Cultural beliefs, myths, and practices influence us in ways we seldom realize. We must learn to recognize these cultural forces so we can, among other things: more skillfully navigate life; appreciate human similarities and differences across places and times; and avoid following along with aspects of our culture that, if we stopped to think about them, we may find troubling. To do so, we carefully analyze the work that anthropologists do in attempting to better understand the highly complex role of culture in human life. Topically, we examine phenomena such as witchcraft, magic, gender, kinship, race, power, food production, money, and social performance. This course can be used to satisfy University Studies requirements.