Anthropology

This course provides an examination of the cultural frameworks and social aspects of gender roles, personhood, human sexuality, and kinship systems, analyzed through ethnographic examples from a diverse range of settings. It equips students with the analytical tools to engage in theoretical debates concerning core concepts such as gender, sexuality, kinship, marriage, and the relationship between nature and culture, as well as exploring how the experiences of gender, sexuality, and kinship vary according to the regimes of politics, law, and materiality in which they are embedded. 

This course examines the role of knowledge and technical skill in human society. It looks at the concepts of technology and science; knowledge and worldviews; scientific culture, and technological culture and knowledge. The course covers the following topics: social, axiological and epistemic problems of science, technology, and technoscience from an information society to a knowledge society, as well as reflections and challenges for Mexico and Latin America.

This course explores specialized areas of contemporary anthropology, including the anthropology of health, illness, and misfortune; social worlds in transition; and the anthropology of everyday life. Through selected ethnographic case studies, it engages with key theories, concepts, and methodologies used to analyze contemporary social experience.

This course explores the origins of the modern museum and trace the development of the Oxford collections as a paradigm for the assembly of a material analog for every kind of historic and scientific record. It considers the museum as an instrument for the promotion of national and racial ideologies and asks how we can constructively confront a past that has often embodied ideas that are deeply at odds with 21st century sensibilities. Most importantly, classes will be taught among the peerless collections of the Ashmolean. Students will handle and examine objects ranging from Palaeolithic hand axes to 19th century silver and from neo-Assyrian sculpture to Renaissance drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael, considering fundamental questions of sources, research, and what it is truly possible to know.

The course explores a range of representational practices, their relationship to power, and their contemporary legacy. It offers an introduction to key debates about the visual aspects of power and how postcolonial theory can illuminate these dynamics. Combining empirical ethnographic case studies with theories from anthropology, postcolonial and subaltern studies, as well as philosophy and visual culture studies, the course extends the discussion beyond colonialism's original geographic boundaries to address hierarchy, desire, agency, and imagination in asymmetrical political contexts. 

This course examines the composition of the cultural heritage of Mexico drawing from the material characteristics of the objects and sites to distinguish between tangible heritage and cultural practices that permit the identification of intangible heritage. 

This course examines how Indigenous knowledge and ‘Western’ science work against, with or independent of each other and look at examples of how science contributes to Indigenous development. This international approach fosters cross-cultural communication skills, sharing of theory and practice, and comparative analysis of the situations of Indigenous peoples in global contexts.

This course presents the different ways in which 20th‑century anthropology has studied forms of political organization around the world. After establishing the universality of politics, anthropology has sought to examine societies’ relationships to the state—that is, the variability of cultural choices regarding the centralization or decentralization of power. The course also explores anthropology’s relationship to colonialism, neo‑colonialism, and post‑colonialism, from the late 19th century to the present day. In addition, it introduces a more materialist approach to politics, emphasizing the importance of the production and circulation of material wealth in the political organization of societies. The course concludes with an outlook toward further study, while highlighting how political anthropology is practiced in the 21st century.