ANTHR 6010 - Proseminar: Social Organization

Spring. 6 credits.

C. Garces.

Focuses on linkages between culture and social institutions, representations, and practices. The nature of these linkages is debated from strongly contesting points of view in social theory (structuralist, poststructuralist, utilitarian, hermeneutic, Marxist). Unlike debates in critical theory where the form of contestation has been mainly philosophical, in anthropology these issues have developed in ethnographic analyses. The course briefly surveys kinship theory and economic anthropology with a focus on implications for general issues in social theory. Discussion of attempts to develop dialectical syntheses around the motion of “practice” follows. The issues addressed in this section carry over into the next, colonialism and post-colonialism, in which poststructuralist readings of history are counterposed to Marxist ones. Finally, Lacanian and Marxist visions of ideology as they relate to anthropological theory and ethnographic analysis are examined with particular emphasis on the cultural and social production of persons.