Anthropology

This course introduces key thinkers, themes, and debates in social anthropology. The course explores the role of “culture” in defining humanity, and how anthropologists, past and present, study it. Students are introduced to debates pertaining to representation of “otherness,” ethnographic practice, constructions of personhood, the problem of gender, and globalization as an analytic node.

This course explores aspects of visual anthropology and concentrates on different cultural perspectives as captured in visual media. Students study early depictions of indigenous peoples, and the history and presence of ethnographic photography and filming. The course also examines the theoretical aspects of visual anthropology, the analysis of scripts and picture composition, and practical issues of archiving. The course includes visits to research institutions in Wellington.

In this course, students learn to apply different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to the study of contemporary issues in reproduction and fertility. Each week a different topic is examined from a multi-disciplinary perspective including social anthropology, biological anthropology, demography, biology, and other disciplines. Topics include love, hormones, and bonding; adolescent reproduction; reproductive loss (abortion, miscarriage, and still birth); childbirth; breastfeeding; infertility; contraception and contraceptive methods; and modification of the sexual body.

This is an exploratory course that studies multiple narrative possibilities through a practical exploration of story-telling. In the first half of the course, students look at narrative and its forms. Students explore books, photographs, film, and performance as examples of possible ways of telling stories. At the same time, students explore what each student's story might be in terms of finding a form that fits. The design of the course works to open up possibilities, and not tie students down with commitments to particular strategies.

Based upon historical instances, this course offers a study of the different views that are held about the relation between a culture and the distinctive views of Christianity about man and the world. Attention is also paid to the factors involved in the acceptance or rejection of Christianity within particular cultures. The course explores one Christian view of culture through the lens of film. In 1989 Krzysztof Kieslowski made a series of 10 one-hour films for Polish television. Collectively they are known as The Decalogue. One film for each of the Ten Commandments. Assessment: 500 word essay on each of the first 9 movies (63%), final 5 page paper on the series (30%), participation 7%.

This course provides students with an overview of anthropology, with an especial focus on cultural/social anthropology. Students examine the development of key concepts in the discipline, such as kinship and social organization, and ask what it means to think anthropologically. This includes considering how the development of human societies relates to other models of change, such as Darwinian evolutionary theory; whether there are universal features of human societies; and how one makes comparisons between different ways of understanding the world.

This course looks at the nexus of identities, digital data and technologies, and methods, drawing on literature from anthropology, social data science, science and technology studies, and related fields. The course considers how identities have creatively flourished, but also provides a critical interrogation of how gender, race, and other forms of difference and inequality are reproduced in and through digital data and technologies. This course begins with considering the history of digital data and technologies, and the methods and tools used to understand digital identities from the fields of anthropology and data science. This includes examining differing approaches to ethics in these fields. The course also explores theories about identity and different ways identities are constructed and performed through digital technologies, such as social media, internet cultures, and fitness trackers. It also explores the identities of those who design and build these technologies, the politics and norms reproduced through technologies themselves, and the effects they have with particular attention to the role of gender and race. Finally, the political economic contexts of these technologies and the formation of digital identities are considered.

This course promotes knowledge and understanding of the modern, heterogeneous Swedish society through the study of education, culture, and lifestyles in Sweden. The cultural development in Sweden, including the development of the educational system during the last century, is introduced and discussed. The range of cultural patterns in different learning contexts (home, school, work, media, gender relations, intercultural settings) is described, analyzed, and compared. How does culture create meaning for the members of a society and how are values interpreted by immigrants and visitors? New conditions for learning and current concerns (equality, immigration, the European dimension, globalization and sustainable development) create new lifestyles, which are discussed within the framework of a multicultural society, with its current problems and possibilities.