Admission requirements
Required course(s):
Any 100-level CHS course, with Social Theory in Everyday Life recommended.
Description
Each society sets out parameters of difference. These may be based on religious narratives, political ideologies, or administrative classifications. Some aspects of variation are widespread and some are specific; certain distinctions are durable while others come and go. In this course, we seek to understand the meaning and significance of difference: how people get animated by and suffer from social fictions of separateness.
How is social difference expressed, shaped, and challenged? In which way are group membership and community labels made visible or invisible, stabilized or upended, performed in everyday life and imagined as national history? This course, organized as an anthropological exploration of difference, addresses these questions. The course texts and themes probe assumptions around collective practice, historical mobility, and social bodies.
This inquiry into difference is grounded in anthropology’s conceptual archive and is framed by comparison. We emphasize the importance of interpretation and symbolism, ritual and language, and power and psychology. Small-scale and cosmopolitan societies, western and non-western perspectives, and pre-modern and contemporary categories are analyzed together, to understand how the social baseline is made.
Students will discuss a number of issues which pertain to contemporary global society. These include the role of colonialism, urbanization, and modernity in shaping variation; the practices, institutions and worldviews by which communities are differentiated; and the shifting circumstances which produce natives, strangers, and aliens.
Course Objectives
Students will learn how to utilize the conceptual vocabulary within socio-cultural anthropology and apply it to other disciplines. They will enhance their comprehension of interpretive and comparative social science, and, through their writing, improve their analytical capacities. Finally, an emphasis on class discussion will sharpen verbal argumentation skills.
After engaging with the course lectures, discussions, and readings, students can expect to:
Become familiar with historic and contemporary anthropological approaches to the study of diverse social forms, as well as to issues of reproduction, exchange, and conflict.
Be able to conceptualize the relationship between spatial scales, epistemological representations, and administrative logics that shape cultural difference.
Evaluate anthropology in the context of related fields - such as history, geography, sociology, and political science – and be able to analyze its salient contributions toward understanding community.
Timetable
Timetables for courses offered at Leiden University College in 2024-2025 will be published on this page of the e-Prospectus.
Mode of instruction
This course employs interrelated visual, audio, and textual modes of instruction. For the first session of the week, there will be either an in-person class focused around visual material, or a pre-circulated podcast by the instructor. For the second session of the week, the instructor will facilitate an interactive discussion-focused seminar. The first weekly class or podcast explores the weekly theme through either documentary and film material, or through verbal analysis of assigned readings. This first weekly session or podcast provides context, highlights key concepts, shows different disciplinary approaches, and employs seeing and listening as ways to deepen our textual engagement with the course material. Attending these sessions, listening to the podcast, and conducting the weekly readings is critical for students to write their weekly reflection, due 24 hours before the second session of the week.
The second sessions each week are devoted to deeper discussion of the assigned texts. Each of the weekly texts introduces students to different forms of analysis and argumentation to help make sense of humans in their moral, social, and political aspects.
Assessment Method
Students are assessed on different parameters that correspond to discrete learning aims.
First, the learning aim of reading comprehension and critical understanding is assessed through a portfolio of weekly reflections from Weeks 1-7. This portfolio of seven reflections is worth 45% of the overall grade. Each reflection will be on the week’s texts. They are to be submitted 24 hours before each student’s seminar session. These reflections have two components: first, a close reading of the weekly readings, which shows awareness of the author’s argument and reasoning, and second, your own analysis of their claims, and capacity to apply their ideas to today’s world.
Second, conceptual application is evaluated through a summary statement. Each student, by the end of Week 7, writes a reflection on their response to the course themes and texts, and evolution in thinking. This summary statement is worth 10% of the final grade.
Third, a written in-class final exam judges analytical and interpretive capacities. This exam will respond to set questions on the course themes and will occur in Reading Week. This is worth 45% of the overall grade. Students will formulate an argument, and empirically substantiate their position, using only course materials. Non-course texts and external references are not permitted in this exam.
Reading list
Readings will be available to students once the course commences.
Registration
Courses offered at Leiden University College (LUC) are usually only open to LUC students and LUC exchange students. Leiden University students who participate in one of the university’s Honours tracks or programmes may register for one LUC course, if availability permits. Registration is coordinated by the Education Coordinator, course.administration@luc.leidenuniv.nl.
Contact
Dr. Ajay Gandhi, a.gandhi@luc.leidenuniv.nl
Remarks
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