* a free alternative to expensive Introduction to Cultural Anthropology textbooks

* includes a full textbook and several original videos

* includes 10 "challenges" (assignments)

* a hub of original and found resources for teaching and learning anthropology

* a “connected course” of many faculty around the world sharing instructional materials

* an open course freely available to anyone online

* an emerging producer of original anthropological videos and other digital content

In this unit, you will explore globalization and development and its effects on indigenous peoples. Modern economic and political development is driven by the assumption that the results will be benefical for all people; however, cultural differences are not taken into consideration, leading often to the destruction of indigenous cultures. Understanding the context of modern development students become versant in the current debate about globalization.

By the end of the unit, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What is globalization?

How did the modern era of globalization develop?

What is the relationship between culture and globalization?

This class examines how anthropology and speculative fiction (SF) each explore ideas about culture and society, technology, morality, and life in "other" worlds. We investigate this convergence of interest through analysis of SF in print, film, and other media. Concepts include traditional and contemporary anthropological topics, including first contact; gift exchange; gender, marriage, and kinship; law, morality, and cultural relativism; religion; race and embodiment; politics, violence, and war; medicine, healing, and consciousness; technology and environment. Thematic questions addressed in the class include: what is an alien? What is "the human"? Could SF be possible without anthropology?

Word Count: 46699

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This class has been reorganized to focus primarily on the War in Iraq. As in previous years, the class still examines war in cross-cultural perspective, asking whether war is intrinsic to human nature, what causes war, how particular cultural experiences of war differ, and how war has affected American culture.

 In this lab students will learn how skeletal remains can be used to estimate the height of an individual. Students will measure several of their bones and the bones of a partner. They will then use a formula to estimate height and compare it to actual height. 

Short Description:
Laboratory activities in this workbook are presented as chapters each of which could either be highly specialized, or generic. The approach and the level of difficulty will vary based on instructors’ preferences and more importantly availability and quality of the materials and equipment available in the laboratory.

Long Description:
Each laboratory activity follows a lecture which is envisioned to provide additional detailed information (already mostly or partially covered in a textbook assigned by a professor for Biological Anthropology theory course) regarding scheduled topics to be covered in the laboratory by offering further and in-depth guidance needed for the laboratory setting.

Word Count: 5432

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

ANTH 150 World Archaeology
Introduction to archaeology and cultural change from the earliest times to the advent of state-level societies.

Course Description:
• When did we become fully modern humans?
• When (and why) did we stop being hunter-gatherers?
• When did inequality emerge?
• Why did some people decide to start living in cities?
• What led to the development of complex state-level
societies?
These are important questions about what it means to
be human that archaeologists address. In this course,
we’ll consider these topics while providing an
introduction to archaeology and the study of world
prehistory. The course provides an overview of human
prehistory from modern humans up to the
development of literate civilizations. The approach will
be problem oriented and comparative. We will
consider ancient cultures from around the world in
order to foster an appreciation for human cultural
diversity. Explaining why cultural developments
occurred is often hotly debated among archaeologists,
and different perspectives will be explored critically
throughout this course.

Kathy Schick defines the role of the anthropologist in understanding our past and present. Created by Big History Project.

Students will need an assigned text to assist with these activities, identify bone and features, understand the proper use of Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium, significance of primate taxonomy, and specific information about various early human forms.

Examines modern human cultures. Analyzes a variety of ethnographic examples from various world societies to understand the diverse aspects of language, technology, economy, social structure, governance, religion, world views and expressive aspects of life.

Social Justice Assignment: Race Based Medicine in the United States by Dr. Mary Courtis.

Upon completing this assignment, students should be able to:
1. Analyze how social institutions and systems of power contributed to the practice of race
based medicine in the United States.
2. Critically evaluate and reflect on their own position in society and experiences with
health care systems from an anthropological perspective.
3. Describe cultural bias and other social factors that make it more or less likely that people
of color will experience differential access to medical treatment in their lifetime.
4. Share the information they learned about race based medicine with other people as a
way to promote social change.

An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology: Perspectives on Humanity Reading List and Schedule

ANTH 213

Introduces a comparative study of human culture. Covers kinship systems, politics, economics, language, ritual, cultural change, ecological adaptations, and ethnographic methodology. Explores cultural similarities and differences and the linkages among cultural, social, political, and economic institutions.

