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 and 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 almost every subject 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. The hijab, for example, - this single piece of cloth - acts as a lighting rod for emotive stereotypes regarding race, religion, gender and geopolitical forces. We will then place take these insights and consider how people create their own worlds through online interactions and visual media. Student participation 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, climate change, transformations in family organization, and human-animal relations, etc. We will pay attention to how people in diverse cultures live their lives, learn and adapt in the context of social, 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 #WitchesOfInstagram? 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
AN238 Reading Ethnography
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module looks at contemporary ethnographic writing in anthropology. The aim of the course is to learn about what anthropologists do through a close reading of a range of anthropological works. Through these ethnographies we will learn about the questions anthropologists ask; the types of theoretical influences they employ; the practices they engage in and data they marshal in forming an argument. Student participation and peer discussion will be expected in all sessions.
OPTIONAL MODULES
AN205 Ethnographies of Crime and Policing
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Around the world, protests about racial injustice, violence, and corruption are challenging the authority of police and forcing societies to rethink how they provide security. Suddenly, it seems, there is a demand to redraw the “thin blue line” in more equitable, less violent, and more responsible ways. But anthropologists have long argued that neither crime nor “the police” are stable categories. Ethnographies of crime and policing show the variability and contingent qualities of these social forms. In this course, we look at some of the most interesting insights available in ethnographies of crime and policing, from early writing about criminal “tribes” and professional masters of disguise 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. Throughout the course, policing practitioners will give guest talks to ground student knowledge in matters such as the use of force and the progress of reform. Along the way, students will learn about ethnographic research and writing, its limitations, and the rich insights that it may provide.
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.
AN213 Affliction and Healing: Medical Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
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.
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.
SEMESTER 2
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
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.
AN237A Changing Legal Landscapes: Anthropology and the Law
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This module will explore the field of legal anthropology from its historical origins to contemporary debates on legal pluralism and human rights. A core objective of the course is to foreground law as a social process influenced by developments outside of the law. The course will examine the contested arenas of law and custom, crime and punishment and the disputing process.
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.
AN241 Ethnographies of Activism and Collective Action
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
In the wake of the pandemic, various ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ movements gather pace to imagine and enact their desired futures. Extinction Rebellion, the Movement for Black Lives, movements for alternative economies and autonomous collectives, but also new right movements such as the Identitarian Generation in Europe or (neo-)fascism take collective action to reshape society according to their views and principles. The module introduces students to the concepts and theories that social sciences have developed to understand various forms of collective action for political goals. We will learn about social movements around the globe through ethnographic works aimed at understanding the worlds of the actors involved from their own perspective. We will examine strategies of collective action, as well as the ambivalences, paradoxes, and conundrums that activist collective action struggles with in various contexts.
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
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
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.
AN310 The Anthropology of Security
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
This seminar involves critical overviews of surveillance and security studies, historically and in the contemporary moment. We will discuss the work of some of the key thinkers in these areas today. We shall also look closely at the contributions of Michel Foucault, which remains central to the ways in which securitization and surveillance are approached in the social sciences. And we will discuss the extension of Foucauldian insights in the work of key interlocutors such as Didier Bigo and Paul Rabinow. Seminar participants will become familiar with processes of securitization in a variety of contexts, from nineteenth-century colonial government to US national security, war, and counterterrorism. 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.
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.
AN345 Ecology and Power: Anthropology and the Environment
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
Jason Moore has proposed the term ‘Capitalocene’ to replace the somewhat nebulous discourse of the ‘Anthropocene’ -- this module similarly insists on a world historically informed understanding of present-day environmental crises, including climate change. Thus, it focuses on writings that exemplify the trans-disciplinary political ecology approach, leaning in the direction of work that deals with struggles over water. The latter part of the module is a close reading of Misreading the African Landscape, a classic environmental ethnography by James Fairhead and Melissa Leach.
AN351 Excavation (takes place in June 2022 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 in June 2022 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
AN348 Shifting Worlds: Theories and Ethnographies of Global Change
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
In this final-semester compulsory 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 to contemporary global change within anthropology. These will help us explore concrete thematic areas of anthropological research, including: identity and citizenship in transnational fields; mobilities, borders and militarism; culture and media; global economics and trade; environment and global health; cultural and political transformations.
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.
AN346 Crime, Death and Forensic Anthropology
Assessment: 100% Continuous Assessment
The module is an overall introduction to forensic disciplines (aimed toward students of Anthropology and Criminology), divided into two broad strands (each containing six lectures), as follows:
- Introduction to Forensics (Strand 1): This strand will cover forensic death investigation in Ireland in the context of criminal investigations, the environment of the crime scene will be explored and the main participants at a scene will be discussed. These first lectures will look at the context of the crime scene and the use of forensic specialisms in the investigation of suspicious deaths; specifically forensic archaeology, forensic ecology and the role of the expert witness in these types of investigations.
- Forensics Anthropology (Strand 2): a more in-depth look at a single sub-discipline in Forensics, namely the practical application of skeletal excavation and analysis in both archaeological and forensic contexts. It will detail the development of this specialism and will focus in particular on the methods used in analyses, and the information which may be ascertained. The strand will conclude with a description of the investigation of mass graves in both Ireland and internationally.
AN350 Ethnographic Filmmaking and Photography (restricted to 12 places)
Ethnographic Filmmaking and Photography is a practice-led module that provides an introduction to Visual Anthropology, teaches students to critically evaluate visual media and provides instruction on how to create short ethnographic films and images. The course will be composed of a mix of lectures, film viewings, and editing practice in Maynooth and film-based fieldwork in local locations and community organisations. Students will receive a practical introduction to storyboarding, filmmaking, photography, lighting, sound and editing. Small group film projects comprise a substantial element of this module.
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.
AN356 Anthropology and 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.
