The course will focus on the concepts, practices and methods of cultural anthropology granting particular attention to ways of constructing the Other as well as the dimension of ethnographic research and methodology, about which I will provide multiple examples. After historically contextualizing the birth of anthropology and changes in both the ethnographic perspective and the observer/observed relationship over the time, I will lead students in analyzing several fundamental concepts such as culture, cultural relativism, stereotype, identity, gender, kinship, ethnocentrism and cultural translation, highlighting the cultural complexities and specificities of anthropological discourse as a critical tool for reading various social processes.