My goal is to make your everyday interactions seem a little strange to you. After all, why on Earth is peanut butter ok with jelly and weird with smarties?

Which animals is it normal to kill, who is suitable to be a president, or what can people be paid for and more are defined by our culture: a shared social code we all live in.

In this course, I’ll introduce you to the basics of anthropology. You’ll learn to see the underlying mechanisms of cultural code, how to recognise and describe it. We’ll have discussions about:

– winks and twitches, or the nuance between a simple behaviour and its meaning,
– how a thing equally be one thing (in one culture) and a completely different thing (in another),
– gifts and commodities, or the interaction between culture and economic systems,
– culture shaping how we treat climate, equality, or money,
– and at the end of the course, you’ll go into the field and observe the culture of Discover itself, with an eye of an anthropologist. We’ll see how many new unspoken rules and spontaneous adjustments we’ve made, only in a few days!

Everyday culture is for those who want to see a new lens of thinking (we’ll start from scratch!) and those already curious about cultural practices, at home or far away.

After this course, you’ll be able to dismantle the patterns and dynamics of cultural behaviours and see the familiar routines you do every day as strange and somehow arbitrary: a little bit as an alien coming on Earth. You’ll also see more familiarities in customs that seem strange at first.