Anthropology

This course studies and analyzes anthropological aspects of the modern world, including sports, video games, movies, and social media, among others. From an ethnographic point of view, it examines how these aspects manifest themselves in the world both culturally and socially.

This course explores the literary and artistic foundations that contribute to the construction of the cultural space and the politics we inhabit. It examines how sources are managed, interpreted, and renewed over time; the architecture and art they inspired; and how they have been adapted to the religious and political installation of Christianity; all of which have informed our unique identity today. The French model is at the center of these lineaments of cultural anthropology. The artistic representations (literary, pictorial, architectural) that endure over time reveal how people in the Middle Ages viewed the world and will influence the identity of future European nations over time.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course starts with introductions into the concept of monumentality and memory in archaeology. The topics are addressed and discussed into detail mainly using examples from Pharaonic Egypt (3000 B.C.E – 300 B.C.E.), a culture which is due to its long duration and the long-lasting traditions on the one hand, and the presence of a large monumental record, especially well suited as a case study. While the major focus is laid upon the emic perspective, presenting and interpreting processes within the Egyptian culture, the course also includes the etic perspective from antiquity until today. The course shows how ancient monumentality and the cultural memory are still being used and how they affected and still affect archaeology. Topics covered include: monumentality – What does it mean and why does it matter; an introduction to the concept of memory within archaeology; monuments of Pharaonic Egypt; what makes a monument a monument in Pharaonic Egypt, the concept of the monumental discourse; cities and residences as expressions of monumentality; the heydays of monumentalism: the pyramids of the Old Kingdom and the time of Ramesses II; Damnatio Memoriae: the Amarna Period and its reception; the structure of the Ancient Egyptian history: how monumental records shaped the later idea of Ancient Egypt; reuse and usurpation; Archaism in Ancient Egypt; monumentality and memory in the Mayan Culture; the construction of memory and identities in the European prehistory: monuments and megalithism; the memory and monuments of Ancient Egypt from Roman times until the decipherment of the hieroglyphs in 1822: what remained without the knowledge of the Ancient Egyptian language; and the memory and monuments of Ancient Egypt today.

This course touches on themes in political ecology, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of food, and the anthropology of development through a detailed exploration of the world’s fisheries; from the fisherfolk that harvest them to the people around the globe that consume them. It critically examines the global fish "crisis" and prospects for global food security and supply; conservation v’s development discourse in resource management; scientific & traditional management of natural resources; certification/eco-labelling and the "green" consumer; commodity chains; ecology of small scale fishers groups; and poverty, development, and livelihoods. Each student on the course becomes a member of CARP-London (Cities Aquatic Resource Project – London) an initiative which both trains undergraduates in research and builds our understanding of the production, supply, and consumption of aquatic resources in our urban centers. 

Socio-cultural anthropology is the study of how people across the globe create, understand, adapt to, and transform their worlds. Located at the juncture between the humanities and social sciences, cultural anthropology merges the study of societies (social structures, institutions and political and economic systems) with the study of culture (belief and value systems, language, ritual and art).

Drawing from their own fieldwork experiences, historical archives, as well as from studies in the sciences and humanities, socio-cultural anthropologists describe, analyze and theorize a wide array of human experiences and relationships. The approach in this course is ethnographic and comparative: it studies peoples and places in depth, comparing places and peoples with one another, in order to gain a better understanding of what is general and what is particular about being human. Beginning with basic concepts in anthropology, ethnography as the core anthropological methodology, and some disciplinary history, the course then turns to a series of topics that anthropologists find important in understanding human beings: kinship and family; domination and subordination in everyday practice; identity and politics; and modernization, capitalism, and globalization.
 

The course explores some of the seminal texts in the discipline to understand how the fundamental questions asked by anthropologists have developed over the last century, and examines how these questions are refashioned in the contemporary world around urgent matters like technological change, global warming, migrants and refugee flows.

The course provides an overview over the history of racism from antiquity to the postwar era. It addresses the relationship with different historical developments like colonialism, slavery, race science, eugenics, segregation and genocide. The course discusses the exemplary developments in different European and non-European societies. While the perspective of the victims of racist discrimination is addressed frequently, the course also focuses on the logic of such discrimination. For this, various related issues are raised, like anti-black racism, antisemitism, hatred against Sinti and Roma etc.

This course provides an introduction to selected themes in the anthropology of the region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean known as Melanesia. It gives students a grounding in the contemporary anthropology of the region, primarily through a close reading of three book-length ethnographies. The three ethnographies, which are all new since 2013, are Christopher Wright's THE ECHO OF THINGS, an account of what photography means to people in the western Solomon Islands; Alice Street's BIOMEDICINE IN AN UNSTABLE PLACE, an analysis of how persons and diseases are made visible or invisible in a hospital on the north coast of Papua New Guinea; and Maggie Wilson’s A TRUE CHILD OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA (edited by Rosita Henry), the part-memoir/part-"ethnographic biography" of a woman who lived between "two worlds," that of her mother, a New Guinea Highlander, and that of her father, an Australian colonist. These ethnographies not only provide students with focused accounts of three very different contexts in Melanesia, they also address histories, dynamics, and concerns familiar to people living throughout the region. Engagement with these three books is enhanced and supplemented by other readings (including works by Pacific Islanders), ethnographic films, and a visit to the British Museum.

What kind of anthropology is it that we, as scholars and students of the discipline, should or need to be advocating – also and especially with a view to current timely demands for conceptual and structural decolonization? How has anthropological critique questioned the fundamentals of the discipline (of anthropology) itself? Which programmatic pathways have been sketched out to indicate constructive ways forward? What do we think of them; which others would we like to raise; why? Does the inclusion of, and focus on theory from the South already constitute a fundamental change? How might anthropology engage constructively with thinkers and theoretical contributions from the global South? In which ways, finally, does it matter that we as researchers and social agents are inevitably positioned in certain ways, often belonging clearly to regions of the Global North or South? This seminar course will pursue these and related questions with a view to some classic and some recent readings, both from within and outside anthropology, and engaging with theorizing from the South, especially from Africa.

This course aims to discuss the meaning of food and meals in various social situations. Based on a cultural analytical perspective, this course focuses on what and how we eat, how different products are incorporated into or excluded from daily meal practices, as well as how food habits are constantly influenced by new circumstances. The course also includes discussions on a variety of defining factors concerning food culture such as production and processes, trade and economy, migration, and housing. Based on traditions, both new and old, the cultural and social significance of food is discussed in different contexts: in everyday life and in festivities, at home, and in public. The historical development of food traditions and innovations, as well as contemporary change and possible future scenarios, are studied. A central perspective of this course is that food culture is a process that is constantly changing.

This course examines the rise of humanitarianism as a dominant way in which both powerful and weak actors conceptualize and respond to a range of social problems and processes, such as political conflict, emancipation, poverty, and migration. This is core terrain for anthropology, because the figure of the human lies at the center of humanitarian discourses and forms of action.  In this course we historicize humanitarianism and ethnographically investigate the possibilities and limits of humanitarian frameworks and action as ways of confronting the challenges that face our world.