In the first year, there are two general courses, Introducing Anthropology in Semester 1 and Anthropology Matters in Semester 2 which will introduce you to anthropology. You can also choose two additional modules – in Semester 1, you will look at material culture and consider how people create their own worlds through online interactions and visual media. In Semester 2 you can also choose a module on Magic and Witchcraft, looking at witchcraft, magic, and other forms of ‘occult’ or ‘mystical’ powers.
SEMESTER 1
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN167 Introducing Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module will introduce you to anthropology as the subject that studies human behaviour and cultural diversity. You will learn about the massive cultural differences that divide the world. But you will also learn about our evolution as a species, and the behaviours that all humans display in common. We will discuss, interactively, group identity, language and power, and the societal structures that bind some and free others. The first half of the module includes close reading of the book When I Wear My Alligator Boots, a fascinating study of drugs, violence and family on the US-Mexico border, which we will use to explore themes raised during the first few weeks. In the latter part of this class we will continue exploring the concept of culture through which anthropologists study human societies. In the process of reading and watching captivating accounts of other peoples’ ways of life, we will develop our anthropological imagination – the capacity to see and describe the world around us in cross-cultural terms. In addition to readings and audio-visual materials, we will engage in hands-on practical exercises to learn ethnographic skills, nurturing our powers of observing, listening and writing.
This introductory course in Anthropology is compatible with every subject (excluding those in Timetable group 4) in the University and it will change the way you see human life forever.
OPTIONAL MODULE
AN168 Being Human: Understanding our Material and Digital Worlds
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module looks at anthropological approaches to material, digital and visual culture. We will first consider object worlds in some detail, and focus on cloth and clothing, fashion and faith, recycling and fashion revolution. As an object of material and visual culture, cloth is frequently co-opted as a vehicle for multiple social and cultural agendas. We will look at specific items of clothing and explore how they may act as a lighting rod for emotive stereotypes regarding race, religion, gender and geopolitical forces. We will then take these insights and consider how people create their own worlds through online interactions and visual media. Student participation in class and peer discussion will be expected in all sessions.
SEMESTER 2
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN169 Anthropology Matters
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
In the spring, we will build upon what we will have learnt about culture and anthropological imagination and show how anthropology can help us explore some of the key developments in the contemporary world. The themes will include urbanization, migration, aging and life course transitions, climate change, human rights, and transformations in family organization, etc. We will pay attention to how people in diverse cultures live their lives, learn and adapt in the context of social, political, technological, economic and environmental changes that are sweeping the world, which we collectively inhabit. Anthropological focus on culture and cultures as both a universal and a specific phenomenon will allow us to examine the richness of human experience in diverse settings across the globe.
OPTIONAL MODULE
AN170 Magic and Witchcraft
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Witchcraft, magic, and other forms of ‘occult’ or ‘mystical’ powers have long been a source of anthropological fascination. Sometimes, these kinds of practices seem to symbolize exotic beliefs and incommensurable cosmologies, challenging our preconceptions about rationality and human nature. Yet anthropological analyses of witchcraft have also shown that modern ideas about “risk” and “responsibility” follow social scripts that are not dissimilar from those of the seemingly irrational belief in witchcraft. The anthropological lesson is that the dangers and mysteries we imagine for ourselves, alongside our conventional habits of who we choose to blame for misfortunes, function ideologically to reproduce core cultural values. If this is true, how might we understand the surge in contemporary interest in things occult, from Wicca to #WitchTok? This module surveys anthropological analyses of black magic, juju, sorcery, flying witches, spiritual warfare, shamanism, magical healers, and more: and shows how these fantastical figures do not belong to a past superseded by a scientific and secular modernity, but have come to find a home even in that hard to understand otherworld we call the internet.
In the second year, the two compulsory modules focus 1) on ethnographic writing – here you will be able to learn what anthropologists do through a close reading of anthropological works that will take you to different places of the globe, and 2) you will also learn about methods of anthropological research in settings ranging from remote villages to urban or digital environments, from organic communities of people to complex formal organizations, distributed across many sites and cultures. You will interact with professional ethnographic practitioners working in government, NGO and business environments. Other modules that you can choose from focus on language, culture and mediation, affliction and healing, anthropology of crime, self, person and identity, poverty and development, material culture, law and also a topical module on diversity in education.