This book was created as a means to provide an Open Educational Resource (OER) for University of Nebraska-Lincoln students enrolled in ANTH 110: Introduction to Anthropology. The book was inspired by the OERs Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd edition, created by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges. Inspiration also comes from Dr. Michael Wesch and his OER text, The Art of Being Human: An Invitation to Anthropology. This book combines the authors’ respective specializations in forensic, archaeological, and cultural/medical anthropology, as well as uses examples from our research and lives. Funding for this work was provided by the Open Educational Resource Seed Grant from the Center for Transformative Teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics might include interaction of disease and society; science, colonialism, and international health; impact of new technologies on medicine and the life sciences; neuroscience and psychiatry; race, biology and medicine. Specific emphasis varies from year to year.

This is a collection of mini lectures created by anthropologists and those in conversation with anthropology as supplimental material to assist college and university instructors who were made to shift their courses online because of COVID19.For more information, see here.To contribute, please create an OER author account and send your name and OER registered email to AnthropologyTeaching@gmail.com.

This course introduces the ethnographic study of politics, i.e., what anthropologists understand to be "political" in various social and economic systems, from small-scale societies to liberal democratic states. It examines politics across three contemporary contexts: electoral politics, public spheres, bureaucracies and humanitarian governance. Students consider and analyze how questions of authority, coercion, and violence have been theorized to relate to the political, and how some aspects of social life are regimented in explicitly non-political ways.

The purpose of this course is the study of human communication across the life span from a temporal-spatial approach. Specifically, the course examines human communication from an evolutionary and adaptive perspective and explores the fundamental question, in what way does culture shape communication and communication shape culture?

Contains syllabus, ten lessons, and two fieldwork exercises for a ten-week course.

This Open Educational Resource was designed to provide a four-field introduction to anthropology for undergraduate courses. This course was created through the cumulative efforts of the Department of Anthropology at IUP as a reflection of their teaching and experiences as a collective.

As instructors of both undergraduate and graduate students alike, the professors in the Anthropology Department hope that students use this book to further their knowledge and understanding of anthropology and apply it in their everyday lives and the world around them.

IUP's Introduction to Anthropology: A Holistic and Applied Approach to Being Human is a 4-field text designed to provide students and instructors with a quality, peer-reviewed free resource that depicts a diversity of perspectives, approaches, and topics related to sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology.

Consisting of a robust series of 20 modules, the IUP OER covers topics from the history of North American anthropology, cultural and archaeological methods, the origins of humans and our earliest ancestors, the development of agriculture, race and ancestry, sex and gender, kinship, religion, climate change, and human rights and social issues—providing faculty flexibility with topics covered in a typical 15-week semester.

Designed to help students engage more meaningfully with each topic and develop as critical thinkers, the OER includes:

review and assessment questions
discussion prompts
class activities
relevant videos
glossaries
suggested readings
allowing students to dive further into topics no matter their preferred method of learning.

We are proud to host an interactive, digital version of the OER, created through the Articulate platform. We are also rolling out a physical version of the text, published through Amazon's KDP (stay tuned for the link).

Authored by the faculty in IUP's Department of Anthropology, this OER arose from a commitment to provide high-quality resources to all students. We combined the best aspects of our introductory course and teaching to create a robust resource that can be used in any introductory, 4-field anthropology course. Our own applied experiences are integrated into the course materials, as well as those from a range of professional anthropologists (isotopes and kinship studies, indigenous archaeology, forensic anthropology and the race problem, medical anthropology, and a linguistic anthropological analysis of food and power relationships in the prison system, among others!). The result is a resource that provides multiple lenses to tackle common introductory topics while showing students the myriad possibilities of what it looks like to be an anthropologist. Contact us for a LMS package to integrate the course into a Learning Management System.

Senior Authors:
Andrea Palmiotto
Lara Homsey-Messer
Benjamin Ford
Amanda Poole
Abigail Adams
Francis Allard
William Chadwick

Other Contributors
Allysha Winburn, University of West Florida
Alexander Martín, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh
Desireé Reneé Martinez, Cogstone Resource Management
Jelmer Davis, University of California, Davis
Anastasia Hudgins, Ethnologica
Sandhyak Narayanan, University of Nevada, Reno
Rachel Horowitz, Washington State University
Lori Labotka, Knoxville, TN
Bridget Roddy, IUP
Ashley Nagle, IUP
Sonja Rossi-Williams, IUP

This OER was made possible through grants from PA GOAL and the IUP Center for Teaching Excellence.