Unit outline_

ANTH1002: Anthropology for a Better World

Semester 2, 2026 [Normal day] - Camperdown/Darlington, Sydney

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.

Unit details and rules

Academic unit Anthropology
Credit points 6
Prerequisites
? 
None
Corequisites
? 
None
Prohibitions
? 
ANTH1004
Assumed knowledge
? 

None

Available to study abroad and exchange students

Yes

Teaching staff

Coordinator Ryan Schram, ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
The census date for this unit availability is 31 August 2026
Type Description Weight Due Length Use of AI
Written work Essay 3: Advocacy anthropology
Communicate the relevance and impact of ideas from anthropology to a wide audience
25% Formal exam period
Due date: 20 Nov 2026 at 23:59

Closing date: 04 Dec 2026
1000 words AI allowed
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
In-person practical, skills, or performance task or test Early Feedback Task In-class concept and class policies quiz
10-question quiz on key ideas and class policies as an early self-check
10% Week 03
Due date: 22 Aug 2026 at 17:00

Closing date: 22 Aug 2026
30 min AI prohibited
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2
Written work Essay 1: Interpreting ethnographic evidence of milk exchange
Use ethnographic facts to illustrate and explain a key idea from class
15% Week 07
Due date: 18 Sep 2026 at 23:59

Closing date: 02 Oct 2026
750 words AI allowed
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2 LO4 LO5 LO6
Written work Essay 2: The essence of kinship
Take a stand on an open question and argue for it
15% Week 10
Due date: 16 Oct 2026 at 23:59

Closing date: 30 Oct 2026
750 words AI allowed
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
In-person written or creative task In-class feedback exercise
Give and receive feedback on a draft and reflect on the process of writing and editing work
10% Week 13
Due date: 02 Nov 2026 at 17:00

Closing date: 16 Nov 2026
500 words AI prohibited
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
Portfolio or journal Weekly writing assignments
Prepare for class by exploring your own ideas
15% Weekly 10 x 100 words AI allowed
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
Contribution Tutorial participation
Work together with peers to understand ideas better
10% Weekly In class AI allowed
Outcomes assessed: LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
early feedback task = early feedback task ?

Early feedback task

This unit includes an early feedback task, designed to give you feedback prior to the census date for this unit. Details are provided in the Canvas site and your result will be recorded in your Marks page. It is important that you actively engage with this task so that the University can support you to be successful in this unit.

Assessment summary

Detailed information for each assessment can be found on Canvas.

Assessment criteria

Essays must be submitted in order to avoid a grade of "absent fail" in the unit.

The University awards common result grades, set out in the Coursework Policy (Schedule 1).

As a general guide, a High distinction indicates work of an exceptional standard, a Distinction a very high standard, a Credit a good standard, and a Pass an acceptable standard.

Result name

Mark range

Description

High distinction

85 - 100

 

Distinction

75 - 84

 

Credit

65 - 74

 

Pass

50 - 64

 

Fail

0 - 49

When you don’t meet the learning outcomes of the unit to a satisfactory standard.

For more information see guide to grades.

Use of generative artificial intelligence (AI)

You can use generative AI tools for open assessments. Restrictions on AI use apply to secure, supervised assessments used to confirm if students have met specific learning outcomes.

Refer to the assessment table above to see if AI is allowed, for assessments in this unit and check Canvas for full instructions on assessment tasks and AI use.

If you use AI, you must always acknowledge it. Misusing AI may lead to a breach of the Academic Integrity Policy.

Visit the Current Students website for more information on AI in assessments, including details on how to acknowledge its use.

Late submission

In accordance with University policy, these penalties apply when written work is submitted after 11:59pm on the due date:

  • Deduction of 5% of the maximum mark for each calendar day after the due date.
  • After ten calendar days late, a mark of zero will be awarded.

This unit has an exception to the standard University policy or supplementary information has been provided by the unit coordinator. This information is displayed below:

Discretion may be applied if students are in contact early with their tutors and instructors. It is always worthwhile for students to finish what they have started. Make a regular habit of checking in with us.

Academic integrity

The University expects students to act ethically and honestly and will treat all allegations of academic integrity breaches seriously.

Our website provides information on academic integrity and the resources available to all students. This includes advice on how to avoid common breaches of academic integrity. Ensure that you have completed the Academic Honesty Education Module (AHEM) which is mandatory for all commencing coursework students

Penalties for serious breaches can significantly impact your studies and your career after graduation. It is important that you speak with your unit coordinator if you need help with completing assessments.