SEMESTER 1
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN210 Ethnographic Research
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This course of lectures and tutorials explores how anthropological field research is designed and carried out in settings ranging from remote villages to urban or digital environments, from organic communities of people to complex formal organizations or processes, distributed across many sites and cultures. The course addresses how such research gets written up as ethnographies and the class will have the opportunity to interact with professional ethnographic practitioners working in government, NGO and business environments. Students will learn practical ethnographic field techniques by carrying out a field exercise in participant-observation, and will explore how to design an anthropological research project, including planning, literature and ethics review, fieldwork, analysis and write-up phases. Moreover, students will learn the epistemological foundations of anthropological research, how to prepare an annotated bibliography, and develop an ethnographic research proposal.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN215 Anti-Racism 1
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module will be dedicated to critical examination of race, racism and anti-racist responses in historical and contemporary contexts. We will learn how race as an inaccurate representation of human biological variation, has been employed as a basis of racist classification systems that have structured people’s experience in the world. We will learn about the role of racism in justifying the atrocities of colonialism and slavery, the European Holocaust and anti-Black, Anti-Irish, Anti-Roma, and Anti-Traveller prejudice and discrimination. We will study the legacy of slavery, police violence and incarceration in the United States and consider the role of collective memory in inspiring the ongoing critique of institutional and everyday racisms. Throughout the module, we will focus on the resistance against racism in different sites and historical moments, including anti-colonial and civil-rights movements. A special attention will be paid to the complexity of the Irish colonial and post-colonial experience. 100% CA assessment will be based on individual reflections and group projects, focused on developing students’ competencies to think through and engage in discussions on issues tied to racism and other forms of systemic discrimination. The goal is to provide students with knowledge-based capacities to confront racism in their everyday lives - personal, professional and civic - and across transnational fields of belonging in the interconnected world.
AN213 Affliction and Healing: Medical Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Dizzying advances in biomedical knowledge and technology can save lives and improve health. They can also create new forms of risk, social control, inequality, and ethical uncertainty. Biomedicine transforms selves and social relations along societal fault lines, giving shape to new kinds of person, population, and public. As health and well-being have become a principle aim of government(s) -- and the market -- meanings of citizenship and styles of subjectivity have mutated. This module tracks these dynamics through a focus on two overarching themes: (a) the logic of optimization and contemporary aspirations for human enhancement through technoscience and (b) knowledge of risk as a contemporary social and political problem.
AN228 Material Cultures
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
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. Student participation and peer discussion will be expected in all sessions.
AN205 Ethnographies of Crime and Policing
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Crime is one of the most popular topics in the media, pop culture, and everyday conversations. Recently, the police have come under greater scrutiny in political and social debates that question its practices and demand either reform, or an overall rethinking of crime control. But anthropologists have long argued that neither crime nor ‘the police’ are stable categories. What constitutes a crime is time and context-dependent, and crime control relies on many different and evolving social mechanisms. Ethnographies of crime and policing show the variability and contingent qualities of these social forms and interrogate their ‘taken-for-grantedness’. In this course, we look at some of the most interesting insights available in ethnographies of crime and policing, from early writing about crime control in stateless societies to contemporary studies of transnational gangs, and from violent customary justice to the role of elite special forces and secretive intelligence units. Ethnography will illuminate the institutional ‘backstage’ of policing and highlight some radical, alternative possibilities. Along the way, students will learn about ethnographic research and writing on crime and policing, its limitations, and the rich insights that it may provide.
SEMESTER 2
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN217 Ethnographic Reading and Writing
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
As the hallmark feature of social anthropology, ethnography is at the core of methodological, ethical, and theoretical debates in the discipline. This module is intended as a follow-up of AN210, and invites students to deepen their understanding and knowledge of ethnography as a method, and of ethnographies as the written end result of anthropological research. On one hand, we will study (excerpts from) various kinds of well-known, beautifully written ethnographies (classical, feminist, postmodern, engaged, reflexive, graphic, experimental, etc.), and examine the methodological issues, ethical discussions, and theoretical and political commitments of each kind. On the other hand, we will develop ethnographic writing skills by critically examining issues of style and applying technical tips and tricks for producing beautiful and engaging ethnographic texts. This will be particularly useful to hone students’ thesis writing skills required in the third year.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN212 Language, Culture and Mediation: Linguistic Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module investigates the ways that human thought, social action, and culture are mediated by language and related semiotic systems. We will investigate a few of the ways that social organisation, social relationships, and identity are mediated through talk, then explore the ways that social relationships and talk itself are transformed via mass media and large-scale publics.
