Anthropology

This course examines the different ways in which people experience and explain supernatural phenomena across the globe. It will look at these varied understandings and people’s experiences of witches, witchcraft, vampires, zombies, and other supernatural phenomena across time and space. This course will address various questions, including how “the supernatural” is a category of beliefs, phenomena and experiences that did not fit within the narrative of a dualistic, scientific paradigm developed in the West as a result of the so-called “Enlightenment” era. It will also look at how this itself was “a myth of modernity” which ignored the fact that not infrequently magic and science coexist. As part of a process of decolonizing knowledge, we will also examine supernatural and occult traditions as they appear in the context of religion, narrative, healing, ritual and media accounts and representations in Western cultures. The primary focus in this course is not belief, but practice, and not what people say they do, but what they do and why they do it. This course seeks neither to prove or disprove the existence of supernatural phenomena, nor to make value judgments about people’s praxes. Rather, it takes an ethnographic, phenomenological approach, recognizing people’s lived supernatural experiences and the many different ways in which people inhabit and perceive this world. 

This course examines the cultural dimensions of emotion in everyday life. It will focus on how emotions are experienced, represented and understood in individual and social contexts. Drawing on different media and cultural sites, this course will examine a range of emotional states such as (but not limited to) love, happiness, fear, hate, terror and ideas of hope, trust, belief and faith in the (re)making of individual and social life. It will also consider how emotions are deployed in current social and political debates.

This course is an anthropological analysis of responses to death and dying, drawing on cross-cultural case studies and relevant anthropological theories of grief, mourning, and funerary practice. It contextualizes a variety of historical and contemporary responses to death and critically examines the development of "modern" death practices.

This course examines contemporary anthropological theory including post-modernism, post-structuralism, practice theory, political economy, globalization, feminist anthropology and the material turn. It introduces major figures in contemporary theoretical debates and key ongoing controversies in the discipline. 

This course examines how social, political, cultural and material conditions shape scientific work and how science, in turn, shapes society. Because of the central role of science, technology and medicine in driving modern developments, understanding the relationships among science, technology and society is crucial for understanding the history of humanity and the contemporary world. 

This course examines study abroad/overseas exchanges, aiming to integrate individual and collective insights for transformative learning. The course draws upon three main student experiences: 1) Pre-Departure (students intending to go on exchange or an equivalent experience) 2) Re-Integration (students returning from exchange or an equivalent experience) and 3) On- Going (incoming exchange students to HKU from overseas). It will first examine the concepts of transformation, experience, and learning, and how they can be integrated from interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., the metaphor of metamorphosis; the morality of human development; the phenomenology of perception and stereotypes). It will then examine the structures and theories of unfamiliar places, rootedness, mobility, cross-cultural encounters, reciprocity, and service learning in the context of students’ unique identities and experiences. It will conclude with reflections on transformation of the “whole person” as an embodied, transnational process.

This course provides an analysis of the fundamental aspects of the human evolutionary process in order to identify the main biological and cultural mechanisms involved in the genotypic and phenotypic conformation of modern human populations.