ANTH 215 - Social Organization: Tribes to Global Systems

This course covers principles of social organization, in societies ranging from small-scale to the modern global system and across a variety of culture areas. In the course, we are concerned with the classic anthropological topics of sex and gender, family systems, kinship and marriage, and with how these are entangled with other aspects of human sociality – with making a living, distributing necessities and luxuries, submitting to authority and resisting it, and communing with the sacred. Students will learn about the building blocks that human beings use to construct their social systems, and how different societies assemble these building blocks in different configurations.