The goal of this class is to learn how to think like an anthropologist. We do not want you to simply to accept what we say. Rather, your job in this class is to learn how to use anthropologists' ideas to answer questions for yourself, and to make an argument for your answers by using the research of anthropologists. To help you develop this ability, we have created many different ways for you to participate, to discuss your own ideas, and to reflect on your perspective and reasoning.

In lecture, we will present ideas that will shock and surprise you. We want you to react. We also want you to talk about what you think, and to listen to other people's points of view. In tutorials, the tutors will lead you and your fellow students in a discussion of the week's ethnographic case study and help you to explore all the different ways these descriptions and analyses of people's lives can be interpreted. Students will be doing most of the talking in class.

While one goal of the class is to introduce you to the study of human diversity and the dynamics of human societies, another important purpose of this class is learning to think for yourselves in a disciplined way. We want you to discover new knowledge and new ideas for yourself. There are no right answers in anthropology, or in this class. This class is designed to help you to figure out your own perspective on the big, unresolved questions about how human societies work and how different people's cultures can be.