AN240 Self, Person, Identity; Psychological Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
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.
AN242 Anthropological Encounters with Sustainability
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module tries to familiarise students with critical anthropological perspectives on sustainability. This will involve understanding the environmental dimensions of the simultaneous historical emergence of mass poverty and mass prosperity in distinct world regions, and critically evaluating the sustainable development efforts used to address the former, using a core ethnography and shorter key texts. The module begins by considering the environmental antecedents and implications of the long historical process of the making of the contemporary Global South and goes on to probe the exacerbation of both global inequality and ecological crisis in the era of globalization. Excerpts from landmark texts by Mike Davis, Peter Worsley and Amita Baviskar are among the readings assigned for the first segment of this module. The second segment is based on a close textual reading of an important recent ethnography on the subject of struggles over natural resources, Nikhil Anand’s ‘The Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai’. This module is a standalone module offered in the Anthropology Department; it is also the second half of the elective stream 'Prioritising People and Planet', which is a teaching collaboration between the International Development and the Anthropology departments.
AN216 Anti-Racism 2
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
In Anti-Racism II, we will examine the continued salience of racism as a tool of structural discrimination today. The semester will feature lectures and conversations with academics from MU and other universities, as well as community experts who will take us to the heart of their research on and lived experiences of racism and anti-racist strategies and practices. Examples of topics include: racism and schools; racism and nationalism; colonialism, racism and indigenous people’s experience; racism and Apartheid; racism and international law in Palestine; racism in intersectional perspectives – including gender, class and sexuality; racism, work and politics, racism and the welfare state; racism and statistics; and anti-Asian racism; racism and international development.
Our discussions will take us around the world – from Ireland and Europe to Central and South America, North America, the Middle East, Asia, South Africa, and Australia. Throughout the module, we will focus on different forms of anti-racist activism and debate how democratic societies can respond to racial prejudice and nurture more inclusive and just forms of citizenship and belonging.
100% CA assessment will be based on individual reflections and group projects, focused on developing students’ competencies to think through and engage in discussions on issues tied to racism and other forms of systemic discrimination. The goal is to provide students with knowledge-based capacities to confront racism in their everyday lives - personal, professional and civic - and across transnational fields of belonging in the interconnected world.
In the third year, the two compulsory modules focus on 1) contemporary anthropological theory and 2) globalization and cultural change. You can also choose fascinating modules in user experience and innovation, ethnographic film making, psychological and environmental anthropology or a module that explores contemporary identities through the prism of gender, sexuality and race. You can also choose from a range of full-semester and short-term courses in forensic anthropology and archaeology.
SEMESTER 1
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN344 Knowledge, Power, Institutions
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
In this module, we will explore how anthropology and anthropologists explore contemporary processes of accelerated change and uneven global interconnectedness. Unlike most disciplines that focus on the macrolevel of globalization, anthropology centres on globalization’s situated nature and the lived experiences of diverse peoples who find themselves at the intersections of global developments. Focusing on these articulations of the global and the local, the module opens with three class sessions dedicated to sketching out conceptual and theoretical approaches and debates concerning contemporary global change . These will help us explore concrete thematic areas of anthropological research, such as: identity and citizenship in transnational fields; mobilities and migration; borders, security and militarism; culture and media; global economics and trade; environment and global health; cultural and political transformations, or ethical challenges of globalisation. The module places emphasis on students' active participation in classes.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN307 Thesis Draft (Compulsory for Single Honours Anthropology)
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module is an individualized ethnographic workshop that develops student thesis projects through structured exercises that are overseen by the thesis supervisor. Students will understand how the concrete details and data gathered in ethnographic research and fieldwork are synthesized in anthropological analysis and writing by doing it themselves. This where the 'magic' of anthropology happens. The workshop uses student research, plus their own cultural knowledge, as resources for constructing analytic or descriptive exercises that develop the ideas and arguments of the thesis. Thus, the module is ‘autopoetic’: it generates its own content through its practice. Writing and research exercises comprise the principal work of the course. Each writing and research milestone is assembled into a portfolio that the thesis supervisor critiques and assesses. Criteria for assessment will include the richness, creativity, seriousness, and care exhibited in the work assembled in the portfolio.
