MA Anthropology & Museum Practice

This module explores what museums are, how they have been conceived of, and what they have the potential to be.

You will seek to understand what defines museums as institutions or sites of professional practice in order to unpack, challenge and reimagine them. You will explore how thinking anthropologically offers a particular methodology and approach to doing this, thinking through individual positionality, structures of practice, and constructed hierarchies of expertise.

The module will also urge you to think about how this sits in tension with the history of anthropology, its direct intersection with coloniality and its re-inscription through the idea of the public archive. This includes looking at the historical foundation of museums in Europe, their entanglement with colonialism, how this is structurally embedded within the present. The course will draw on Global Majority, indigenous and community-led models of practice in order to imagine new futures for the museum and heritage sector, that are more relevant, useful and ethical.

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 aims to complement the Anthropological Theory module by introducing you to the research methods used by anthropologists. It will return to some of the key texts used in the previous term to critically analyse the links between theory and methods. The module provides you with experience in working with qualitative and ethnographic methods to support fieldwork and dissertation modules.

It is designed to follow the three stages of research design and report writing: scoping and planning, conducting research and analysing data, and writing it up.

It covers a range of different kind of data and types of method including:

• ethnographic fieldwork
• in-depth interviews
• surveys and questionnaires
• ‘studying up’
• autoethnography
• the use of archives
• images and film
• participatory and collaborative research methods
• conflicts of interest
• ethical codes
• informed consent

You will work in groups to devise team research projects and are encouraged to use this as a springboard for your individual reports, relating to issues raised in the lectures and readings. The report will discuss the research context, data gathering techniques, the merits of the approach used, the data it produced, and any problems encountered within the research process.

The dissertation is an extended piece of written work of academic standard. It should be 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).

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 of male and female. In this module, however, using a range of ethnographic examples we’ll 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.

Arguably modern anthropology and modern art are close in terms of both their origins and their critical reflection on the relationships between images, objects and persons. The concern with anthropological or ethnographic issues is often an explicit feature of contemporary artworks.

But despite a long history of dealing with the so-called ‘art’ of other cultures, what does anthropology have to contribute to an understanding of the kinds of artworks you might find at Tate Modern today? Using ethnographic case studies, this module will consider key anthropological approaches to art both historically and thematically. We’ll explore how art and anthropology are entangled with each other, including suggesting ways in which anthropology can productively learn from contemporary art.

The module draws on visual art, ethnography and film to think about central anthropological issues.

Topics we’ll discuss include:

• personhood
• class
• indigeneity
• commodity fetishism
• performance
• identity
• memory
• the sensuous
• realism
• history
• mediation
• 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 module explores the role of visual representation in anthropology in terms of both the history of its use within the discipline, and the potential it holds for new ways of working.

We’ll look 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. 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 provide you with a challenging and creative view of the potentials for using audio-visual material within anthropology.

This module will introduce you to the core concepts and theories relating to economic and political organisations and the problem of accounting for change, both empirically and theoretically. You’ll be able to familiarise yourself with a number of empirical contexts. In result, you may be able to conceptualise the complex socio-economic processes that are affecting the peripheral areas that have long been the concern of anthropologists. We’ll explore several contemporary problems relating to such issues as the apparent contradiction between local or national autonomy and globalisation that does not easily fit into definitions of the "economic" or "political".

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’ll revise classical theories of state and nationalism in the light of these two positions and discuss ethnographies of conflicting regional, supranational, national and global identities.

This module explores the multiple ways migration and borders are understood and experienced in different social, geographical, and political settings, as well as in different theoretical and discursive domains.

Grounded in anthropological perspectives and methods, and branching out into film, literature, and art, the module aims to destabilise dominant understandings of migration and borders. We’ll critically unpacks core themes at the heart of contemporary debates on transnational movement – from race to belonging, from surveillance to gender.

Throughout the module, we’ll engage with a variety of theoretical, literary, and visual materials that focus on migrant lives and border crossings to develop a critical understanding of migration and the material, political, cultural, and linguistic borders that shape it.

The module will provide an overview of the study of material culture within the discipline of anthropology, with a focus on the materiality of heritage, memory, and archival practice.

We’ll engage in conversations about the materialisation of the past through both formal and informal archival practice, including institutional archives, policy archives, oral histories, collective remembering, and other forms of memorialisation.

We’ll also participate in discussions on absences and silences in the archives and hold conversations about the immaterial archive, for example exploring how experiences of intimacy or sensuality are denied space within professionalised archival practice.