SEMESTER 1
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN221 Research and Writing (Dr Jamie Saris)
This module is a general survey of the main theoretical approaches in social and cultural anthropology from its early modern roots until the present. We will pursue a critical study of the schools of thought that prevailed within the discipline at different times and examine a selection of ethnographies that represent them.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN222 Linguistic Anthropology (Dr Steve Coleman)
This module explores some of the ways we use language and speech to make and remake ourselves and investigates a few of the ways that social organisation, social relationships, and identity are mediated through talk.
AN229 Medical Anthropology (Dr Frank Szabo)
This course offers an introduction to medical anthropology. If sickness and suffering are universal aspects of the human condition, it is also true that disease and illness are always experienced within historically specific sociocultural frameworks. Putting sickness into social context, in this course we tarry with the proposition that disease is never just about biology. Rather, we view health and illness as produced by and within hybrid and dynamic 'biosocial' milieux, melding the somatic and the semiotic, culture and corporeality, body and mind. In exploring sickness across societies with an eclectic aetiology of this sort, medical anthropology takes seriously diverse ways of knowing and treating disorder, sometimes questioning (and sometimes supporting) the magisterial social position of Western biomedicine. This course thus explores mysteries and meanings of affliction and convalescence as occasions for considering some of anthropology's most enduring conceptual quandaries, tackling head-on questions such as: the epistemological status and ritual efficacy of both ‘faith’ and ‘science,’ colonialism and cultural confrontation, embodiment and the social construction of the body, medical power and (global) social inequality, the politics of reproduction and gender inequality, modernity and political economies of hope.
AN231A Area Studies II: Africa (Dr Anne Fitzgerald)
This Course aims at familiarising the student with definitive works that have led to the current representation of Africa in anthropology and social science circles. The Course debates a wide array of classic and contemporary articles and books on the Continent. In order to enable students to form their own perspectives, the Course will be critical but not conclusive. The Course will also be useful for those who are interested in early theoretical developments of anthropology.
AN232 Economic Anthropology (Dr Ela Drazkiewicz)
This module takes up and deals with all the controversial and “messy” parts of the economy that formal economics sets aside. Tough questions are posed about human nature, power and social life. Students will read in detail about the economic lives of people in many different kinds of societies, and about the major issues of poverty and development that shape the world. Economic anthropology is directly concerned with the most central anthropological issues of human nature, choice, values, and morality. This course gives students a solid basis for thinking about the different ways we explain human behaviour, thought, and culture and provides a foundation for applying anthropological knowledge to real-world situations.
SEMESTER 2
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN227 Anthropological Research and Writing (Prof David Prendergast)
This course of lectures and tutorials explores how anthropological field research is designed and carried out in settings ranging from remote villages to urban settings, from organic communities of people to highly formalized organizations, whether in a foreign country or one's own native country. The course addresses how such research gets written up as ethnographies and how such ethnographies are read. Students will learn practical ethnographic field techniques by carrying out a field exercise in participant-observation, and will learn how to design an anthropological research project, including planning, fieldwork, analysis and write-up phases, by writing up a proposal for an actual research project (which they have the option of carrying out as a BA thesis in the third year). Moreover, students will learn the epistemological foundations of anthropological research, as well as the ethics of anthropological research.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN226 Pyschological Anthropology (Dr Jamie Saris)
This course is designed to introduce the student to how the relationships between personal minds and socio-cultural phenomena have been approached by anthropologists over the past one hundred years or so. The lectures focus on how specific thinkers have understood the problem of the individual mind within various social-cultural contexts in pursuit of models of social analysis and understandings of individuals that might have some actual relationship to how humans variably fashion their lives in different times and places.
AN228 Material Culture (Dr Pauline Garvey)
This module looks at anthropological approaches to material culture, from spectacular monuments of the built environment to the commodities that furnish domestic life. Through diverse ethnographies, we will focus on the active role of the material world to mediate, constitute and intervene in human relationships.
AN234 Anthropological Approaches to Poverty & Development (Dr Chandana Mathur)
This module tries to familiarise students with critical anthropological perspectives on global poverty and inequality, and the efforts to address it, using a core ethnography and shorter theoretical texts. It begins by considering the long historical process of the making of the contemporary Global South, and goes on to probe the exacerbation of global inequality in the era of globalisation. Excerpts from key texts by Worsley, Appadurai and Scheper-Hughes are among the readings assigned for the first segment of this module. The second segment is based on a close textual reading of the classic ethnography on the subject of development, James Ferguson's 'The Anti-Politics Machine'. This module is a standalone module offered in the Anthropology Department; it is also the second half of the elective stream 'Perspectives on Poverty and Development', which is a teaching collaboration between the International Development and the Anthropology departments.
AN237A Legal Anthropology (Dr Anne Fitzgerald)
This course examines the relationship between legal processes and other aspects of social, economic, and political life. Through applying an anthropological perspective, this module looks at the law from a cross-cultural perspective and examines how societies across the world define and practice social ordering. The course considers contemporary debates within the field, including on topics of human rights and legal pluralism. Through paying attention to diverse meanings of legal practices around the world it asks what are the implications of different legal practices for national, and transnational socio-political and economic arrangements. |