AN356 Anthropology of Literature
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module explores anthropological and ethnographic approaches to the study of literature and literary community. In an anthropological perspective, literature can be seen as one aspect of a set of interrelated cultural forms: discourses, images, theories and movements. An anthropological approach to literature can explore the motivating connections between diverse aspects of cultures, societies and states. Such an approach allows anthropology to see literature not only as a finished object but also as social activity. In this module, through directed readings and a series of writing assignments, we will explore the relationships between literary textuality, social action, and their description and analysis through ethnographic and other forms of scholarly writing.
AN342 User Experience and Service Innovation
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module explores service innovation through the context of human experience. It will equip undergraduate students with the transferable skillset required to bridge academic learning with the applied contexts of UX research practitioners. Students will explore user experience in terms of both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Using methods such as design ethnography, experience-centred design and co-design, students will develop a toolkit for capturing experience across a range of societal and organisational issues. This module will illustrate how students can create innovative ways of responding to these issues, bringing about positive change through evidence-based practices. Major international organisations are seeking individuals who can bring creative but also critical responses to problem-solving. This module will expose students to the potential of innovation to initiate or manage change in the design of private and public sector products and services, while also reflecting on public good and societal responsibility.
AN310 The Anthropology of Security
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Security is a frequent concern in our time. This seminar involves critical overviews of surveillance and security studies, historically and in the contemporary moment. Seminar participants will understand how various phenomena, groups of people, or things are constructed and managed as a security threat in a variety of contexts. From predictive policing to crime prevention, from complex security apparatuses such as US national security to the control of migration, and from prepper culture to counterterrorism, we will understand the historical, political, and social dynamics that contribute to the production of (in)security. We will examine processes such as gatedness, risk, preparedness and, of course, the cultural production of fear. From biometric technologies to refugee displacement and from migration control to bioterror, this seminar involves close attention to contemporary examples with the aim of staking out an anthropological position in relation to security.
AN355 Troubling Identities: Gender, Race and Sexuality
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This seminar focuses a reflexive and critical anthropological lens on contemporary identity politics. The module samples historical genealogies of identities today, as well as philosophical, social scientific, and historical analyses of how the self has come to be a key problem in contemporary society. We will review several of the dominant frameworks that shape contemporary identity politics, including multiculturalism and the politics of recognition, representation and cultural appropriation, inequality and intersectionality, violence and victimhood, and so on. Examining the norms and forms of thought that make identity intelligible as a political problem, as well as the forms of domination and resistance that comprise the substance of the political struggles associated with identities, the module hopes to generate fresh thinking for overcoming social injustice.
AN351 Excavation (takes place at the end of 2nd year in June 2024 (off-campus with IAFS) - Optional)
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
The summer school programme will be delivered through onsite experiential learning at the Ferrycarrig Ringwork, in the Irish National Heritage Park, Ferrycarrig, County Wexford. The program will give students a hands-on orientation in archaeology field techniques and field anthropology in a research driven environment. Students will participate in different research, excavation and post-excavation tasks, and be expected to critically evaluate the wider role of the excavation, particularly in terms of public outreach. Student instruction will be led by an international team of archaeologists and specialists from the Irish Archaeology Field School in the disciplines of archaeology, physical anthropology and history, through both onsite tuition and a series of onsite workshops and lectures. The module aims to maximise the teaching benefits of conducting a multi-facetted research programme in a 'live' research environment - excavating the first Anglo-Norman castle in the country.
