Understanding
World Cultures
Course
Description
January 2021
At a time when
international travel must be vicarious, this course
tours world cultures and provides an intellectual framework for understanding them. Culture is much more than food, language, and the
arts. It is a distinctive set of thought patters, basic assumptions,
and solutions to life’s
problems. Each culture has a logic of
its own that explains
practices that may seem strange to visitors.
A global perspective
also helps us to understand the origins of
ethnic and racial conflict in the US and elsewhere. The course
will feature in-depth studies of about a dozen specific countries on six
continents, in nearly all of which the instructor
has lived and worked. The course was
offered in the Osher program
about a decade ago, but the materials have been restructured, expanded,
and updated over the last year for
the instructor’s courses at CMU.