Oklahoma Panhandle State University

Book and Edition:  Window on Humanity:  A Concise Introduction to Anthropology – 3rd Edition
Author:  Conrad Phillip Kottak
Publisher:  McGraw – Hill
ISBN:  978-0-07-340527-8

Comments:  Available to rent at OPSU Bookstore. 

This course is designed for students desiring to obtain an understanding of the human condition through the discipline of Anthropology and its unique approach to examining the origins, development, and nature of humans and their cultures. Anthropology shows the tremendous diversity of human beings and their way of life while at the same time revealing their underlining unity. In this course, students will come to know perspectives, methods, and materials of the field through its four major subfields:  Physical anthropology, archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Although we will cover other topics in this course, the primary ones we will address include human evolution and variation, prehistory and culture changes, aspects of communication, and social organization and structure. By way of example, this course will draw on a variety of cultures and societies to present the concept of human unity through diversity.  Finally, the course will encourage the student to suspend his/her value judgments in order to understand why human begins–in their different cultural contexts-believe, think, speak, and socially behave the way they do.