Anthropology

This course covers twenty-first century Korean popular culture - from the Hallyu (Korean Wave) phenomenon to cultures of popular protest, including the Minjung movement; culture industry and mass culture; consumption cultures; fandom cultures; globalization of Korean food, as well as emerging cybercultures. Utilizing an anthropological perspective, the course situates these phenomena within issues of class, gender and ethnicity in South Korea.

This course covers research design and ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology. It integrates an understanding of Chinese and North American social and cultural systems through written exercises and ethnographic practices. It places students’ fieldwork experiences within a framework of the Chinese and North American contexts to provide students with conceptual and methodological tools for approaching their field placements.

The aim of this course is emphatically not to answer the question of the definition of culture, nor is it to provide a history of the development of culture. Rather, the course starts from the notion that culture creates meaning and allows us to understand ourselves, others, and the world in specific, constructed ways. What may seem natural to us, might in fact just be cultural convention, imprinted on us from such an early age that we have come to understand it as natural. This course examines how traditional cultural views on the world, concerning the uses of language, processes of othering, gender etc., have been studied, taken apart and criticized over the last few decades. In doing so, the course deals with several of the major theorists concerned with this process of deconstruction. The course necessarily deals with a limited selection of perspectives and objects. From the many methods of studying culture (anthropological, archaeological, biological, art historical, sociological etc.) the course uses the framework of Cultural Studies, a relatively recent field of study within Humanities. Furthermore, in order to focus discussions, the course takes three case studies as a starting point in the discussion sessions: the novel FOE by J.M.Coetzee, the artwork EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERY by Renzo Martens, and the documentary PARIS IS BURNING. These are discussed in light of different theoretical frameworks, allowing the study the following topics, each tightly linked to major theories in studies on culture and each functioning as a context for the analysis of cultural phenomena: language as construction, knowledge/power, the death of the author, Postcolonialism, processes of "othering." gender, and cultural memory.

This course examines globalization, internationalism and transnationalism, with a particular focus on anthropological approaches. It covers whether people have always been on the move crossing borders and how this might be different in our age of globalization; the impact of globalization on local cultures; humans moving towards a global culture; globalizing consumerism; globality in relationship to inequalities such as those involving gender, class, race, wealth; and globalization in relationship to Aboriginal concerns and International Human Rights, peace and war issues, and law and international law.

This course offers a study of migration research through an anthropological lens. New analytical and methodological perspectives raise important questions concerning the social organization of migration as well as our understanding of the processes of socio-cultural continuity and change. The course examines how anthropological theory could potentially contribute to the conceptualization of the spatially and temporally extended processes that are set in motion by migratory movements. The course discusses the possibility of the creation of an ethnographic research practice that can encompass these complex processes.