Visit the Current Students website for more information on AI in assessments, including details on how to acknowledge its use.

Simple extensions

If you encounter a problem submitting your work on time, you may be able to apply for an extension of five calendar days through a simple extension.  The application process will be different depending on the type of assessment and extensions cannot be granted for some assessment types like exams.

Special consideration

If exceptional circumstances mean you can’t complete an assessment, you need consideration for a longer period of time, or if you have essential commitments which impact your performance in an assessment, you may be eligible for special consideration or special arrangements.

Special consideration applications will not be affected by a simple extension application.

Using AI responsibly

Co-created with students, AI in Education includes lots of helpful examples of how students use generative AI tools to support their learning. It explains how generative AI works, the different tools available and how to use them responsibly and productively.

Support for students

The Support for Students Policy reflects the University’s commitment to supporting students in their academic journey and making the University safe for students. It is important that you read and understand this policy so that you are familiar with the range of support services available to you and understand how to engage with them.

The University uses email as its primary source of communication with students who need support under the Support for Students Policy. Make sure you check your University email regularly and respond to any communications received from the University.

Learning resources and detailed information about weekly assessment and learning activities can be accessed via Canvas. It is essential that you visit your unit of study Canvas site to ensure you are up to date with all of your tasks.

If you are having difficulties completing your studies, or are feeling unsure about your progress, we are here to help. You can access the support services offered by the University at any time:

Support and Services (including health and wellbeing services, financial support and learning support)
Course planning and administration
Meet with an Academic Adviser

WK Topic Learning activity Learning outcomes
Week 01 What is anthropology and why should anyone care? Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO6
Week 02 The concept of culture and the two anthropologies / Eriksen (2015b); Eriksen (2015a) / Pierpont (2004) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO3 LO4 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 03 Culture is not biology / Baker (1998); King (2019) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 04 Culture, the natural environment, and utilitarian explanations / Århem (1989); Holtzman (2009) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 05 Gifts and commodities / West (2012) / Eriksen (2015c); Lyon (2020) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 06 Spheres of exchange / Reyes-Foster and Carter (2020) / Addo and Besnier (2008) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 07 Global gifts / Cearns (2019) / Abranches (2014) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 08 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) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 09 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) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 10 Who is kin?: Translation and recognition in Australia / Povinelli (2002); Vincent (2017) / Cowlishaw (2012); Kelly and McConvell (2018); Burke (2011); Russell (2006); Sutton (2003) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 11 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) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 12 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) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  
Week 13 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) Lecture (2 hr) LO1 LO2 LO3 LO4 LO5 LO6
As per lecture Tutorial (1 hr)  

Attendance and class requirements

  • Attendance: According to Faculty Board Resolutions, students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences are expected to attend 90% of their classes. If you attend less than 50% of classes, regardless of the reasons, you may be referred to the Examiner’s Board. The Examiner’s Board will decide whether you should pass or fail the unit of study if your attendance falls below this threshold.
  • Lecture recording: Most lectures (in recording-equipped venues) will be recorded and may be made available to students on the LMS. However, you should not rely on lecture recording to substitute your classroom learning experience.
  • Preparation: Students should commit to spend approximately three hours’ preparation time (reading, studying, homework, essays, etc.) for every hour of scheduled instruction.

Study commitment

Typically, there is a minimum expectation of 1.5-2 hours of student effort per week per credit point for units of study offered over a full semester. For a 6 credit point unit, this equates to roughly 120-150 hours of student effort in total.

Required readings

Recommended and required readings as well as other supplementary resources are available through the Library. They can be found in the Library catalogue and through the Leganto interface (“Reading List”) to the catalogue on the class Canvas site. See each week’s notes page for details on the topics and readings we cover in class.

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.

Anderson, Ken. 2009. “Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy.” Harvard Business Review 87 (3): 24–25.

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. University of California Press.

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

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.

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. 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.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.

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.

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.

Nolan, Riall W. 2003. Anthropology in Practice: Building a Career Outside the Academy. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

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.

Purdie, Shirley, Glenn Wightman, Peggy Patrick, Lena Nyadbi, Phyllis Thomas, Doris Fletcher, Goody Barrett, et al. 2018. Gija Plants and Animals: Aboriginal Flora and Fauna Knowledge from the East Kimberley, North Australia. Batchelor, N.T.: Batchelor Press.

