MA Anthropology & Museum Practice

You’ll be introduced to current debates about heritage and museum practice, including:

• Curation as a means of knowledge production and of public cultural engagement
• The history of museums and the museum in anthropological history
• Museums as sites of imagination, distinction and exclusionary practice

In this seminar-based module you’ll investigate the ways in which anthropologists think about and through ‘things’. You’ll gain an understanding of theories of materiality and how material culture figures in anthropological accounts and understandings of human diversity. 

The dissertation is an extended piece of written work of academic standard, i.e. adequately researched, clearly written, well presented and structured and following academic conventions. It will show that you have an understanding of both theoretical debates in anthropology and relevant ethnography and make convincing use of secondary or library based data. Your project can involve fieldwork and/or archives (primary data that you have collected) as well as your analysis of the relevant secondary sources in anthropology (secondary data that you have consulted).

The module will be made up of 10 practical sessions hosted by the Horniman Museum. These sessions will be:

1. Documentation and theories of knowledge management
2. Curation
3. Research and fieldwork within the museum
4. Education / Outreach
5. Object handling and conservation
6. Storage and collection managements
7. Museum management and funding
8. Exhibition design and installation
9. Digital museum and interactivity
10. Fundraising, marketing and membership

This module is concerned with social and cultural constructions and understandings of gender, sexuality and the body as discussed in anthropology and beyond. The main aim of the module is to develop a critical understanding of some of the major theoretical approaches to gender, sex and the body, as they have been and are relevant to anthropology. In European intellectual history ideas about the body have often revolved around the biological binary categories male and female. In this module, however, using a range of ethnographic examples we look at ways in which the idea of male and female is perceived, embodied and challenged, cross-culturally, in different contexts, and at different historical moments. The topics addressed range from work, performance and narrations of the self, to queer communities and families, and from biopolitics, and new technologies of the body/reproduction, the body, gender, and nation, and gender and globalisation. By the end of the module, you will be expected to be familiar with the main theoretical perspectives in anthropology on gender, sexuality and the related politics. You should also be aware of the historical changes which have marked the analysis of these concepts and be able to use ethnographic material as evidence for theoretical points.

This module will explore understandings and experiences of the health and illness by engaging with classic and contemporary ethnographic work to ask:

•How are health and illness understood and experienced; how are healing practices assessed?

•What is the relationship between health and inequality, both with reference to professional status and economic disparities?

•What can anthropology contribute in practice?

The module draws on visual art, ethnography and film to think about central anthropological issues such as ‘personhood’, ‘class’, ‘indigeneity’, ‘commodity fetishism’, ‘performance’, ‘identity’, ‘memory’, ‘the sensuous’, ‘realism’, ‘history’, ‘mediation’ and ‘advocacy’. The aim of the module is to reflect on how much images tell us about human beings and their relationships in the contemporary world.

This is a practical module in which you'll find and negotiate a work placement within an organisation outside the university. These organisations can be either not-for-profit or profit­based. They might include activist groups and Non – Governmental Organisations involved in rights, advocacy or development work, local community-based initiatives, social entrepreneurship initiatives, law firms, media outlets and corporations involved in corporate social responsibility projects. The module allows students a great deal of flexibility in arranging the nature of the placement and the organisation involved, in consultation with the module convener and the college placements office.

For programmes on which the placement is a core module, the placement provides the opportunity to interrogate the boundary between theory and practice.

For students on MA Migration and Mobility, the placement module is also a platform for more nuanced investigation of the relationship between research led, theoretical approaches to migration and mobility and the exigencies and logistics involved in advocacy, practical interventions and vocational application. Advocacy and development work are not in opposition to critical, theoretical concerns – they are mutually constitutive. But understanding how various kinds of considerations need to balance against one another, what needs to take priority and when, can only be gleaned from first hand experiences and observations.

The placements involve working half a day a week carrying out a project useful to the organisation. You'll gain an understanding of the demands, constraints and concerns of working within an organisation and will be able to draw out connections between the practical issues of concern to the organisation in their applied work and the theoretical issues addressed in the rest of the module.

