121-108 Varieties of Human Experience

Formerly available as 121-052. Students who have completed 121-052 are not eligible to enrol in this subject. Formerly available as 136-172/002. Students who have completed 136-172 or 136-002 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

This subject explores aspects of human behaviour relating to human cognition and the symbolic worlds humans create and inhabit. Students will consider language, forms of symbolic classification, kinship, religion, myth, rationality and relativism, non-Western medical systems and problems of anthropological method and ethnographic description. On completion of the subject students should have a general understanding of the social and cultural basis of human experience; a general familiarity with the range of world views documented in ethnographic literature; and a background of relevant ethnographic knowledge on which to base further anthropological studies.

Written work totalling 2000 words and a 2-hour exam.

Subject reader will be available.

• E Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. abridged ed, Clarendon Press, 1976.
• J Hendry, Wrapping Culture. Oxford University Press, 1993.