This weekend I stumbled upon a treasure trove of Cambridge University video lectures available for free download at the Cambridge DSpace website.
Most of the videos are from the anthropology department, and the most prolific lecturer is anthropology professor Alan Macfarlane, who has also made many of his lectures available on YouTube.
Macfarlane is an insightful lecturer who has also posted some chapters from his many books on his website.
I am currently listening to his 9-lecture series on Classical Social Theories (website, YouTube), which covers thinkers from Montesquieu in the 18th century to Ernest Gellner and F.W.Maitland in the 20th century. In the introduction (see below) he talks about different paradigms in the social sciences, which change from period to period.
Technical note: the DSpace website has extremely slow download speeds. It’s much faster to download Macfarlane’s lectures from YouTube. Instructions for how to download video from YouTube are here and here.
Here’s the first lecture in the series:
Filed under: 5-star professors, Anthropology, Courses, Lectures, University podcast | Tagged: Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge University
