MA Social Anthropology

This module will introduce you to the theories and methods of modern anthropology. The aim of the module is to situate intellectual histories of social and cultural anthropology within wider contexts. We’ll study how particular ideas and approaches arise at specific points in history, and reflect general concerns about inequality, war, racism, feminism, and other contemporary social issues.

What holds anthropology together as a discipline, more than a narrative of scientific progress, or the construction of a specific scientific niche, is a recurrent interest in a set of questions that constitute the anthropological tradition. This module introduces you to this tradition and encourages you to think critically and analytically about these themes.

The topics of this module will focus upon some of the theoretical developments and methodological strategies pursued in response to profound and widespread social transformations. Each lecture will cover a major theory or debate and examine this in relation to particular ethnographic examples. In a field as vast as anthropology, it is important to maintain a selective focus on areas of personal interest and we’ll encourage you to build on the knowledge developed from elsewhere while on this module.

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.

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.

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 offers an introduction to theoretical debates and methods of digital anthropology. The module combines an introduction to the debates that have shaped the field with practical sessions, designed to familiarise you with digital methodologies for anthropological research.

As digital technologies transform contemporary experiences of subjectivity, embodiment, sociality and everyday life, the module uses anthropological tools and methods to think through digital technologies in a range of ethnographic contexts. Through the topics of this module, we’ll reimagine the object of anthropology through digital ethnography and explore how the purchase of digital futures and imaginaries remake anthropologists’ conceptual toolkits.

We’ll combine an enquiry into the materialities and politics of digital infrastructures, devices and social media platforms with practical learning while using digital methods to produce an anthropological analysis. Practical sessions will help you develop independent research skills including research design and ethics, working with digital video, techniques of online data collection and digital qualitative as well as ethnographic analysis.

The Anthropology of Religion module takes as its starting point the fact that religion is everywhere in the modern world, exerts a powerful influence on social life, and motivates social action in a variety of ways. You’ll explore how distinctions between the secular and the religious, and between science and magic or ‘superstition’, have been used to legitimate or devalue different/non-Western practices and indigenous cultures.

Using a wide range of ethnographic studies, the module encourages you to question the implicit hierarchy often assumed between secularism and religion, and to challenge and rethink earlier academic epistemologies. A focus on religion as a mode of social action is also explored in relation to how religious belief and practice may promote forms of social justice and activism - as well as violence and oppression.

The module also looks at the relationship between religion, race, place and identity in the context of diasporic communities. You’ll also examine how social media and digital platforms are facilitating transnational notions of religious belonging and identity. You’ll be introduced to anthropological and interdisciplinary perspectives on religion, the body and sexuality. You’ll also explore themes of embodiment and corporeality via the relationship between religion, ecology, and environmentalism. You’ll particularly focus on how nature-oriented new religious movements have sought to resist instrumentalist neo-liberal and Enlightenment disenchantments of space, place and landscape.

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".

Modern anthropology and political economy have their origins in the democratic revolutions and enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century. How could the arbitrary social inequality of the old regime be replaced by a more equal society founded on what all people have in common, their human nature?

We’ll consider different approaches to political economy – Marxist, neo-institutionalist and anthropological – and look at the relationships between the state and the economy both historically and how they are experienced in everyday encounters.

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.

This module revolves around contemporary debates in the anthropology of social movements. It considers the contribution of ethnographic approaches to activism and protest to the theorisation of politics, collective action and social change. The anti-globalisation movement, #occupy, the anti-corruption movement in India, the anti-foreclosures movement in Spain (PAH), the Landless Workers' Movement, right-wing extremism, feminist reproductive health activists, independent-living activism, queer movements and the Indigenous Environmental Network are some of the examples that the module will explore. Rather than 'explaining away' these movements, the pedagogical orientation of the module is based on learning from them, i.e. devising ways of conceptualising their practice, methods and transformative power. The module will also consider, as a transversal issue, the question of 'engaged' or 'militant' research - and more broadly the relationship between the production of academic and activist knowledges.

The assessment is constructed around student projects that will present, in a multimedia portfolio format, the result of research conducted about/with social movements.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to rights in terms of their philosophical foundations, the history and shape of the UN system and anthropological contributions.

We’ll explore human rights and humanitarian law of bodies of law, institutions, systems of practice and ideologies – with particular focus on the issue of cultural relativism (historically the key stumbling block for anthropological engagement with rights) and cross-cultural experiences of engagement with, or resistance to, rights.

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.