ANTH 1002 Class notes

Anthropology for a better world

ANTH1002 - Semester 2 2026

Ryan Schram

March 8, 2026

Slides

ANTH1002

Semester 2, 2026

Course description

This unit of study examines contemporary global issues from anthropological perspectives. Global crises affect all forms of life - both human and ‘more-than-human’ - in different and unequal ways. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to humanity’s planetary future. The first step towards healing is to stay with the trouble, by listening to each other. Anthropologists are trained to listen so that they can disrupt takenfor-granted norms and imagine the future otherwise. Students will think with anthropological works that explore topics such as climate change, financial crisis, pandemic, and war. By doing so, we aim to explore how we can create a more just and kinder world together.

Teaching staff

Coordinator

Ryan Schram
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building, Room 410

Lecturer(s)

Name: Ryan Schram
Email: ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Office: Social Sciences Building, Room 410
Name: Cate Massola
Email: cate.massola@sydney.edu.au
Name: Sophie Chao
Email: sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au

Assignments summary

Title	Due date	Points	Weight	Length
In-class concept and class policies quiz	August 22	10	10%	10 multiple-choice questions (500 words equiv.)
In-class writing exercise: Explaining core concepts with ethnographic evidence	September 18	100	15%	750 words
Essay 1: The essence of kinship	October 16	100	15%	750 words
Essay 2: Advocacy anthropology	November 20	100	25%	1000 words
In-class feedback exercise	November 2	100	10%	500 words
Weekly writing assignments	weekly	100	15%	10 x 100 words
Participation	weekly	24	10%

Weekly schedule

Week	Date	Topic and reading(s)
1	August 4	What is anthropology and why should anyone care?
2	August 11	The concept of culture and the two anthropologies / Eriksen (2015b); Eriksen (2015a) / Pierpont (2004)
3	August 18	Culture is not biology / Baker (1998); King (2019) / Boas ([1931] 1940)
4	August 25	Culture, the natural environment, and utilitarian explanations / Århem (1989); Holtzman (2009) / Palmer (2020)
5	September 1	Gifts and commodities / West (2012) / Eriksen (2015c); Lyon (2020); Marx ([1867] 1972); Mauss ([1925] 1990)
6	September 8	Spheres of exchange / Reyes-Foster and Carter (2020) / Addo and Besnier (2008); Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955)
7	September 15	Global gifts / Cearns (2019) / Abranches (2014); Leinaweaver (2010)
8	September 22	Who counts as family?: Kinship as classification / Carsten (1995); Gilliland (2020) / Bouquet (1996); Kaberry (1937); Mariner (2019); Morgan (1871); Purdie et al. (2018); Schneider (1984); Wright (2020)
B	September 29	Classes cancelled in honor of seasonal festivals
9	October 6	Kinship, Country and cosmology in Indigenous Australia / Graham (1999); Kearney, Bradley, and Brady (2021); Rose (1996); Rose (2013) / Durkheim ([1912] 2001); Kaberry (1938); Levi-Strauss (1963); Merlan (1982); Myers (1991)
10	October 13	Who is kin?: Translation and recognition in Australia / Povinelli (2002); Vincent (2017) / Cowlishaw (2012); Kelly and McConvell (2018); Burke (2011); Russell (2006); Sutton (2003)
11	October 20	Where anthropologists work / Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and Van Willigen (2006); Wilson, Babidge, and Hoffstaedter (2026) / Eriksen (2006); Gunn, Otto, and Smith (2020); Low and Merry (2010); MacClancy (2002); McIntyre (2007); Nolan (2003); Sunderland and Denny (2007); Tax (1975); Willigen (2002)
12	October 27	Ethnographic skills and professional practice / Bell (2011); Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (2011) / Anderson (2009); Das (2015); Das (2007); Gupta (1995); Gupta (2012); Ho (2009); Ho (2005); Tett (2009); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing author. (2011); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015)
13	November 3	Anthropologists as activist-researchers and public intellectuals / Scheper-Hughes (1995); Tuck and Yang (2021) / Farmer (2001); Farmer (2004); Graeber (2012); Graeber (2004); Hale (2006); Mead (2016); Smith (2012); TallBear (2013); Todd (2016)

References

Abranches, Maria. 2014. “Remitting Wealth, Reciprocating Health? The “Travel” of the Land from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal.” American Ethnologist 41 (2): 261–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12074.

Addo, Ping-Ann, and Niko Besnier. 2008. “When Gifts Become Commodities: Pawnshops, Valuables, and Shame in Tonga and the Tongan Diaspora.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (1): 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00477.x.

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Århem, Kaj. 1989. “Maasai Food Symbolism: The Cultural Connotations of Milk, Meat, and Blood in the Pastoral Maasai Diet.” Anthropos 84 (1): 1–23. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Maasai-Food-Symbolism.-The-Cultural-Connotations-of-Arhem/e503a28f3c1ba7c63eddb0eb8957838fa0c9e10e#related-papers.

Baker, Lee D. 1998. “Rethinking Race at the Turn of the Century: W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas.” In From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954, 105–31. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=879033.