AN353 Forensic Anthropology (takes place at the end of 2nd year in June 2024 (off-campus with IAFS) - Optional)
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
The summer school programme will be delivered through onsite experiential learning at the Ferrycarrig Ringwork, in the Irish National Heritage Park, Ferrycarrig, County Wexford. This course will cover human and comparative osteology, determining sex, approximate age at death, living stature, identifying palaeopathological conditions and understanding how these techniques are used in archaeological and forensic contexts
SEMESTER 2
COMPULSORY MODULE
AN344 Knowledge, Power, Institutions
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Few ideas have so firmly entrenched themselves in social scientific discourse over the last forty years or so more than the notion that knowledge and power are inextricably bound up with one another, and, further, that a critical aspect of relations of domination are connected to groups of people getting to know one another “scientifically”. Crucial to this way of thinking is an implicit or explicit notion of “institution” defined as relatively structured parts of social life, generally with some connection to the state, generally committed to visualising and solving a social “problem”. Weaving these levels together, are specific types of subjects and subjectivities -- the sick, the bad, the mad, the dangerous to know – and, on the reforming side – doctors, nurses, wardens, activists, and missionaries (among others) – interested in somehow making certain classes of humanity “discernable” and “better”.
The purpose of this module is three-fold. The first is to introduce the student to some of the ideas in the writings of Michel Foucault, who is practically impossible to ignore in any discussion of power and knowledge. The second is to introduce several ideas concerning institutions that echo one another to an extent, but that also diverge in crucial ways. The third is to look at some work in Anthropology clearly influenced by these sources.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN318 Thesis (Compulsory for Single Honours Anthropology)
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This course involves the writing up and completion of a B.A. thesis.
AN340 Visual Ethnography
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Visual Ethnography is a practice focused module that teaches students to critically evaluate the utility of visual methods in the production of anthropological knowledge. Students will become conversant in the history, major ‘turns’ and challenges of visual anthropology and receive a practical introduction to ethnographic filmmaking and photography for fieldwork, lighting, sound and editing. Individual and small group film projects comprise a substantial element of this module.
AN346 Crime, Death and Forensic Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
The module is an overall introduction to the use of forensic human identification disciplines in cold case analyses cases (aimed toward students of Anthropology and Criminology). Students will learn about forensic death investigation in Ireland, particularly related to missing persons and unidentified human remains cases. The first lectures will introduce the topic of death in a medico-legal context, coronial law governing the ownership and examination of the deceased, and the deployment of An Garda Síochána (AGS) and forensic specialists in death scenarios.
We will explore how crime scene staff will process a scene and how photography is used throughout the investigation. Further lectures will cover the issues of missing persons in an Irish and international context. Students will hear about the various issues concerning missing persons, particularly those leading to long-term missing persons cases and cold case analysis. Important aspects such as cold case strategies and the International Cold Case Analysis Project (ICCAP) will be introduced with emphasis on the use of forensic anthropology in unidentified remains cases. The role of exhumations, DNA sampling and the science of DNA analysis will be discussed and the three primary identifiers according to the INTERPOL DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) Protocol explained.
Forensic human identification of the living and the dead will be demonstrated, including Forensic Craniofacial Reconstruction, Skull/Face Photo-Superimposition, the use of Evo-Fit by AGS and Forensic Facial Identification from images/CCTV. Students will have the opportunity to hear directly from experts drawn from the Irish Coroners Service, AGS Technical Bureau, the National Missing Persons Helpline and Forensic Science Ireland.
AN311 Consumption Issues
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
There is a wide academic literature that focuses on consumer culture in explaining radical changes in Euro-American societies, and such attention is usually accompanied by statements regarding the consequences of modern life. Where best to understand this modern moment than in ethnographic examples across time and space. Taking objects that we regard as trivial and holding them up to scrutiny, this course will cover a series of themes including: (1) historical trajectories and the consumer revolution, (2) different forms of materiality such as the fetish, the animated artefact and the commodity, (3) the politics of consumption, (4) consumption, the senses and design. All students are required to attend and participate in all sessions.
AN357 Human-Animal Relations: Anthropological Perspectives
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
From the food we eat to the pets we keep our lives are inextricably entwined in complex relationships with other animals. This module will explore the multiple and varied interactions humans have with nonhuman animals. We will consider the place of nonhuman animals in social anthropology. In Western tradition, the human animal has been prioritized, thus reinforcing the fundamental and irreconcilable differences between human ‘culture’ and animal ‘nature’. However, we will put these interactions in socio-historical context and consider cross-cultural comparisons and theoretical analysis. We will examine practices and ways of being through a number of detailed ethnographic case studies of human-animal interactions.
Key issues relate to how we might understand often conflicting attitudes such as what it means to be human and our responsibilities to nonhuman entities. These discussions may culminate in a re-consideration of the place of nonhuman animals in social anthropology.
