Welcome to Anthropology 407: Advanced Readings in Regional Ethnology. This course provides you with an opportunity to investigate problems or issues in greater depth than is normally possible in an introductory course. For example, a student having taken an introductory course on Arctic or African ethnology may wish to study a specific problem: kinship, ritual, or cultural ecology of the peoples of that region. Both the regional and theoretical focus of the course are issues that you will have discussed with the course professor before being allowed to register in it.

This is a very flexible course. In conjunction with the course professor, you in effect design your own course content objectives, and carry out tasks that enable you to accomplish those objectives, guided and supported by the text that is provided with the course package, the course professor, and the staff in the Athabasca University Library and other libraries to which you have access. By the time you have completed this course, you will have designed and carried out a program of research on the issue or problem you have chosen as your focus, resulting in a major paper of approximately 10,000 words (50 pages, typed and double-spaced).