2020-21

The course will reflect upon gender as an analytical category in social anthropology. Gender identities reveal gender asymmetries and as such can be used as a means to explore the position of men and women in any given social formation. The first lectures deal with women’s position in pre-modern and modern societies. Thus we will discuss women’s rights and the vote in western cultures, although we will also examine “exotic” and “remote” societies that present interesting examples of matrilineality and matrilocality.

Social psychology provides a theoretical and methodological basis for various branches of the discipline of psychology and so permits the study of specialized aspects of human behavior that are also of current interest. The field of education and the study of the components of the act of teaching are a typical example and make clear the importance of concentrating one's interest on this field of enquiry, particularly in a department that produces the teachers of tomorrow.

The course deals first with the explication of the formation and development over time of the concepts of semiology and semiotics as an interdisciplinary approach employed by the social sciences. The course lays particular stress on the semiotic approach to culture, through an elucidation of the concept of 'text', which, in the approach employed by Geertz, can be taken from written discourse and applied to all components of a culture.

The aim of the course is for the student to acquire an awareness of the need for an anthropological approach to the contemporary education process, particular at secondary level. The course commences by establishing the basic difference, which is mainly methodological, between the sociology of education and the anthropology of education.

During the first part of the course, lasting three weeks, the students are introduced, first, to the scholars and their work who have dealt with the history of modern Hellenism from the beginning of the historiography of the Greek nation to the present, second, to the most important scholarly institutions in which the subject is studied and promoted, third, to the academic journals, conferences and symposia that have dealt with the study of the history of modern Hellenism and, fourth, to the types of direct and indirect sources employed by scholars who deal with the subject.