Cultural Anthropology
Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com
This is a complete course: fifteen instructional weeks and a finals week, every student component, built with The Course Maker and ready to import. Weeks are relative (Week 1 to Week 16); you set the dates when you import it. Browse the whole thing below. Click any piece to read it in full, then click back to return here.
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Download this course
This course is free, complete, and evergreen, and it is yours to keep; free downloads run through June 30, 2028. Students pay $0 for course materials: the readings and videos are links to freely available resources.
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What the paid build adds
This sample is complete and yours to keep. A paid build is the same course made yours in the ways a download cannot be:
- Every date set to your term and your breaks, and re-paced to a second campus calendar at no extra charge.
- Your syllabus, your policies, and your outline of record in the build, with an alignment report that shows which component addresses each objective and SLO, and a Universal design for learning section drawn from the course's own data.
- Your name on every page as the course's creator.
- Kept current every term: fresh assessment variants, every link re-checked and the dead ones replaced, and the subject brought up to date where it has moved.
- The full instructor pack: answer keys and worked solutions, the alignment report, and the UDL map.
- A record for your college's file: the design attestation, a disclosure statement for every edition, and what changed at the end of each term.
Included in every course
ChapterRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Slide deck with speaker notesRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a slide deck with speaker notes, a chapter to read, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Captioned video linksRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — captioned videos, a chapter to read, and a slide deck with speaker notes — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee. We link videos only when a caption track exists (from the creator or generated automatically), and we never host them.
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Policies, schedule, and grading
Assignment groups & weights
Configured in the export — the gradebook is set the moment the course is imported.
| Assignment group | Weight | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorials & Practice | 10% | |
| Quizzes | 10% | |
| Workshops | 20% | |
| Assignments | 25% | |
| Discussions | 15% | |
| Exams | 20% | |
| Total | 100% | Letter Standard |
What students will be able to do
Explain the anthropological perspective (holism, comparison, and fieldwork), the four subfields and applied anthropology, and the culture concept, distinguishing culture from society, enculturation from acculturation, and ethnocentrism from cultural relativism as a method and from moral relativism.
Describe and practice ethnographic methods: participant observation, two-column field notes that keep observation apart from interpretation, interviews, the genealogical method, emic and etic perspectives, thick description, and reflexivity, following the discipline's ethics of doing no harm and obtaining informed consent.
Analyze language as a cultural system: distinguish language from communication, explain dialect, register, and code-switching, evaluate the strong and weak forms of linguistic relativity, and describe nonverbal communication and language endangerment.
Compare how societies make a living and exchange goods: the subsistence strategies as a model, generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange, the obligations a gift creates, and documented cases such as the kula and the potlatch.
Analyze political organization and social control: distinguish power from authority, use the band, tribe, chiefdom, and state model and the egalitarian, rank, and stratified scheme as models rather than rankings, and describe law and dispute resolution.
Analyze kinship, descent, marriage, and households: read and draw kinship diagrams in kin-type notation, distinguish patrilineal, matrilineal, and bilateral descent and descent from residence, apply kinship terminology systems, and explain marriage exchanges and household forms.
Explain how sex, gender, and sexuality and race and ethnicity are culturally organized, describing documented cross-cultural gender diversity, continuous human variation, and census categories as the issuing body's own categories.
Interpret religion, ritual, and healing: apply the three phases of a rite of passage, liminality, and communitas, explain magic, witchcraft, and revitalization movements as anthropologists have analyzed them, and distinguish disease from illness using explanatory models and the idea of structural violence.
Analyze globalization, colonialism, migration, cultural heritage, and repatriation, describe applied and public anthropology, and synthesize the course's concepts in an ethnographic reading of one fieldwork site.
Ethnographic analysis — record observations in field notes that keep what was observed apart from what it might mean, apply an anthropological concept to them accurately, and compare the practice with a documented ethnographic case, stating the reading in one plain sentence.
Cultural understanding and research integrity — describe cultural practices in their own terms without ranking cultures, distinguish emic from etic accounts, follow ethical fieldwork practice (consent, no harm, no identifying details), and verify any claim about a real people, including AI output, against a primary or issuing-body source.
How this course is built — read this first
Every teaching module carries the same set, in the order a student meets it: a Start Here overview, the chapter (the primary reading), the lecture (titled “Lecture: <module title>”), the slide deck with speaker notes, readings & resources (links only), the lecture tutorial and practice exercises worked with an AI tutor, the quiz, the discussion and the assignment, and the weekly Ethnography Workshop. Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the final in Week 16, a finals week with no module.
The discussion and the assignment each ship in both formats: the adaptive version is the published, graded item, and its traditional alternative (no AI) is a separate item that ships unpublished beside it. An instructor who prefers the traditional format publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one.
What you see here is every student page. The instructor pack (answer keys and worked solutions, rubric calibration, image prompts, audio-brief scripts, and the alignment report) ships only in the download, never on this site.
Discussions & assignments: both formats in every module
Same learning objective either way; what changes is how the work happens.
Work it through with an approved chatbot
The student does the work in a guided conversation with an approved chatbot, using a copy-paste prompt the course provides. For a discussion, the AI is a Socratic partner that challenges their thinking and never writes the post. For an assignment, the AI is a coach: it asks questions, checks the reasoning shown, and waits for the student to revise. The student submits the chat link with the required summary or report.
The familiar way, one click away
The student does the work themselves and submits it, and the instructor grades it against the rubric. No AI required. It ships unpublished, opening with a one-line note to the instructor; publish it instead of the adaptive version if you prefer.
Every week, every component
Each week is a heading; every component under it links to the full student page. Week 8 is a teaching module that also carries the midterm bundle; Week 16 is the finals week, with the final exam bundle and no module.
Anthropology and the Anthropological Perspective
The Culture Concept
Fieldwork and Ethnographic Methods
Language and Communication
Making a Living: Subsistence Strategies
Exchange and Economic Systems
Political Organization, Power, and Inequality
Midterm Review & Exam
The midterm exam bundle