This advanced seminar aims to equip students with a partial intellectual history of sociocultural anthropology. Such courses are often structured chronologically, moving from classical to contemporary social and anthropological theory (e.g., ANT6100H). This course instead assumes a familiarity with the theoretical canons, their critiques and historical emergence, and attends to particular foundational questions and epistemological concerns that have long preoccupied anthropologists. Thus, each week serves as a minor genealogy of anthropological thought. Through the seminar students should come to appreciate not only the varied theoretical positions and projects that have animated anthropology at specific sociohistorical moments, but also the recursive nature of anthropological theorising itself — the many ways that old questions are continually being revisited, revised and reanimated through new lexicons and lenses.

Participants in this class conduct an independent ethnographic inquiry, analyze data, write it up and publish it on the Ethnography Lab website as an original contribution to knowledge. The premise of the class is that the most effective way to learn how to do ethnographic research is by actually doing it, with guidance and plenty of opportunity for feedback. The format of the class is collaborative. Each year the class has a common theme. All students identify a research site related to the theme, usually a site within the University of Toronto where they conduct primary ethnographic research, and bring issues of research design, ethics, theory, and analysis to the weekly group session for collective brainstorming. Assignments include individual weekly blog posts, collective synthesis and writing for the website, and an individual final report.