Anthropology

The course discusses how goods are produced, circulated, and consumed, and how these three fundamental processes of social life and reproduction are mediated by technology. Classically, economic anthropologists focused on how such activities were organized in small-scale societies or in colonial territories; often production and exchange, with their associated technologies, were highlighted while consumption received less attention. Today the impact of globalization, the rise of the digital society, and the overflowing material abundance that characterizes life in the advanced economies and aspirations elsewhere, have led many social theorists to focus on consumption and communication as the key factors determining how people experience power, identity, connections, and conflicts. The course examines a range of case studies and theoretical essays, evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and applicability of different approaches.

What can we learn about Japan through its popular culture? How do we shape our identities through what we watch, wear, read, listen to, create and where we go? What happens when we translate and localize Japanese popular culture for a foreign audience? This course serves as an introduction to contemporary Japanese popular culture. The primary focuses are on how we define ourselves through engaging with pop culture, and on its translation/localization. We draw on theories from literary, media, translation, and gender studies. The course is a mix of lecture, discussion, and group work. Units: The regular version of this course is worth 3.0 UC quarter units. The Q version of this course is worth 4 or 4.5 UC quarter units. Students must submit a special study project form which outlines the requirements for the additional units. This is typically an additional paper graded by the instructor of the course.

This course examines how people in different societies conceptualize and live out relatedness. It shows how notions of relatedness are linked to ideas about gender, theories of procreation (which are themselves changing under the impact of assisted reproductive technologies), and understandings of bodily substance, as well as having profound emotional, economic, and political salience. Kinship was long regarded as the core of the anthropological discipline, and although the extent to which this should still be the case has come under question, recent years have seen a marked revival. The course considers the history of kinship studies, looking at some central debates in the subject and assessing their implications for other anthropological sub-disciplines and anthropological theory more generally; and it examines the relevance of kinship studies to understanding ourselves, our families, and our contemporary world as well.

This course addresses the ways in which social media and other related interactions in cyberspace have become a central element in the everyday lives of humans across the globe in the 21st century. Modern lives are now largely interwoven with digital technologies that have not only changed our own cultures, but also have brought forth new cultural forms through mobile phone technologies, networked “smart”-products, and cultural groupings only possible through digital means. The course approaches the anthropology of these digital cultures through its main themes—the transformation and expansion of social media, social research online, the intermixing of our online and offline lives, critical social issues of online lives, and the question of posthumanism. These themes are addressed explicitly in the course, and are also the subtexts of the different lectures, readings, and project work. The course presents the techniques of online fieldwork and referencing; explores a diverse array of new ethnographies on social media: on gender, political movements, online dating, hacking, and gaming culture. These ethnographies also serve to model online social research and provide examples of methodology and design. The social consequences of cyberspace are addressed in the topics of internet pornography, addiction, surveillance, activism, and social networking. Gender and identity issues are a continuous theme throughout the course, highlighting how online lives accentuate already existing dynamics. Hong Kong connections to these subjects will also be critically discussed, often drawing on topical themes presented on blogs and forums.

This course takes students on a journey to discover Britain's Stone Age past. By participating in classroom-based sessions, hands-on activities, museum visits, and field excursions, students learn how archaeologists reconstruct past landscapes and understand the human populations that once inhabited these lost worlds. The course explores the first dispersals of humans across Europe; a remarkable story of survival in unfamiliar landscapes, where the challenges of changing climate, physical barriers, and food and resource availability tested human resilience to its limits. Located at the edge of this ice-age world, Britain uniquely documents these early inhabitants and their social, cultural, and technological development.

This course provides students with an understanding of core dynamics, conflicts, and consequences of contemporary forms of globalization, especially as these pertain to interactions between the so-called Global North and Global South. The course focuses on how Europe is and has been positioned in these global flows, and how the European Union (EU) and other actors have sought to handle resulting problems or exploit emerging opportunities. Students are introduced to theoretical and conceptual knowledge necessary to understand various forms of globalization and to recognize the historical, discursive, and material foundations of contemporary dynamics. The course also analyzes the consequences for Europe and the political responses of the EU in relation to aspects of globalization such as migration, ecological destruction, transnational crime, or global inequality and development.

This course explores the role of the audiovisual within ethnographic research and vice versa. Through a combination of assigned readings, film screenings, site visits etc. students critically examine the making of documentary and ethnographic media. What has been the history of photography, sound-recording and film within the discipline? Which theoretical frameworks informed anthropologists behind the camera? And how did media made by non-anthropologists influence ethnography? In answering these questions, the course covers resultant practices of sound and image-making such as salvaging, categorization, surveillance, erasure, etc. The course also considers how the very material used in creating these media e.g. Kodachrome film stock and Shirley cards, wet plates, shellac records etc. impacted framings of “the self” and “the other.”

This course examines music and performance from an anthropological perspective. The course introduces the human communicative spectrum and research into the evolution of music. By means of ethnographic examples, students are introduced to the key ways that anthropologists have studied music and theorized about its role in human society as it relates to ritual and ceremony, dance and the body, identity, diaspora, power, and religion. Students are required to read and review one entire monograph on music and write an extended essay of their choice as the assessment for the course.

This course offers a study of political systems and political processes. It discusses conflict and its resolution. It emphasizes local-level politics and non-industrial societies.