Courses / Module

Everyone today is faced with an important question: how do we understand and relate to others who have very different beliefs about the world?

As a discipline, anthropology seeks to render the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. We often attempt to turn encounters with ‘foreign’ or ‘strange’ beliefs into occasions for creating fresh knowledge about social and cultural life, and into opportunities for gaining a deeper understanding of human beings. For example, in many parts of the world today, people live in fear of the malicious influence of those they believe to be witches. This module samples diverse contemporary and historical cases of witchcraft phenomena, including a famous Irish case, in order to introduce and contemplate fundamental topics of anthropological inquiry. By closely examining cultural difference and putatively ‘exotic’ beliefs, anthropology provokes us to question our own ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about the world.

This module continues the comprehensive first-year introduction to the discipline, covering a range of topics in which the problem of cultural difference comes into especially sharp focus. These include: moral and epistemological relativism, differing ideas about nature, the varied ways in which people around the world understand kinship, diverse systems for understanding affliction and healing, and cosmologies that posit the active influence of ancestral ghosts and spiritual beings in the everyday lives of people. Through an ‘ethnographic exercise’—a small fieldwork and interpretation project—students are encouraged to begin viewing social and cultural phenomena ‘close to home’ through anthropological eyes.