Psychological Anthropology

The academic field of psychological anthropology is theoretically anchored in some crucial concepts and approaches of anthropology, fertilized by a couple of relevant concepts and approaches from some other disciplines, especially psychology, and to some extent also philosophy and sociology. The course focuses empirical topics in the interface between anthropology and psychology. The course has an existential orientation by offering theory and knowledge targeting various experiences that are familiar from everyday life in the modern, western world. This approach is juxtaposed with various traits and cases from more exotic and low-tech cultures. The intention is that such comparison of the familiar and non-familiar will catalyze understanding of both. The course offers fundamental knowledge in the field, especially with regard to role theory, interaction analysis and social construction of reality, ranging from perception and communication, towards belief systems, knowledge forms, science and technology. This fundamental knowledge is applied to and substantialized in concrete analyses of a broad spectrum of potentially enlightening social phenomena: rites of passage, family relations, anomalous body expressions, physical architecture, psychiatric institutions, use of veil among men and women, secularization, interaction between Scandinavian bureaucracies and immigrants, business relations, social media, mobile phones and computer games.

Knowledge:
- Knowledge on how perceptions and behaviour of individuals can be understood contextually.
- Know different role theoretical perspectives that can be applied across cultures.
- Possess knowledge on how studies of other societies and cultures can throw light on the understanding of ourselves.
- Knowledge on how the world as well as science can be understood as socially constructed.


Skills:
-Be able to analyze social interaction from a role theoretical perspective.

- Be able to apply a metaperspective on the world as socially contructed.
- Be able to apply a social perspective on research processes and research outcomes.
- Hold an understanding of how comparison as a method can increase the knowledge of our own society.

Competence:
- Ability to analyze and understand important aspects of social institutions and human interaction that can be of relevance for handling social situations.
- Competence to ask critical questions about knowledge and epistomology.

Lectures (approx.14 hours) and seminars (approx. 10 hours).
The course is offered in the autumn semester. If the course is to be offered in the spring semester this will be announced at the beginning of the spring semester. The announcement will be available at the Department and on the Department's web page.