In the final assignment for this class, we want you to show us that you not only understand the main ideas from each topic we have covered, but that you can explain them in your own words and explain your own views on them.

To review for this assignment, look at each topic we discussed and ask “So, what? Who cares?”

• Why do anthropologists care about this topic? What is important about it for them? Why do they think I should care?
• Do I care about this idea? Why or why not?

In other words, you want to think about how each topic in this class contributes to the aims of anthropology, which is to establish that there is no single way to be human, except for the fact that every human being is also part of a larger whole, a society, and is the raw material for a society's ideals.

Thinking back on the class, I can see three main ideas that have emerged as we investigated different topics in each module. Each of the topics from class speaks to one or more of these ideas, and you can see connections across the topics in this way.

• How should we understand human difference?
• What does it mean to be part of a community? What does it mean to say that human beings are naturally social?
• How do people think, and where can we locate the human mind?

You can sort each of the examples, concepts, and arguments from each week into each of these three ideas (and some topics would belong in more than one).

References

A guide to the unit