Anthropology

This course engages the past, present, and future of social anthropology and material culture studies. The course examines anthropology’s relationship to colonial practices asking whether its methods and concerns encourage complicity with power, or resistant forms of thinking. It explores the conditions for anthropology as an ethical praxis in the light of this earlier history, and looks at past and present contributions from feminism, queer and trans studies, and decolonial approaches. The second half of the course focuses on specific debates and topics, for example: multi-species anthropology, capitalism/neoliberalism, technology and infrastructure studies, the Anthropocene.   

This course discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using digital audiovisual media in the processes of data collection, analysis, and presentation of conclusions in social anthropology. It analyze the tradition of social photography and its main contributions, the use of photography as a tool, and the main techniques used. The course also examines visual anthropology versus ethnographic cinema as well as the rules for construction of anthropological audiovisual. 

Social Anthropology is the comparative study of human society and culture. It focuses on investigating the everyday complexities of social life across diverse contexts at local, national, and global scales. This course introduces students to some of the methods, theories, and approaches used by social anthropologists in making sense of human socio-cultural diversity across the world. The course provides students with an introduction to a range of core concepts and ideas underpinning anthropological studies of socio-cultural life, and examines how ethnographic accounts enable anthropologists to make theoretical claims about the social and cultural world. Throughout the term, we will cover topics of central importance to Social Anthropology including the ethnographic method; comparison, reflexivity, and positionality; the culture concept; history, colonialism, and decolonization; kinship and social organisation; individual and society; personhood, gender, and embodiment, nature, culture, and environment; and anthropology in the Anthropocene.