Curriculum Map

Cultural Anthropology

A famous 1956 paper described a tribe obsessed with body ritual — shrine rooms in every dwelling, mouth-rites performed twice daily. The tribe was Americans; the shrine room is your bathroom. Ten units that use the study of human cultures as a mirror: your kinship, your gifts, your medicine, and your rituals become specimens alongside everyone else's.

10 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

A 1956 paper describes a North American tribe obsessed with mouth-rites, body-shrines, and the belief that the human body is inherently disgusting. The tribe is called the Nacirema. Read the name backward and the whole discipline of anthropology opens up: the study of other cultures is really a machine for making your own culture visible.

2-3 weeks

The Strangest People in the World

For most of a century, psychology built its picture of 'human nature' almost entirely from undergraduates at Western universities — one of the most unusual populations of humans ever to exist. A 2010 paper gave that population an acronym, WEIRD, and showed how much of what researchers had called universal turns out to be, on closer inspection, local.

2-3 weeks

The Cockfight and the Notebook

How does an anthropologist actually know what they claim to know? A stranded fieldworker in the Trobriand Islands and a raided cockfight in Bali gave the discipline its core method — participant observation and thick description. A bitter dispute over adolescence in Samoa, decades later, gave it a hard lesson in how that method can fail, and how the discipline corrects itself — a lesson that later spilled into a full reckoning with whose voice an ethnography actually represents.

2-3 weeks

The Words for Snow and Time

A popular myth claims Eskimo languages have dozens of words for snow, proof that language shapes thought. The myth is mostly wrong — and the real evidence for the connection between language and cognition, from Berlin and Kay's color universals to a language with no words for 'left' and 'right' to the still-contested case of a language with no words for exact number, is stranger and better documented than the myth it replaced.

2-3 weeks

Who Counts as Family

Every society on record regulates who may marry whom, and almost none of those rules look like 'follow your heart.' Kinship — the system of descent, marriage, and obligation that organizes who owes what to whom — is the oldest and most universal form of social organization humans have built. It is also, this unit argues, the original blueprint every larger political system had to improvise from.

2-3 weeks

The Gift That Must Be Returned

No gift is ever really free. Every human society that has ever been studied has built elaborate, often invisible rules around giving, receiving, and returning — rules so deep that refusing a gift can be an act of war and forgetting to reciprocate can end a friendship. This unit follows the obligation to give from a Melanesian sea route of shell ornaments to a Pacific Northwest ceremony the government once made illegal to a Venmo request sitting unanswered in your phone.

2-3 weeks

Thresholds and Transformations

A person walks into a graduation ceremony a student and walks out something else, and everyone in the room agrees on exactly when the change happened, even though nothing physically different occurred at that moment. This unit is about ritual: the machinery societies build to move people between social categories, the strange in-between state that machinery has to pass through, and the systems of meaning — witchcraft, magic, ceremony — that make an uncertain world feel answerable.

2-3 weeks

Two Kinds of Sick

A doctor and a patient can examine the exact same body and disagree, in a way neither of them would call disagreement, about what is actually wrong. Medical anthropology studies the gap between the biological process happening inside a body and the meaning a person and their community make of that process — and its central, uncomfortable finding is that biomedicine, the system most readers of this unit trust without question, is itself one culturally specific way of answering the question, not the neutral baseline every other system falls short of.

2-3 weeks

Feeding the World Five Ways

Every human society has had to answer the same question — how do we get enough food to survive — and human beings have answered it in only a handful of fundamentally different ways, each one a complete system of knowledge about soil, water, animals, and season, refined over generations. This unit surveys five subsistence strategies as five different bodies of expertise, tests the romantic claim that foragers had it easier than we do, and ends in the aisle of a supermarket where almost no one can name the person who grew their food.

2-3 weeks

The Ethnosphere

Half of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken on Earth today may fall silent within this century, and every one of them carries knowledge, categories, and answers to the question of what it means to be human that exist nowhere else. This closing unit takes up cultural survival as a live, contested, present-tense problem: what dies with a language, who owns a culture's data and its dead, what separates appropriation from exchange, and what Wade Davis's wager about the ethnosphere asks of the reader specifically.

2-3 weeks

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.