MA in Visual Anthropology

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

Modern Anthropology has had an uneasy relation with art and with objects and images in general. The reaction against the museum anthropology of the 19th century led to a certain iconoclasm in the discipline. Yet a hundred years later, the interest of anthropologists on art, and conversely, of artists in Anthropology, is blooming. But this is not so contradictory: in fact modern anthropology and modern art are very close from their origin, in their critical reflection on the relation of images, objects and persons. In this module, we will discuss first the questions that the anthropological tradition has opened up on the relation of things, images and persons. Is the value of objects a human construction? Do objects have agency? Are images, representations? What are the arguments for idolatry and iconoclasm? All these questions are necessary preludes to understand the anthropological approach to art in the modern world. They will enable us to ask what characterises 'art' as a form of social value in our society, as well as how objects and images from other societies are valued as 'art'.

This module consists of screenings followed by seminars. The emphasis will be on key feature, documentary and ethnographic films, from Nanook of the North (Flaherty) to Burden of Dreams (Blank) to Blade Runner (Scott). A focal theme of the seminars will be the examination of the 'language of film'.

This module will train you in the use of camcorders (diverse formats), sound-recording, lighting, scripting/story-boarding and digital editing. During terms 1 and 2, you will be required to produce short practice videos (2-4 minutes) supervised by members of staff and will keep production diaries to document your acquisition of skills. While MA degrees normally result in dissertations, the key assessed artefact of the MA Visual Anthropology programme is a film. Accompanying this, however, will be an essay/report of 5,000 words in which you will provide a supporting textual account in the form of a catalogue.

This module looks at various ways in which anthropology has engaged with images, in terms of the production of narrowly anthropological research material through ethno-photography and ethnographic film as well as in terms of a broader set of interdisciplinary concerns with theories of representation, modern media, translation and political advocacy. The ethnographic project of modern anthropology has been a hybrid scientific/literary enterprise and visual complements, film in particular, have provided links both to cognate fields and non-specialist audiences. The module is grounded in a wide-ranging literature that informs the history of anthropological and social theoretical concerns.

This module encourages you to engage critically with the rights discourses that underpin development agendas in the contemporary world. You will consider the historical evolution of rights discourses, the institutions that have been established to uphold rights, the language of Human Rights used in international law, as well as the concept of rights as understood by development organisations, governments and multilaterals (such as the UN). You will also analyse the cross-cutting – and often competing – claims made in the name of, for example, gender and child rights, indigenous rights, intellectual property rights, animal and environmental rights, customary law and bioethics.

The module provides an opportunity to explore the concept and discourses of rights in relation to numerous contemporary social issues (such as natural disasters, constitutional reform, war crimes tribunals, environmental disputes and gender politics), and consider the purchase of the rights concept (and its limitations) within development discourses and practices, as well as in relation to patterns of governance and social justice.

While taking this module, you'll concentrate on planned change in the 20th century with special emphasis on the post World War II era, after the rise of the so-called Development Industry. We will cover the history of development and aid through various approaches to development, and will explore the discourses which have informed approaches to policy. Following this you will look at implementation and the history of anthropological involvement, including anthropological critiques. Finally, there will be an in-depth analysis of the development implications (both in terms of international agency or national government policy implications as well as projects on the ground) of selected global trends. Possible selected trends might be HIV/AIDs or Structural Adjustment Policies.

There are long held tensions between the disciplines of anthropology and history, although they share some common epistemological concerns.

Increasingly, anthropologists have incorporated historical accounts towards expanding ethnographic possibilities, and to explore theoretical questions of continuity, social change and periodisation, and to examine colonialism as a set of historical conditions. As part of a historicised practice, anthropologists have challenged assumptions about relationship between myth and history, and explored complex temporalities.

In turn, historians have borrowed from anthropological methodologies to underpin radical ideas about microhistories, oral history practices, which have also contributed towards the anthropological project. More recently, both historians and anthropologists have turned to memory as a way of accessing the past through practice, policy and the emotions.

This course sets up these questions through three interconnected threads: the history of anthropology, historical anthropology, and anthropologies of history.

We examine the different kinds of evidence that may be used to understand the past, and how the past is made sense of in the present, through archives, images and material culture. Together this provides us with a model for approaching the past anthropologically, in order to gain ethnographic understandings of the dynamic processes of historicity in everyday contexts, where the past can be deployed, imagined and evidenced.

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

An introduction to key areas of medical anthropology, ranging from ideas about healing to questions of social inequality and ‘biosociality’. We will explore questions of how culture shapes understandings and experiences of the body, health and illness. We'll also examine the implications of new technologies on understandings of health, and the politics of modern global healthcare. We will engage with classic and contemporary ethnographic work.

Key questions include:

• How is health understood and experienced culturally?
• What is the relationship between health and unequal economic and technological systems?
• What can anthropology contribute to global health issues?