Students are expected to negotiate a work placement in the autumn term, to be taken up before the end of January or in early February at the latest. The placement should be for one half day a week ideally, but no greater than a full working day a week, to allow students to also attend to the other elements of their study on the module. Where more than a half day placement is being negotiated, the convenor will need to be informed.

The hours are to be agreed by the organisation and the student, but should not impinge on attendance at lectures and seminars that make up part of the student's studies on the MA. The duration of the placement is also to be agreed between the parties involved, but should ideally last for 10 weeks. Students who wish to consider their placement for a longer period should remember to take into consideration the amount of time and effort that will be required during the assessment period and to consider their own progress on their dissertations before undertaking any further commitments.

During the placement, students are asked to make a positive, 'hands on' contribution to the work of the organisation that has accepted them and to abide by the organisation's own code of conduct. The academic expectations of the placement include gaining a closer understanding of the historical and conceptual approaches that frame the work and goals of the organisation, together with a better appreciation of the demands and constraints under which the organisation operates. While it is hoped that these understandings will be largely the product of your work in the organisation (a form of participant observation in anthropological terms), it is always useful to conduct semi-structured interviews with members of the organisation where co-workers are amenable to the idea and where it in no way proves disruptive to your work there.

All students are reminded that the placement, both as part of their anthropological training and as a form of ‘field research’, are governed by the Ethical Guidelines adopted by the American Association of Anthropologists.

This module explores the friction and common ground between History and Anthropology. In order to understand this productive but spirited dialogue, we historicise their relationship and overlapping but divergent theoretical perspectives and methods. Modern social anthropology was formed in the early 20th century by a rejection of evolutionism and its replacement by synchronic site-specific studies, a move that effectively eclipsed history’s theoretical significance to the discipline. Yet, dissatisfaction with the ways in which synchronic functionalist ethnographic analyses ignored history and social change brought about lasting debates about continuity and rupture; the relation between pasts, presents and futures, and the wider humanistic turn of both disciplines under the theoretical influence of Marxism, feminism, and other critical social theory since the 1960s. This module is, in many ways, an examination of the possibilities of a historicised anthropology and poses several intertwined empirical and theoretical questions about the place of structure and agency, consciousness and historicity, and memory and silences within ethnography. Through historical ethnographies and selected social historiography, we aim to understand not only how to approach the past anthropologically, but also grasp ethnographically the uses of history as a collectivist political project implicated in nationalism, racist ideology, and categories like world heritage.

This module explores the role of visual representation in anthropology in terms of both the history of its use within the discipline, and also the potential it holds for new ways of working. It looks at work in a wide range of media – photography, film/video, performance – and the ways in which they might be used in an anthropological context, and this will involve looking at work from outside anthropology such as photojournalism and contemporary art, as well as the work of visual anthropologists.

The intention of the module is to give students a challenging and creative view of the potentials for using audio-visual material within anthropology.

It has been claimed that the contemporary global flows of ideas, commodities and people fragment national political and cultural spaces towards both more local and global directions. Others have argued that nationalist ideologies are, in fact, re-emerging and legitimising growing inequalities in the new global order. We will revise classical theories of state and nationalism in the light of these two positions and discuss ethnographies of conflicting – regional, supranational, national, global – identities.

This module will consider the border politics involved in the making of 'transnational', diasporic', and 'local' communities. We will theorise the border as a material, political, cultural and linguistic boundary that is increasingly defining social life as well as engage with the experiences of those who cross borders. We will ask: How are borders constructed and contested? How do migrants experience borders? How is the discourse of citizenship destabilised when movement and borders become central heuristics by which to understand belonging and membership? Throughout the module we will read academic texts as well as engage with films and literature that focus on migrant lives and border crossings to develop a theoretical and practical knowledge of border politics in relationship to migratory flows.

In this seminar-based module you’ll investigate the ways in which anthropologists think about and through ‘things’. You’ll gain an understanding of theories of materiality and how material culture figures in anthropological accounts and understandings of human diversity.