Anthropology

This course studies how humans have communicated verbally, non-verbally, and across distances.

This course examines the way visual art and culture is used to express identity and its relation to changing notions of creativity and selfhood. The goal of the course is to think critically about the purpose of art: what is it, what does it do, who is it for, how is it made?

This course offers a theoretically and methodologically informed analysis of culture, art and literature drawing on sociology and anthropology. Students are introduced to key sociological and anthropological concepts which facilitate the interpretation of art-works as both reflective of society and potentially transformative – whether literary, cinematic, musical, or whatever sort – including liminality, play, and social performativity. Effectively, these suggest that by creating imaginative spaces of narrative and symbolism, art can consider elements of society, and variously re-think and re-evaluate them, or even critique them.

Drawing principally on Marxist anthropology, post-structuralism and post-colonialism, this course looks cross-culturally to explore the interrelationships between diverse forms and sources of power, the roles of colonialism and corporate globalization in configuring and sustaining local relations of inequality, and the rise of resistance movements that explicitly challenge exclusions based on class, gender, and ethnicity. Special attention will be paid to the effects of multinational corporations on local power relations and patterns of inequality throughout the world via brand marketing, legal reform, and corporate social responsibility. Case studies will be drawn from Latin America, North America, Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

This course provides a deeper understanding of migrant lives, experiences, and emotions in the 20th and 21st century, to give a fuller sense of the varied comparative and transdisciplinary methodologies that can be used in the study of the subject, and to introduce students to research work with a view to thesis writing. The course incorporates varied approaches including chronological, thematic, and theoretical aspects. For example: the relationship between psy disciplines and migration experiences; the emergence of refugee psychiatry and its relationship to broader political contexts; and the politics of humanitarian psychiatry. The course centers around a group of comparative and interdisciplinary case studies. These include displaced persons and forced migration from within and outside Europe after the First and Second World War; dissidents and refugees in Europe; guest workers and post-colonial labor migrants after 1945 in Britain, France, and Germany. The course also incorporates varied methodologies and sources, including printed and unprinted sources, oral history and life-story analysis, quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods as well as film, memoir, and visual analysis.

This course delves into labor in China through an anthropological lens and pays attention to various aspects, including skill and livelihood; institution and reform; culture and technology, and gender and family, based on relevant literature and first-hand fieldwork materials obtained through the teacher’s research. The concept of "labor" is not confined to Marxism, but it is extended by specific materials from anthropological labor studies. The course aims not only to lead students to master multiple situations of labor in the Chinese context, but also encourages a reflexive exploration of students finding their own positions in society.

This course looks closely at cultural representation in museums, what they display, to whom, and how. Students first gain an understanding of how museums are organized and the concerns each department faces in terms of cultural representation. Then, they embark on an exploration of the current critical issues facing museums as they represent cultures, both that of the communities in which they reside and other peoples. Nowhere are these issues more palpable than in the National Museum of Scotland, with its large, varied, and historical collection, tasked with representing Scotland's relationship to the global world for a local and global audience. Using the galleries of the National Museum as guide and case study, students examine how nine specific conversations in museology - capitalism, community, citizenship, technology, scientific norms, race, colonialism, ethnology, and memory - are constructed, negotiated, and challenged in the museum.

The course provides students with the sociological-empirical analysis of societal phenomena, such as integration, acceleration, polarization, fragmentation and social action, such as conflict, protest, critique, social mobilization, and claims-making. It also introduces the students to a range of methodological approaches to the study of society/social actors in interaction with politics, law, and the economy. The course enhances the student's capacity and skills to analyze society, social actors, and social problems by using sociological and interdisciplinary instruments.

The course is divided into 3 parts:

In the first part, the course provides an introduction to political sociology, its main sociological theories, concepts, and forms of analysis. Political sociology will be explored through main themes including power and authority, conflict in society, forms of mobilization, societal actors and civil society, and interaction with state (and international/transnational) institutions as well as economic actors.

In the second part, the course provides a specific (and critical) attention to forms of (innovative) data gathering, measurement, ranking, the usage of big data, and the potential downsides to the collection and uses of big data. The course critically discusses formatting, codification, quantification, measurement, rankings, forms of surveillance and control, performance indicators, and auditing.

In the third part, the course explores specific case-studies around four themes: Rule of law and democracy; Human rights, crime, surveillance, and justice; Market economy, the digital world.

This course examines the analytical object "violence" in its differentiated dimensions. What we think of as violence encompasses multiple phenomena that cannot only be understood as forces of destruction: violence must be grasped as also generative of life-worlds. The course inquires into the nature of violence, explores its epistemological and existential, sensual and structural, exceptional and ordinary dimensions, and forms.

This course examines popular musical culture with an emphasis on musicological, sociological, and anthropological aspects. Other topics include: comparative folklore; how and why popular music should be studied; the songbooks and folklore missions in Spain; methods and procedures in ethnomusicological research; anthropology of music-- music in culture; reformulation of folklore; processes of transit and cultural contact. Pre-requisites: Musicology students with prior musical knowledge