Exploring The Arts Through Cultural Anthropology

Are you interested in Art? Tattoos? Graffiti? Theater? Music? What about ancient cave drawings? Take this course to find out more about The Arts around the world!

This is an introductory Cultural Anthropology course focusing on The Arts.  In Unit 1, you will learn about the field of Anthropology in general, how to understand other cultures, and why art is an important topic. In Unit 2, you will learn about what art is, art and culture, and the functions of art. In Unit 3, you will learn about the visual arts, rock art, body art, and graffiti. In Unit 4, you will learn about verbal art, including myths, legends, and tales. In Unit 5, you will learn about music, including why we have music, the creation of music, and the function of music. You'll also learn about dance, and dance in culture and the functions of dance. In Unit 6, you'll learn about Theater, including theater and media, performers, content, and audience role. In Unit 7, you will be given a summary of everything you learned about The Arts.

The introductory, concluding, and activity lectures are talking head videos, and the rest are narrated slideshows. These are not PowerPoint lectures. The slideshows are made up mostly of images that complement the lecture, so there is very little text on the screen.

Each Unit has a short quiz, and an activity that includes a worksheet to be completed. These activities should take you about 10-15 minutes to complete. The last Unit has an optional activity, where you can go out "in the field" and be like an Anthropologist!

This course is part of a series of Anthropology courses, called Anthropology 4U: The 4 fields of Anthropology, For Everyone. The courses can be taken in any order, and you don't need to know anything about Anthropology to take these courses.