Bell, Genevieve. 2011. “Unpacking Cars: Doing Anthropology at INTEL.” http://hdl.handle.net/10088/22459.

Boas, Franz. (1931) 1940. “Race and Progress.” In Race, Language, and Culture, 3–17. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Bohannan, Paul. 1955. “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1955.57.1.02a00080.

———. 1959. “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 19 (4): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700085946.

Bouquet, Mary. 1996. “Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1): 43–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034632.

Burke, Paul. 2011. “Towards an Ethnography of Anthropologyʹs Encounter with Modern Law.” In Law’s Anthropology: From Ethnography to Expert Testimony in Native Title, 1–34. ANU E Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hdxr.5.

Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness Among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 223–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/646700.

Cearns, Jennifer. 2019. “The “Mula Ring”: Material Networks of Circulation Through the Cuban World.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24 (4): 864–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12439.

Cowlishaw, Gillian. 2012. “Culture and the Absurd: The Means and Meanings of Aboriginal Identity in the Time of Cultural Revivalism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2): 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01749.x.

Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary. University of California Press.

———. 2015. Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty. Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1287ft5.

Durkheim, Emile. (1912) 2001. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 2011. “Introduction.” In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Second Edition, 1–16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. 1. publ. Oxford: Berg.

———. 2015a. “A Brief History of Anthropology.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 12–31. London: Pluto Press.

———. 2015b. “Anthropology: Comparison and Context.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 1–11. London: Pluto Press.

———. 2015c. “Exchange and Consumption.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.

Farmer, Paul. 2001. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. University of California Press.

———. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press.

Gilliland, Mary Kay. 2020. “Family and Marriage.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 182–203. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/family-and-marriage/.

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology.

———. 2012. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Penguin Books Limited.

Graham, Mary. 1999. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 3 (2): 105–18. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853599X00090.

Gunn, Wendy, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith. 2020. Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. Routledge.

Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375–402. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00090.

———. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394709.

Hale, Charles R. 2006. “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 21 (1): 96–120. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2006.21.1.96.

Ho, Karen. 2005. “Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (1): 68–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.1.068.

———. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.

Holtzman, Jon. 2009. “A Samburu Gastronomy.” In Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya, 94–121. University of California Press.

Kaberry, Phyllis M. 1937. “Subsections in the East and South Kimberley Tribes of North‐West Australia.” Oceania 7 (4): 436–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1937.tb00397.x.

———. 1938. “Totemism in East and South Kimberley, North‐West Australia.” Oceania 8 (3): 265–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1938.tb00422.x.

Kearney, Amanda, John Bradley, and Liam M. Brady. 2021. “Nalangkulurru, the Spirit Beings, and the Black-Nosed Python: Ontological Self-Determination and Yanyuwa Law in Northern Australia’s Gulf Country.” American Anthropologist 123 (1): 67–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13513.

Kelly, Piers, and Patrick McConvell. 2018. “Evolving Perspectives on Aboriginal Social Organisation: From Mutual Misrecognition to the Kinship Renaissance.” In Skin, Kin and Clan. Australia: ANU Press.

King, Charles. 2019. “The Anthropologists Who Upended the ‘Science’ of White Supremacy.” The Washington Post, August 2, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-anthropologists-who-upended-the-science-of-white-supremacy/2019/08/01/da0575c6-a314-11e9-b732-41a79c2551bf_story.html.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2010. “Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations.” Latin American Perspectives 37 (5): 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10380222.

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Low, Setha M., and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2.” Current Anthropology 51 (S2): S203–26. https://doi.org/10.1086/653837.

Lyon, Sarah. 2020. “Economics.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de González. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/economics/.

MacClancy, Jeremy. 2002. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines. University of Chicago Press.

Mariner, Kathryn A. 2019. ““Who You Are in These Pieces of Paper”: Imagining Future Kinship Through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (4). https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.4.03.

Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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McIntyre, Alice. 2007. Participatory Action Research. SAGE Publications.

Mead, Margaret. 2016. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: William Morrow.

Merlan, Francesca. 1982. “A Mangarrayi Representational System: Environment and Cultural Symbolization in Northern Australia.” American Ethnologist 9 (1): 145–66. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1982.9.1.02a00090.

Morgan, Lewis H. 1871. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family. Vol. 17. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution.

Myers, Fred R. 1991. “Kinship: Models of the Pintupi Social Universe.” In Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines, 180–218. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Palmer, Christian T. 2020. “Culture and Sustainability: Environmental Anthropology in the Anthropocene.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, edited by Thomas McIlwraith, Nina Brown, and Laura T. de González, 357–81. Arlington, Va.: The American Anthropological Association. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/culture-and-sustainability-environmental-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. 2004. “The Measure of America.” The New Yorker, March, 48–63.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. “Shamed States.” In The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, 153–85. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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Wright, Andrea. 2020. “Making Kin from Gold: Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor Migration to the Gulf.” Cultural Anthropology 35 (3): 435–61. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.3.04.