Anthropology

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.

This course examines the dynamics of critical anthropology under various forms of capitalist systems, while raising questions about neoliberalism and mainstream economics after the financial crisis. It studies literature on capitalist systems, labor, technology, and currency of these times. It also analyzes anthropological research cases that address existential, emotional, and practical issues, as well as literature covering the topics of inequality and climate change that have emerged in such cases.

This course begins with a historical perspective on the development of current economic and tech-structures, asking what is actually new. It then examines types of tech economies and forms of valuation, considering topics such as credit (e)valuations, the power of platforms, the producers of technology such as software engineers and users, prediction algorithms, digital money and markets, and surveillance capitalism. Anthropologists and social scientists from adjacent disciplines have the potential to contribute to both academic and public debates regarding economies of technology by engaging both critically and productively with the way that technology is shaping society and making specific assertions about what is “of value." Students develop their own argument about the changing economies of technology during the course using an empirical case and present their own case for feedback at a workshop, before writing the final essay. This course builds knowledge, skills, and competencies to engage with the current developments in tech by building on classical as well as current theoretical perspectives from fields including economic and digital anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies.

This course analyzes anthropological texts and literature. It studies anthropologists including Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski. The course discusses these anthropologists and their writings as a group while comparing and connecting them to others.