Through ethnographic methods, anthropologists examine a wide range of phenomena including medicine, the media, popular culture, indigenity, minority groups, law and the environment, along with many other areas. They do so by situating these topics within their broader cultural contexts, and closely examining taken for granted assumptions and ideas about them. Ethnographic information is collected over long periods of time, among the people the anthropologist wants to study. On the basis of long term and in depth engagement, anthropologists are able to arrive at very specific cultural understandings of the world, which differ from conventional, assumed and even stereotypical or ethnocentric understandings.

This course looks at how anthropologists think about these topics, and how they carry out research. You will learn about anthropological styles of thinking, how to ask research questions, how to link up questions with methods, how to undertake methods to get data, and how to do basic data analysis.