WARNING: Special permission is required to register for this course. Make sure you read the notes and/or description below carefully. You may also want to consult with your advisor.

Human beings share a common genetic inheritance, but our cultural institutions differ in a bewildering variety of ways. This course explores the many different cultural expressions of basic human cognitive and social abilities and needs, We will look at cultural variations in child rearing, mother-child attachment, language socialization, categorization, reasoning, problem-solving, architecture, music, politics, warfare, food-gathering, sex roles, mental disorders, and altered states of consciousness, all with the goal of understanding how the shape of social systems and symbolic expression reflects the economic and adaptive needs of the culture and its people. Among the approaches to these phenomena we will consider are symbolic interaction, cognitive anthropology, dialectic materialism, modern ethnology. Graduate Students Only.