This seminar introduces students to modern social theory, its historical moorings and its relationship to the anthropological enterprise. The seminar investigates how the concepts of society and culture evolved in relation to humanist thought and political economic circumstances as Europeans explored, missionized, and colonized. We examine how anthropological theory and practice have been modeled within and against other natural and social science disciplines. We inquire into key debates related to the categories of the human, the social, and the individual; the formation of political institutions and practices; the development of ideas about reason, culture and human nature; symbolism, consciousness and personhood; race, gender and difference; exchange, class and capital. In charting how society and culture have been theorized and debated historically, we also reflect on forms of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic sensibilities that are relevant today and their meaning and stakes for a present and future anthropology.