University of Bristol

In this course students explore central theoretical issues in modern social anthropology and in the history of the discipline; key figures and their contributions to the history of anthropology; important ethnographic case studies; connections between ethnographic materials and theoretical positions; cross-cultural similarities and differences in a number of social and cultural domains; and the relevance of social anthropology for 21st century citizens.

This course takes students on a journey from the seemingly familiar surroundings of everyday France to a more complex and enriched understanding of the key debates and issues which have defined French and Francophone identities over the centuries. Using source material in French (also available in translation for ab initio students), it focuses on figures and places that seem easily recognizable to many students and scholars of France and explores the networks of often competing ideas and values that have shaped who or what they are perceived to be today.

Students learn to identify and remove simple trends and seasonalities from time series data; describe the properties of stationary time series and their autocorrelations; define various time series probability models (ARMA, ARIMA, GARCH); construct time series probability models from data and verify model fit; define the spectral density function and understand it as a distribution of energy in the frequency domain; compute the periodogram and smoothed versions; and analyze multivariate time series.

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.

This course examines some of the issues that face human kind at the beginning of the 21st century and show how geographers approach the problems facing the modern world. It includes topics that are currently reported in the media and examine the realities and uncertainties behind these issues, focusing particularly on the tools available to address key questions. The course facilitates cross-disciplinary discussion and to promote an in-depth understanding of problems facing us all. The course provides an insight into how these issues are influenced by complex interactions between social, cultural, economic, physical, and biological processes.

This course introduces students to ideas about objects and helps them achieve a broad understanding of many of the ways in which objects function in human societies, in the recent as well as more distant past. The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the interdisciplinary study of "objects in cultures;" and it demonstrates how societies create objects which in turn create individual identities, and reify cultural traits.