Reyes-Foster, Beatriz M., and Shannon K. Carter, eds. 2020. “Milk-Sharing Practices.” In Sharing Milk: Intimacy, Materiality and Bio-Communities of Practice, 97–134. Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.46692/9781529202090.005.

Rose, Deborah Bird. 1996. “Caring for Country.” In Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, edited by Peter Larmour, 63–68. Australian Heritage Commission.

———. 2013. “Common Property Regimes in Aboriginal Australia: Totemism Revisited.” In The Governance of Common Property in the Pacific Region, edited by Peter Larmour, 127–44. ANU E Press.

Russell, Peter H. 2006. Recognising Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, Merrill Singer, and John Van Willigen. 2006. “Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present, and Future.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 178–90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3804743.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36 (3): 409–40. https://doi.org/10.1086/204378.

Schneider, David M. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books.

Sunderland, Patricia L., and Rita Mary Denny. 2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek (Calif.): Left Coast press.

Sutton, Peter. 2003. Native Title in Australia: An Ethnographic Perspective. 1st ed. Cambridge: University Press.

TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1362022.

Tax, Sol. 1975. “Action Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 16 (4): 514–17. https://doi.org/10.1086/201616.

Tett, Gillian. 2009. Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. London: Little, Brown.

Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, author. 2011. Friction : An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2021. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tabula Rasa, no. 38 (June): 61–111. https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.04.

Vincent, Eve. 2017. “‘We Know Who We Are’: The Impact of Native Title on Local Identities.” In “Against Native Title”: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia, 89–106. Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press.

West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Willigen, John van. 2002. Applied Anthropology: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Wilson, Lee, Sally Babidge, and Gerhard Hoffstaedter. 2026. “Introduction.” In Anthropology as a Vocation: A Discipline for a Changing World. Brisbane: The University of Queensland. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:5f634cc.

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.

Learning outcomes are what students know, understand and are able to do on completion of a unit of study. They are aligned with the University's graduate qualities and are assessed as part of the curriculum.

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

  • LO1. gain an introductory level of knowledge about key concepts in anthropology
  • LO2. gain familiarity with ethnographic writing and argumentation
  • LO3. acquire skills in cross-cultural comparison
  • LO4. develop written communication skills
  • LO5. apply key anthropological and ethnographic insights in reflexive analysis
  • LO6. develop critical thinking

Graduate qualities

The graduate qualities are the qualities and skills that all University of Sydney graduates must demonstrate on successful completion of an award course. As a future Sydney graduate, the set of qualities have been designed to equip you for the contemporary world.

GQ1 Depth of disciplinary expertise

Deep disciplinary expertise is the ability to integrate and rigorously apply knowledge, understanding and skills of a recognised discipline defined by scholarly activity, as well as familiarity with evolving practice of the discipline.

GQ2 Critical thinking and problem solving

Critical thinking and problem solving are the questioning of ideas, evidence and assumptions in order to propose and evaluate hypotheses or alternative arguments before formulating a conclusion or a solution to an identified problem.

GQ3 Oral and written communication

Effective communication, in both oral and written form, is the clear exchange of meaning in a manner that is appropriate to audience and context.

GQ4 Information and digital literacy

Information and digital literacy is the ability to locate, interpret, evaluate, manage, adapt, integrate, create and convey information using appropriate resources, tools and strategies.

GQ5 Inventiveness

Generating novel ideas and solutions.

GQ6 Cultural competence

Cultural Competence is the ability to actively, ethically, respectfully, and successfully engage across and between cultures. In the Australian context, this includes and celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, knowledge systems, and a mature understanding of contemporary issues.

GQ7 Interdisciplinary effectiveness

Interdisciplinary effectiveness is the integration and synthesis of multiple viewpoints and practices, working effectively across disciplinary boundaries.

GQ8 Integrated professional, ethical, and personal identity

An integrated professional, ethical and personal identity is understanding the interaction between one’s personal and professional selves in an ethical context.

GQ9 Influence

Engaging others in a process, idea or vision.

Outcome map

Learning outcomes Graduate qualities
GQ1 GQ2 GQ3 GQ4 GQ5 GQ6 GQ7 GQ8 GQ9

This section outlines changes made to this unit following staff and student reviews.

The unit has been redesigned on the basis of feedback and experience in first-year teaching to offer a wider range of topics and perspectives.

Disclaimer

Important: the University of Sydney regularly reviews units of study and reserves the right to change the units of study available annually. To stay up to date on available study options, including unit of study details and availability, refer to the relevant handbook.

To help you understand common terms that we use at the University, we offer an online glossary.