Anthropological Theory for Everybody engages students with the intellectual history and key theoretical turns of sociocultural anthropology — from early fieldwork paradigms to postcolonial and globalisation critiques. The course proceeds through a series of canonical and contested debates: the Malinowski tradition of participant observation; the Mead–Freeman controversy over cultural vs. biological determinism (nature vs. nurture); Turner's ritual theory; Geertz's interpretive anthropology; feminist critiques of androcentrism in the discipline; postcolonial critiques; and contemporary frameworks for analysing globalisation, from Appadurai and Tsing to Hannerz.
By working closely with primary theoretical texts, students develop the ability to read, contextualise, and evaluate anthropological arguments on their own terms. The course is explicitly designed for second-year students of the Liberal Arts and Humanities Programme and could partially serve as a preparation for the CESS (Comprehensive Examination in Social Sciences) exam. It complements and deepens knowledge acquired in the first-year compulsory course Introduction to Anthropology, which introduces the discipline's topics, concepts, and vocabulary; this course shifts the focus to the theoretical debates, methodological controversies, and intellectual genealogies that underlie those concepts.
Last update: Horáčková Karolína, Mgr. (23.08.2026)
Anthropological Theory for Everybody engages students with the intellectual history and key theoretical turns of
sociocultural anthropology — from early fieldwork paradigms to postcolonial and globalisation critiques. The
course proceeds through a series of canonical and contested debates: the Malinowski tradition of participant
observation; the Mead–Freeman controversy over cultural vs. biological determinism (nature vs. nurture); Turner's
ritual theory; Geertz's interpretive anthropology; feminist critiques of androcentrism in the discipline; postcolonial
critiques; and contemporary frameworks for analysing globalisation, from Appadurai and Tsing to Hannerz.
By working closely with primary theoretical texts, students develop the ability to read, contextualise, and evaluate
anthropological arguments on their own terms. The course is explicitly designed for second-year students of the
Liberal Arts and Humanities Programme and could partially serve as a preparation for the CESS (Comprehensive
Examination in Social Sciences) exam. It complements and deepens knowledge acquired in the first-year
compulsory course Introduction to Anthropology, which introduces the discipline's topics, concepts, and vocabulary;
this course shifts the focus to the theoretical debates, methodological controversies, and intellectual genealogies
that underlie those concepts.
Last update: Horáčková Karolína, Mgr. (30.08.2026)
