Introduction to Anthropology: Debates, Controversies, and Re/visions

The discipline of anthropology has housed a number of dramatic confrontations over the past several decades. Each of these debates, controversies, and re/visionary moments has made claims about—and has attempted to redefine—the appropriate theoretical and methodological parameters of the discipline. In this semester-long lecture, we will examine several of these more heated confrontations (including the Mead/Freeman debate, the Yanomami controversy, the Captain Cook debate, the Kalahari “San” debate, and responses to Turnbull’s contentious portrayal of the Mountain Ik) and use them as springboards for talking about anthropological practice and theory in more general terms. Through all of this, we will ask questions about the politics of representation, the ethics of fieldwork, and the authority of the anthropologist to speak “for a people.” Further, we will explore the relationship between theory, data, and explanation—and also consider how a single event can be interpreted in radically different ways. We will look to the publication of Malinowski’s diaries and Edward Said’s Orientalism as critical junctures in the discipline and will discuss the profound impact that feminist theory and scholarship has had on both ethnographic research and writing.