Anthropology

This course offers a range of approaches to contemporary conversations around embodiment and ideas of normativity. In particular, it familiarizes students with representations of physical and mental difference in film, social media, and literature within and beyond European and North American contexts. Featured themes include disability and identity, health and constructions of the self, mental difference, and the quest for political recognition.

The course focuses on the Scandinavian colonial expansion from 1600 to the early 20th century. Based on a number of case studies (e.g. resource colonialism in Sápmi and Greenland, plantations in the Danish West Indies, trade and consumption of colonial products), the course examines colonial discourses and practice and notice relationships between colonialism and resources/environment, economics, power, resistance and science and colonial inheritance. The course also explores the different cultural processes, such as creolisation, othering and ambivalence that takes place in colonial environments and manifests itself in material culture. The course introduces theoretical procedures for historical-archaeological studies of colonialism and presents different sources, methods and perspectives and central research questions.

Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, with its diverse landscapes — ranging from Mt. Etna’s volcanic geology and coastal marine biodiversity to rural agricultural practices and conservation areas — offers a unique and comprehensive setting for immersive ecological and environmental field studies. This course will engage with key topics such as the natural history and ecology of Mediterranean island environments, the geological processes that shape the landscape, perspectives on human-environment interactions, and the oceanographic dynamics that influence coastal and marine habitats.

The increasing uptake of generative AI technologies for a range of purposes from emotional care and companionship to work flow optimization serves as a rich field of inquiry for anthropologists studying human-technology relations. While all technologies are imbued by popular narratives and imaginaries, the use of AI tools in particular is informed by myths of hype and anti-hype that underline the need for ethnographic approaches exploring how these technologies are actualized in practice. This course explores the potential of anthropological theory and methods for elucidating the social, cultural, and political implications of generative AI. With tech companies touting the greater efficiency and profitability promised by these technologies at the expense of other considerations, qualitative research providing a more nuanced picture of human-AI entanglement in everyday life is crucial. So too, the far-reaching impacts of AI technologies provide an opportunity to revisit some of the key perspectives and questions animating cultural anthropology as well as the ways these might intersect productively with other disciplinary approaches. Key topics in the course include the political economy of AI and its impact on the future of work, race and gender logics and biases of AI, and the integration of AI into social media, virtual worlds, and the metaverse.

This course explores banquet culture in the Mediterranean, investigating the traditions of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Our journey will take us to museums and archaeological sites in and around Rome, as well as Tuscany, Lazio, and Campania. In particular, we study the material remains from the Etruscan town of Tarquinia, the Villa of Tiberius at Sperlonga, the Greek city of Paestum, and the luxury villas of the Bay of Naples. As we explore these ancient aristocratic villas, we also explore the pastimes of the elite related to banquets, such as raising fish, birds, and flora, by studying their gardens, fisheries, and wine and olive presses, as well as the entertainment accompanying these feasts. Key ancient texts, such as the ancient Roman cookbook by Apicius, invite us into the Roman kitchen with original recipes and menus. Through the investigation of the ritual of feasting, this course assesses how the Roman banquet has shaped our ideas of culture, leisure, and status today.

This course provides an introduction to Social Anthropology as the comparative study of human societies and cultures. Students are introduced to key themes and debates in the history of the discipline. Ethnographic case studies are drawn from work on a variety of societies, including hunter-gatherers, farmers, industrial laborers, and urban city-dwellers. Drawing on both classical and contemporary work, the course starts by posing the question: What is Social Anthropology? After exploring the ethnographic method and considering some historical background, the rest of the course is organized around core themes in the discipline, including (in the fall term) relatedness, exchange, and power. Through comparing different ethnographic examples, students consider key questions through anthropological perspectives. How do we become people and become related to others? What is love, and is it natural? Why do we think of some people as different and others as the same? Why are gifts and exchange so central to human societies? Does work empower or enslave us? What is power, and why do some people have it and others don’t?

This course begins by exploring the intellectual interventions and traditions that have emerged in the anthropology in and of Britain over the last 50 years, and then swiftly moves into exploring the ways in which interdisciplinary ethnographic research has been conducted across Britain. While reading ethnographies in cross cultural, global contexts, in this course students place a particular emphasis on the urban context of Greater Manchester. Students explore ethnographies that have been based on ethnographic research across Greater Manchester, and which raise and address urgent questions of social, political, and economic change in Manchester and beyond. The course tackles the concept of "the urban’" by exploring ethnographic examples from anthropology, sociology, human geography, and business studies that focus on social and cultural lives and relations. Students take two fieldtrips (Cheetham’s Library and Manchester Airport) and two walking tours (Fallowfield and Rusholme) to visit and reflect on the ethnographic locations of the materials and readings they engage with. 

This course provides students with a distinctly anthropological perspective on social media. It explores how familiar themes in anthropology, from kinship and friendship networks to the relation between circulation and value, take on new forms in a world of ever-increasing social media connectivity. Combining insights from anthropology and social media studies, students will consider questions such as: Is culture becoming more homogeneous now that more than one billion people worldwide have a Facebook profile, or are there as many different Facebooks as there are local contexts? How does the circulation of online content relate to pre-existing forms of community and belonging? What are the links between algorithms and agency? Are selfies a symptom of increasing individualism? And how can ethnographic methods capture social worlds of infinite distraction, endlessly interrupted by notifications, memes, tweets and Instagram stories?

This course introduces students to two ways of making sense of public health. The first is by exploring some of the key sites that are central to the making of public health. The second is through acknowledging that whilst public health (and its sidekick, epidemiology, the study of health across populations) sounds like it would be about actually existing people, it is often about people at the aggregate. In other words, statistics. This course takes a different approach: students study the observable behavior and attitudes of actually existing people—whether in the present or the past. This course introduces students to some key research methodologies in the social sciences and humanities-doing fieldwork, using archives, and unlocking the mysteries of university libraries in order to enable students to understand and master key concepts in the anthropology, history, and social science of life, death, and illness as part of the practice of medicine; to familiarize students provide students with key debates in the anthropology, history, and social science of life, death, and illness; to familiarize students with how medical understandings of life, death, and illness have changed over time; to familiarize students with how medical practice and understanding of life, death, and illness differ across cultures.

In this course students are introduced to the anthropological study of kinship, with an added focus on gender given the close relationship between the two. The study of kinship has been foundational in social anthropology, and early anthropologists often sought to categorize and rank societies according to their kinship system. Since then, the study of kinship has moved considerably from charting "systems" to understanding the full complexity of concepts and practices of relatedness, and even questioning the universality of "kinship." While acknowledging the historical foundations of the field, this course focuses on more contemporary aspects of the study of kinship and gender. Questions about race and ethnicity also figure prominently throughout the course. Through ethnographic examples from a wide range of social contexts, students reflect on the socially constructed nature of ideas of kinship and gender and debate key social issues of contemporary relevance.