ANT 230 Culture and Crime

3 hours 

This course examines crime, criminality and responses to crime from an anthropological and cross-cultural perspective. Students will analyze the concept of crime as a cultural construct and as a social phenomenon and consider its causes, factors and complexities in a global context. Norms and transgressions will be explored through ethnographic case studies of and cross-cultural research on a variety of world cultures and how power, economics, identity, gender, religion, and other meaning systems are integrated with these transgressions on local, national and global scales. Students will study cases critically and learn qualitative anthropological methods such as interviews and observation to consider and compare examples of and attitudes toward crime in their own society.