Anthropology

This seminar invites participants into a process for deepening their/our understanding of key concepts and practices in the digital mediation of culture, in the interests of a greater shared awareness and agency within the overwhelming, epochal processes referred to generally as digitalization. In lectures, readings, site visits, and group discussion, the course offers useful theoretical bases for approaching digitalization as a/the process at work on culture today. It practices critical skills for exploring and evaluating digital mediations of cultural heritage (both on-site at Berlin museums and online). And it empowers scholars/thinkers/artists/designers as producers of digital culture mediations with practical tools for developing and pitching effective concepts. The course takes Berlin’s cultural landscape as a field and the newly completed Humboldt Forum as a special object of study, drawing on the teacher’s professional experiences from 2015 to 2020 in the development and implementation of the Humboldt Forum digital concept for offer on-site and behind-the-scenes perspectives. The course invites participants to identify the issues, questions, or processes in culture that most concern them and support them in formalizing and refining constructive proposals of their own.

This course examines the Caribbean, with specific attention to the historical, environmental, socio-cultural features of modern existence that have come to constitute Caribbean experience. Special attention is given to moving beyond a linguistically singular and myopic vision of the Caribbean, to one that emphasizes its complexities and contradictions through a comparative lens. While it explores the various routes of cultural formation, it also explores the social institutions that shaped the region and the processes of socialization and indigenization that took root.

Regarding transnational migration, the EU promotes a political reasoning between processes of consolidation and necessary conflict, between sovereignty and shared responsibility, between the right to define and delimit and the duty to negotiate. As the visibility of migration increases in various ways, migrants are often represented and imagined as a homogenous mass of “the other." This leads to a problematic understanding of migration as something to be controlled and governed from a top-down perspective alone. But the respective processes of negotiation on migration policy, within and across the outer borders of the Union, take place not only between the official institutions of nation-states, but on all scales of European populations. They also take place from a bottom-up perspective in the centers and at the margins of societies alike. This course departs from concepts of the anthropology of the state and of migration and students first gain an overview of EU-level migration polity. Diving deeper down we will start to change perspective: How do local activists develop and implement their own ways of welcoming migrants? Where do migrants work and how are they represented in trade unions? Finally, focusing on the history of migrant struggles in Berlin, the course encounters migrants’ viewpoints, which reach beyond the usual framings of ‘the poor migrant’ as ‘passive victim,' as a threat or as the ‘(anti-)hero’ of globalization. The course encounters viewpoints on the conflicts, compromises, resistances, solidarity, and social transformation shaping and shaped by recent migration movement to Europe.

This course covers the theoretical approaches and methodological components within cultural memory studies concerned with minoritarian groups and affect/emotion: e.g. Nora, Stoler, Rigney, Trouillot, Said, Azoulay, Sharpe, Hartman, Muñoz, Mbembe, Campt, Arondekar. It provides an introduction into archives (theory) and memory, especially in relation to power by introducing the political and academic assessment of the post-colonial dimension of cultural memory, and the queer dimension of historical scholarship.

This course explores public health and social perspectives on health, illness, and medicine in another cultural context. It discusses global health topics in relation to issues of health and human rights, migration, and global health equity. This course examines the concept of the social determinant of health and how these impact the health of individuals and populations.

This course provides an anthropological perspective on the cultural variation among human societies by examining the history, foundations, and some key cases of the discipline. The course consists of two parts. Part I introduces the history and development of some of the basic concepts, approaches, and research methods of social and cultural anthropology. It does this using a critical reading of Evans-Pritchard's classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande which is used as an instrument to understand the discipline’s historical development and its relevance today. Selected readings from Nanda and Warms’ textbook, Cultural Anthropology, establish the principal areas of anthropological inquiry. Students gain insight into ethnographic methodology through a field visit involving preparation, and observation description. Part II develops the conceptual and ethnographic insights acquired in Part I through the study of globalization and Brazilian urban culture. Donna Goldstein’s ethnography of a Rio de Janeiro shantytown demonstrates the continuing relevance of cultural anthropology for the study of contemporary post-industrial society. Goldstein portrays the lives of the poor in a Brazilian favela, conveying the most intimate and hidden details of their lives: from crime and sexuality to responsibilities of kinship and friendship, to childhood dreams of riches and the search for dignity. This focus on problems of the inner city shows the consequences of polarized race, class, and gender relations, the relationship between culture and the economy, and between individual responsibilities, and agency structural constraints. Relevant chapters of Nanda and Warms’ textbook and several articles provide a conceptual framework for Goldstein's ethnography. Students gain further insight into ethnographic methodology and questions of representation through a field visit to an ethnographic museum.