Anthropology

The course examines pre-Columbian art history in one or more areas of the American continent. The course explores the potential and limits of applying the “art” category to pre-colonial indigenous productions. The course includes an overview of fundamental elements of the current debate on the anthropology of art. The course analyzes the artistic productions of Mesoamerican pre-colonial indigenous peoples to explore their multiple aesthetic, religious, and political functions. The course discusses how such products were perceived, collected, and exhibited in museums in modern times, focusing attention on the objects’ materiality and agency, here perceived as their ability to continuously arouse new questions and discourses. The course examines topics including art and anthropology; artistic practices in ancient Mesoamerica (Olmecs, Maya, Teotihuacan, Aztecs); Indigenous American artefacts in early modern European collections; birth and transformation of the Ethnographic museum, with specific focus on the musealization of Haida artifacts; and contemporary indigenous art and politics of display.

With contributions from fields like cultural history and theory, social and cultural anthropology, design, arts and media studies, the lecture series "Dis/Entangling material futures" renders visible the multiple entanglements and disentanglement associated with the making and unmaking of material futures. Contributions also highlight a variety of methodological approaches, knowledge constellations, and modes of critique emerging at the intersections of the humanities, social sciences, arts, design, and curatorial practices. They require addressing what is at stake when conducting material research, from inside as well as outside of established institutions (academic or otherwise).

The course provides an overview of Africa's historical, cultural, and societal development. Themes like precolonial societies and livelihoods, the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, independence, and postcolonial transformations are described with the help of anthropological, archaeological, and historical approaches and insights. Teaching is composed of lectures, seminars, group exercises, film screenings, and study visits.

This course is an introduction to social anthropology - taking as its central theme and organizing structure the life course from birth to death, conceived in very broad terms. As well as encompassing life crisis moments and rituals of birth, marriage, and death, the course includes such themes as gender, personhood, work and making a living, the house, consumption and exchange, health, and the body. It begins with a brief consideration of what anthropologists do; thinking about participant observation and fieldwork; and it ends with a brief discussion of how anthropological subjects are placed - and place themselves - in history.