Anthropology

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced levels students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course considers the Indian Ocean as an interregional arena created by the intersection between maritime trade and cultural connections. It focuses on the circulation of people, goods and ideas across the oceanic space as a way to understand the connections and disconnections that created a unified system of cultural and economic exchange. The course adopts a longue durée perspective, in order to unravel the rise and development of an Indian Ocean regional identity. It considers the Indian Ocean as the first global economy produced by the decoding of the monsoon wind system and then explores the rise of Islam and the consequent development of the Swahili civilization along the East African coast. It analyses the indigenous responses to the European commercial intrusions that started in the 16th century and explores the impact of the development of formal colonial rule in the 19th century. Elements like port cities, littoral societies, trade diasporas, religion networks, long-distance trade routes, and different forms of slavery will be used as analytical tools to unravel the elements of unity and disunity in the Indian Ocean space. Particular attention is given to East African societies and their role in the Indian Ocean world. During the course, the students analyze travel accounts, novels, historical sources, and scholarly works and critically engage with the historiographical debates that characterize the Indian Ocean Studies field. At the end of the course, students reach an understanding of the Indian Ocean cultures, economies, and societies that transcends national histories and be able to engage with a non-Eurocentric approach to processes of globalization.

Berlin’s rich museological landscape lends itself to in-depth exploration of Germany’s difficult heritage: How are the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially, remembered and represented? This course enables students to get to know a number of Berlin museums focusing on Memory and Post-WWII migration using anthropological methods and to analyze them within larger theoretical frameworks of “self” and “other” constructions.

This course provides a broad-based introduction to the core themes and ideas of the anthropology of the Middle East, and by extension of the Anthropology of Islam. It begins by exploring the reasons behind the relatively late emergence of the Middle East as an area of study, before moving on to consider such topics as Orientalism, gender, rural versus urban anthropology, the role of religion (traditional and modern), and the forging of a regional subjectivity (as witnessed in the ongoing uprisings throughout the Middle East, the so-called “Arab Spring”). The course stands alone as a regional module, as well as offers an overview of the issues for continued study of the Middle East.

This course explores the place of food in art in France, with a focus on the modern and contemporary periods. Throughout the course, representations of food are studied as a means to survey the evolution of French art within a global context, and as significant markers of social, ethnic, and cultural identity. The analysis of these depictions provides the opportunity to learn about dietary and dining customs, habits, and beliefs prevalent in France from the early modern period to the present. The course begins by decoding the archetypal representations of succulent food in the still life and genre painting of 16th-17th-century Holland, which established the conventions of the genre for centuries to come. It then examines how the rise of these previously minor artistic genres in 18th-century France coincided with the birth of French gastronomy. Frivolous depictions of aristocrats wining, dining, and indulging in exotic beverages like coffee and hot chocolate then give way in post-Revolutionary France to visions of austerity and “real life,” featuring potato-eating peasants. The focus then shifts to representations of food and dining in the age of modernity, when Paris was the undisputed capital of art, luxury, haute cuisine, and innovation. The course analyzes how Impressionist picnics and café scenes transgress social and artistic codes. Building on their momentum, Paul Cézanne launches an aesthetic revolution with an apple. Paul Gauguin’s depictions of mangos and guavas speak to his quest for new, “exotic” sources of inspiration, and allow discussion of questions of race, gender, and French colonialist discourse. Drawing from these pictorial and social innovations, the course subsequently observes the place of food and dining themes in the avant-garde movements of early 20th-century Paris, whose defiance of conventional society and art leads them to transform previously comforting themes into troubling ones.  It questions the place of food—or its absence—in art to capture the suffering and violence of upheavals like the Second World War and consider the place of food and dining in contemporary art: from the Pop Art movement’s calling into question postwar consumer society through its representations of mass-produced food; to contemporary creators in a plural and globalized art scene who use these traditional themes to challenge the status and roles of the artist, the spectator, and the work of art itself; to how depictions of food in visual art grapple with multiculturalism in France today.

This course offers a sample of Irish traditional cultural expressions, focusing on the three main areas of oral literature, custom belief and tradition, and folk life. Students are introduced to storytelling, storytellers, stories, calendar customs, traditions, festivals, rituals, and fascinating aspects of popular belief and religion, such as fairies, Irish Saints, the Otherworld, Wake "amusements" and the Pattern Day. Folk life includes a survey of Irish vernacular architecture, furniture, objects of everyday life, traditional boats, and much more.