This module introduces the fascinating domain of the anthropology of religion: a vast and wide-ranging subject. It introduces some of the many ways anthropologists have approached religious phenomena and highlights what is unique about anthropology’s contribution to the understanding of religion. It raises questions concerning what counts as ‘religious’ and includes within the remit of the module consideration of a variety of non-human agents (gods, God, spirits, witches) and religious practices (meditation, worship, performances).

We begin with an overview of the state, highlighting the contingency of its current form and discussing whether or not analyses of the state continue to be relevant in the light of globalisation and changing modes of production. We then go on to analyse key economic institutions that exist through (sometimes in spite of) the state. In the second half of the Autumn term, through locales such as factories, we will see these institutions in action by exploring the capitalist labour process, the impact of industrialisation on the peasant economy and political forms of peasant resistance. We think about changed practices of labour through globalisation of capital and flexible production, and drawing together certain themes (such as value and freedom) that have been running throughout all the lectures. We end the first term by looking at contemporary forms of radical politics, with a special focus on anarchism and at its agenda of building ‘societies without states’. 

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.

“You guys [Balanda (white) anthropologists] keep looking, looking, looking but you just don’t see”
Aboriginal filmmaker Bangana in Deger ‘Shimmering Screens’ p221

Why is film so affective? What do we understand about how film works? These questions are absolutely fundamental if we are to consider anthropology’s relationship to the moving image.

Thinking through this cinematic magic from both a media, and an anthropological perspective allows us to construct a set of productive new approaches to understanding film. Anthropologists began using film very early on – the earliest footage was shot on the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits in the 1890’s – when the camera was considered a “vital” piece of equipment.

However, this module will critically consider the general assumption that visual anthropology equals documentaries with ethnographic (ie exotic) content. It will instead, explore a series of creative approaches to the visual as evidence and witness from an anthropological perspective. The proliferation of so-called ‘indigenous media’, particularly on the web, arguably redefines the role of the visual anthropologist, and we will the problems and productive possibilities of intercultural looking.

These questions are central to a renewed interest in various kinds of ethnographic film as a result of the recent convergence of contemporary art and documentary. The module will argue for an experimental approach to intercultural filmmaking and suggest what the future of anthropological film might look like. The module also provides a strong theoretical background for those students going on to take Experimental Ethnographic Filmmaking in the Spring Term.

This module takes up Weinberger’s criticism of contemporary visual anthropology for adopting a narrow definition of its field and its available tools, when the conjunction of ‘visual’ with ‘anthropology’ should actually open up a whole range of creative possibilities for conducting and presenting research.

It will explore the role of photography and sound in anthropology in terms of both the history of their use within the discipline, and also the potentials they hold for new ways of conducting research.

The module will take an anthropological approach to develop a new understanding of photography and the way in which it participates in society. Photographs have become one of the primary and most tangible forms for recording memory, and we will explore the magical animist nature of photography. The module will also consider the potential of sound as a means of anthropological description and a way of researching space and place, time and memory, identity and belonging. We will consider the relations between words and sounds, and ways of knowing and being in the world.  The distinctions between the word as it is written and as it is spoken is important here, as are issues of translation – sound into recording, sound into text, one sense into another, as well as adequate cross-cultural translation. The module also provides a strong theoretical background for those students going on to take Ethnography Through Photography and Sound in the Spring Term.

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

This module explores the inter-relationship of gender, sexuality and the body both within western cultures and western social theory, and in a range of other cultural and historical contexts. Emphasising the ways in which the body and gender have been produced/imagined differently in diverse times and places, it focuses on both classical and current anthropological topics including:

• The status of the body – biological or cultural
• Decoration, modification and transformation of bodies
• Distinctions between sex and gender
• Alternative sex and gender systems
• Kinship, marriage and chosen families
• New reproductive technologies
• Identity politics and queer theory
• Theories of performance/practice
• Violence, resistance and power politics

This module will consider the border politics involved in the making of 'transnational', diasporic', and 'local' communities. We will theorize 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 destabilized when movement and borders become central heuristics by which to understand belonging and membership? Throughout the 5 week 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.

This module revolves around contemporary debates in the anthropology of social movements. It considers the contribution of ethnographic approaches to activism and protest for thinking about politics, collective action and social change.

Examples of topics explored include:

• the anti-globalisation movement
• #occupy
• the anti-corruption movement in India
• the anti-foreclosure movement in Spain (PAH)
• the Landless Workers' Movement
• right-wing extremism
• feminist reproductive health activists
• independent-living activism
• queer movements
• the Indigenous Environmental Network

Rather than 'explaining away' these movements, this module is based on learning from them, for instance, 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.

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.

This module offers an introduction to theoretical debates and methods of digital anthropology. It combines an introduction to the debates that have shaped the field with practical sessions designed to familiarize learners 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. Topics covered will reimagine the object of anthropology through digital ethnography, and explore how the purchase of digital futures and imaginaries remake anthropologists’ conceptual toolkits.

The module will combine an enquiry into the materialities and politics of digital infrastructures, devices and social media platforms with practical learning using digital methods to produce anthropological analysis.

Practical sessions will develop independent research skills including research design and ethics, working with digital video, techniques of online data collection and digital qualitative and ethnographic analysis.