Anthropology

This course examines Hong Kong’s culture and its people from an anthropological perspective. Through close readings of ethnographies, viewing of videos, and fieldtrips, the class explores the interaction of different cultural flows in various social systems, and learns about the linkage between the past and the present, the local and the global, and the Chinese and the rest. 

This course introduces students to the synergies and challenges across anthropological and psychoanalytic theory. It encourages students to think across methodologies and conceptual toolkits in their analysis of subjectivity, the psyche, and human experience.

The Celtic literatures contain a variety of strong and memorable female and male characters, some positively portrayed and others negatively. The idealized gender characteristics which may underpin these portrayals is explored in the lectures. In the case of the ultimate model of masculinity, the male hero, the myth of heroic prowess coupled with the underlying threat of unpredictability and violence is examined. In addition, the blurred lines of gender identity in poetry is a particular focus. Saints' Lives of the Middle Ages, often an expected source of gender role reversal and fluidity, is also covered. A range of representative texts are read in translation, and discussed and analyzed in lectures.

This course consists of ethnographic studies on Japanese popular culture, focusing on an academic understanding of Japanese popular culture through weekly meetings but also extracurricular team investigations of sociocultural phenomena that signify Japanese popular culture. 

This course offers an introduction to the history of cultural anthropology, tracing the formation of anthropological theory from its roots in the Enlightenment and European colonial expansion up to the present. Partly an intellectual history of the discipline, students explore key texts that mark critical shifts in anthropological thinking about what it means to be human. In doing so, students explore theories and critiques that have shaped, complicated, and haunted anthropological conceptions of humanity, including ideas about nature and culture, notions of race, progress, and civilization, and theories of personhood and social life.

This course considers how intrinsic war is to human nature (the Hobbes/Rousseau debate), the causes and escalation of conflict, the conduct of warfare, its physical manifestation and immediate outcomes. The focus is on small-scale societies of prehistoric and recent date, using archaeological information and ethnographies of conflict to study and define "primitive" war as an anthropological phenomenon. The course takes a comparative, evolutionary, and historical perspective, to look at the broader impact of war and conflict in a sample of early and indigenous societies.

Ethnography as both the methodology and the set of methods by which anthropologists gather our data from the field has a long and controversial history emerging during European colonial expansion. Students critically examine the early ethnographic works, particularly in relation to Ireland as well as abroad. Contemporary texts comparatively show core issues and debates in how the "other" is written. As students move through these texts we engage with different ethnographic methods developing the student's own skills in collecting and curating social data.

What is childhood? Was it invented? How has the concept of childhood differed in different historical, geographical, and socio-economic contexts? These are the questions that will preoccupy students in this course. Focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries, but with reference to earlier periods, and covering Ireland, Britain, Europe, and the wider world – including colonial settings and China – the class explores how the experience and perception of childhood changed. Students examine the hypothesis that childhood as a time of innocence, development, and play was not a natural category but had to be "invented," and they consider different periods and locations as possible candidates for its invention or adaptation. From child labor and children in war to the children of elites and youth culture, students construct a nuanced picture of male and female childhood. 

This course examines interpretations of urban legends from Hong Kong and other parts of the world using anthropological, sociological, psychological, and literary approaches accompanied with case-studies from different media and platforms.