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--- 2700:2025:about_this_class [2025/02/03 15:25] – Ryan Schram (admin)
+++ 2700:2025:about_this_class [2025/02/09 14:57] (current) – Ryan Schram (admin)
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 Welcome to //ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology//. This class is a required second-year unit for all majors and minors in anthropology. Our purpose is to give you a strong sense of the different schools of thought and perspectives among cultural anthropologists so that you can decide for yourself what kind of approach to anthropology makes the most sense to you.
+{{ :2700:2025:nauman.jpg?nolink |A photograph of a six-story concrete and glass building towering over the relatively smaller concrete classroom buildings of a university campus, surrounded by green sapling trees on neatly landscaped lawns, and wide pedestrian paths. A group of three people, one standing beside a bicycle occupies the foreground. On the top story of the otherwise undecorated tower, neon letters forming words for vices and virtues are arrayed in a frieze and flash in an alternating pattern. (Nauman, Bruce. 1988. Vices and Virtues. Neon tubing. Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. <https://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/artist/nauman.html>.)}}
-<figure>
-<img src="" alt="Wall partitions bearing large block letters in white on a dark red background sit against the walls of the interior walls of a hollowed out industrial warehouse (repurposed as an exhibition space), rising from floor to approximately 2 meters and wrap around a corner. The letters are adjacent, leaving only the voids of the letterforms as negative space, and creating an uncanny effect while still being legible as a word, 'DISJUNCTURE.'"/>
-<figcaption style="font-size: 0.8em;color:#779">
-</HTML>
-Nolan, Rose. 2019. A Big Word – DISJUNCTURE [Photo by Ian Hobbs]. Acrylic on wall partitions. <https://annaschwartzgallery.com/artist/rose-nolan>.
-</figcaption>
-</figure>
 Most people would say that scholars have to be specialized, and work in a “discipline,” a specific branch of knowledge. This is more or less true, but it doesn’t sit well with anthropology. We are like [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJLDYxvkfk|7-Up, the Un-Cola]] (McDonald 2017). Anthropology is the un-discipline. Our discipline is not a specialization, it’s a conversation. It is a debate among many people who share a lot of the same interests and the same curiosity, but who don’t really agree on much else, except maybe an interest in keeping the conversation going. Who is an anthropologist? It’s people who want to talk to other anthropologists, even ones with whom they—in all honesty—don’t share a lot of ideas in common.
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   * If people are products of a social system and its cultural worldview, do people have free will, freedom to act, the capacity for meaningful action?
     * What part of one’s life is determined by rules and the social system they form, and what part is determined by one’s own actions or other people’s actions?
-  * Each society is like a world unto itself, but every society has a history, and the evidence for historical changes are everywhere. This is a paradox.
+  * Each society is like a world unto itself, but no societies are truly isolated and the evidence for the effects of contact and interaction among different societies is everywhere in history. This is a paradox.
     * So how much like a “world” is a society? Is it a sphere, a cell, an organism, or something else?
     * To understand people today, should we look at history, movement, change, and events, or look at how their community fits together as a system now?
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     * Do human beings and human societies have a fixed essence from which several different varieties descend, or is humanity a bunch of apples, oranges, and other incomparably different things? Can it be both? Could it be neither?
+{{ ::nolan.png?nolink&400|Wall partitions bearing large block letters in white on a dark red background sit against the interior walls of a hollowed out industrial warehouse (repurposed as an exhibition space), rising from floor to approximately 2 meters and wrapping around a corner. The letters are adjacent, leaving only the voids of the letterforms as negative space, and creating an uncanny effect while still being legible as a word, 'DISJUNCTURE.' (Nolan, Rose. 2019. A Big Word – DISJUNCTURE [Photo by Ian Hobbs]. Acrylic on wall partitions. <https://annaschwartzgallery.com/artist/rose-nolan>.)}}
-<figure>
-<img src="" alt="A photograph of a six-story concrete and glass building towering over the relatively smaller concrete classroom buildings of a university campus, surrounded by green sapling trees on neatly landscaped lawns, and wide pedestrian paths. A group of three people, one standing beside a bicycle occupies the foreground. On the top story of the otherwise undecorated tower, neon letters forming words for vices and virtues are arrayed in a frieze and flash in an alternating pattern."/>
-<figcaption style="font-size: 0.8em;color:#779">
-Nauman, Bruce. 1988. Vices and Virtues. Neon tubing. Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. <https://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/artist/nauman.html>.
-</figcaption>
-</figure>
 We won’t necessarily treat each of these questions separately. Rather we will look at debates within anthropology and the formation of new schools of thought over time. As we will see some or all of these open questions inflect every big topic that anthropologists examine.