How Culture Works
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this anthropology course examining how the concept of culture has been defined and used across scholarship and popular media worldwide. Materials draw on first-hand ethnographic observations, historical syntheses, quantitative data, and fictionalized or visual accounts of human experience to compare different approaches to studying culture. Students design and carry out empirical research projects involving systematic observation of human interaction, practice interpretative analysis methods, and learn to argue for the validity of their findings. The course includes readings, assignments, and a syllabus published through MIT OCW, free to access with no certificate offered. It suits anyone wanting a grounded, methods-based introduction to how anthropologists and other scholars study culture rather than a purely theoretical survey.