The Department of Social Anthropology offers the following basic level (first cycle) courses for incoming exchange students.
Autumn term – basic level
- Current Debates in Social Anthropology (period A)
- Communication and Aesthetics (period B)
- Gender and Sexuality (period D)
Spring term – basic level
- Current Debates in Social Anthropology (period A)
- Communication and Aesthetics (period B)
- Medical anthropology (period C)
- Gender and Sexuality (period D)
Current Debates in Social Anthropology (period A)
The course describes current research themes in anthropology and relates them to broader theoretical currents. It highlights important debates in anthropology from the early 1900s to the present, methodological and epistemological debates, and relevant concepts that are considered important for understanding the development of anthropology today. The course gives the students basic skills of how to write and demonstrate their knowledge of important anthropological debates.
Communication and Aesthetics (period B)
Human beings use their senses – seeing, hearing, touch, taste, smell – to receive impressions and ideas from the world around them, and they also create all kinds of cultural forms to express themselves and reach out to each other through the senses. This is fundamental to communication and culture everywhere, at the same time as the forms show great diversity and variation. They include speech, body language, writing, pictures, sculpture, music, song and dance. In various combinations such forms have also been combined into rituals which have been central to human life. With time media technologies have evolved which transmit and preserve some of these cultural forms increasingly and effectively in time and space: print, telephone, television, Internet. Human groups have also shaped their own aesthetic values relating to the use of these forms. Reaching a comprehensive understanding of the human forms of communication and aesthetics, and at the same time illuminating their diversity and change, is one of the central tasks of anthropology.
Medical anthropology (period C, NB only spring term)
Medical anthropology is an introductory course in medical anthropology. It focuses on how disease, suffering and healing are formed in a complex interaction between biological, psychological, social, political-economic and environmental processes.
Gender and Sexuality (period D)
The course provides the students with knowledge of anthropological studies of gender and sexuality. The course examines how anthropologists historically have dealt with issues of gender and sexuality, particularly in view of men and women, homosexuality, and by extension, heteronormativity. The course leads to current theories and debates of gender and sexuality.
