MA Visual Anthropology

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 is a core module for the MA Visual Anthropology programme and, as such, explores key concepts and debates in the sub-field.

The module takes an inclusive approach towards the definition of visual anthropology. It’ll provide tools both for the anthropological analysis of visual materials, and for applying anthropological knowledge to the production of actual visual artifacts.

The overarching goal is to foster a situated understanding of the role of the visual in the production of anthropological knowledge, including its political and aesthetic dimensions. In this sense, the module is designed to provide a theoretical and methodological foundation for your own projects.

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 purpose of this module is to provide a practical understanding of solo camera-director documentary making. The sessions are aimed at developing awareness, skills and confidence in the use of audiovisual equipment to tell engaging stories relevant to the social sciences.

We’ll combine shooting and editing exercises with screenings and discussions. The first term concentrates on developing the necessary practical skills to document unscripted social events and interactions (i.e. filming and editing). The second term focuses on specific documentary styles, interviewing techniques and storytelling conventions. We’ll also deal with the stages of documentary production from the idea to the completed film.

While the module aims to train you as solo camera-director, participating in group exercises will provide a taste of working within a conventional documentary crew. You’ll also encouraged to critically relate your films to current themes and discussions in anthropology and to fieldwork research.

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.

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 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.

To understand some of the implications and practical concerns of communicating anthropological themes and issues through visual and aural, as well as written media. This is a production-based module and does not follow the usual lecture/seminar format. It is centered on the development of your own individual practical visual or sound project and seeing that through to completion, hopefully by the end of the term. As such the contact hours are mostly made up of one-to-one tutorials, although there will be some sessions when we meet as a whole group. We will have a group viewing session in the last week of the Spring Term. Above all else, the module requires you to engage in a process of practical production, not to take a few photographs, or record a bit of sound at the end of the term, but to develop and refine a project through all the various stages and forms necessary for its successful completion. Students typically produce several versions of the practical work as they refine their project over the module of the term.

In planning their project students should - if necessary - look at a practical ‘how to do it’ books, although technical advice will also be given in tutorial sessions. Even if you have had a good deal of photographic experience, this is likely to draw attention to issues you have not so far considered.

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.

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.

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 module aims to provide you with a critical understanding of international development as a social, political and historical field, and of anthropology’s engagement with development and processes of planned social change. It will aim to provide an understanding of the emergence of development as an idea, the architectures and infrastructures of aid, and introduce key theoretical approaches in the study of inequality.

We’ll consider the ways in which contrasting ideas of development were woven into both colonial policies of extraction and discourses of trusteeship and into anti-colonial freedom movements that led to the formation of post-colonial nation states after World War 2. We’ll also examine anthropology’s long and intimate relationship with development through its critical engagement with policy processes and planned interventions, as well as tensions between academic and applied approaches in the discipline.

The module contextualises these theoretical and critical approaches to development through a series of interlinked topics and ethnographic case studies. You’ll be actively encouraged and supported to develop your own perspectives and critiques of development and to make links between the topics introduced in this module, for example, (neo) colonialism, decolonisation, racism and whiteness, growth and inequality, the role of state and corporate actors in development, and whether the interventions and outcomes which the contemporary international development industry is intended to deliver are worthwhile.