The aim of this course is to provide students with the anthropological lenses for seeing contemporary global challenges. The course is divided into four thematic parts that focus on:

• global kinship and care, 
• global medicine and global bodies,
  
• global otherness: religion and cosmology, and
• global cultures. 

In the course, the students will read anthropological and ethnographic texts to gain the knowledge about cross-cultural, local and global variations of particular issues. After successfully completing this course, the students will be able to use relativist perspective upon issues of own and other culture and society, understand multiple approaches to cosmology, medicine and kinship across the world as well as inside a single country ; and apply their knowledge about the nature of social relations, social institutions and social acting in all areas of social life.

Link to Zoom meetings:  https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/96765554551

Course requirements

• 9 points: course activity (only 2 absences are allowed)
• 11 points: questions for seminar discussions formulated from obligatory reading by Tuesday (23:59:59) each week
  • questions MUST mirror and connect the obligatory reading and other obligatory activities (e.g. movies) and they should show the students' ability to synthetise the obligatory reading with other material (movies etc.) - the questions should be concrete and motivated by the reading (example of a bad question could be "What do you think about the text?")
  • questions are sumbitted via discussion in IS
• 40 points: two timed-essays (each for 20 pts) 
  • first essay is scheduled after first two blocks (kinship and medicine), second after third and fourth block (religion and culture)
  • first essay: students will recieve the topics (four topics, they select one) for essay via mail by April 12 and must sumbit their essays by April 16
  • second essay: students will recieve the topics (four topics, they select one) for essay via mail by May 31 and must sumbit their essays by June 3
• 30 points: final essay (empirical) 
  • students formulate their topics with the help of teachers
  • the essays should work with some empirical material (short interview, analysis of existing artifacts - texts, discussions, movies, books...)
  • deadline for essay: June 20
  • 2000 words +- 10%
• 10 points: presentation of final essay
• presentation will take part online and before the sumbission of the final paper so that students can get feedback in advance
• duration: 5-7 minutes plus discussion 
• dates: June 15 and/or 16

All part are obligatory!

Final grades: 

100 – 96 A 

95 – 90 B 

89 – 80 C 

79 – 70 D 

69 – 60 E 

59 – F