Aims

To become familiar with the methods of social and cultural anthropology and of psychology; to gain some insight into how the social sciences study human activity.

Main themes

Content : the course addresses central psychological and anthropological theories in order to understand the functions and processes that characterize the phenomenon of human life, taking into account biological as well as social and cultural determinants. We shall study: consciousness; affective, cognitive, and perceptual functions; the learning process and memory; learning abilities; personal and social identity; the interactive field; the structural givens of life in society; the relationship between "nature/culture"; the origins of the social bond, its universality and various expressions; the social means of exploiting natural resources; society's relationship to history and memory. Reference theories and models will be situated in their historical context, and the paradigm governing different kinds of approaches will be explained and examined.
Method : in the anthropological approach, we shall describe the main contributions as well as the limitations of the strands of thinking that have successively marked the history of the discipline. We shall then move on to discussing the bases of the key sectors of social and cultural anthropology, insisting on the methodological singularity of field work and of a comparative approach. For the psychological approach, we shall contrast the current findings concerning the mechanisms governing human behavior with the key theoretical strands that have marked psychology from its beginnings.

Content and teaching methods

The first half of the course will successively examine: the field of anthropology, the epistemological and methodological foundations of anthropological practices, the main trends of anthropological thought, the relationships between anthropology and related disciplines, the main fields of anthropological knowledge (family/kinship, economics, politics, symbolic systems).
The second half of the course will address questions in contemporary psychology: schools and fields, biological foundations of behaviour, sensations and perceptions, vigilance and consciousness, learning and memory, cognitive and affective activities, psychology of health and questions related to mental health.
Course materials will be available at the beginning of the class.

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