BA (Hons) Anthropology & Visual Practice

This module introduces basic anthropological concepts of kinship, politics, economics, and religion and the history and theoretical schools of anthropology.

You will study either Ethnography of a Selected Region I: Africa or Ethnograqphy of a Selected Region 2: South Asia, depending on timetabling and staff availability.

Ethnography of a Selected Region 1: Africa

Module Convenor: Dr Dominique Santos 

Africa has been a key space, both geographically and imaginatively, in the development of the discipline of anthropology. This module is an introduction to anthropological studies on societies and cultures in Africa and the African diaspora. Ethnographic case studies are used to address some of the major themes that have characterised studies of Africa and debates about African identity, including sexuality, gender, colonialism, music, art, magic & sorcery, religion, power and the diaspora. Throughout the module, emphasis is placed on how the idea of Africa is mobilised in different ways for a variety of ideological purposes. In this way, students will be able to make links with wider anthropological debates about the construction of society, changes in ethnographic research and the relationship between anthropology and its subjects. On completion of the module, students will have gained knowledge of key debates in African anthropology and be able to reflect critically on the history of ethnographic engagement with Africa. At the same time, they will have developed an understanding of the diversity and contingencies of everyday life in contemporary Africa.

Ethnography of a Selected Region 2: South Asia

Module Convenor: Dr Martin Webb

This an ethnography led module that introduces students to the anthropology, sociology, history and politics of India. The module begins with an introduction to significant historical events and an overview of the emergence of the post-colonial nation. We move on to consider the anthropological construction of India and then follow key themes of inequality, hierarchy, development and the nation across a series of topics which introduce ethnographies exploring: the state, youth, citizenship, love and friendship, urban lives, public culture and the idea of a global India. While the module focuses on India, where ethnographic threads or literatures connect to scholarship from across south Asia students will be guided and encouraged to follow them.

This module explores aspects of anthropological methods. You study the following areas: data collection techniques and implications of type and quality of data; participant observation: techniques involved, its evolution and change; analytical approaches to primary data, re-analyses of secondary sources; the philosophy of science; value free social science, interaction between observer and observed, perception and ‘fact’.

This module aims to encourage a critical appreciation of ethnographic film, introducing some of the growing literature on visual anthropology, and raising general issues of representation in anthropology as a whole. 

This module explores the intellectual history of Anthropology, examining key ideas and introducing thinkers that have had significant impact on the discipline. It will focus on a particular sub-field and will explore in depth the ways that different theoretical and methodological approaches are developed in one specific area of research and writing.

This module will introduce you to key areas in the history and practice of image use in Anthropological research and publication. You will also have hands on training on a number of professional software packages, as well as high level visual and audio production equipment (cameras, recorders, microphones).

Politics, Economics and Social Change introduces you to the core concepts and theories relating to economic and political organisations and the problem of accounting for change, both empirically and theoretically.

To familiarise you with a number of empirical contexts in order that 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. 

To explore a number of contemporary problems relating to such issues as the apparent contradiction between local or national autonomy and globalisation that do not fit easily into definitions of the "economic" or "political".

This module is concerned with key ways of thinking that have shaped and continue to shape the discipline of social anthropology. As such, the module is intended to augment what you have learned in the first year and to help consolidate your sense of how important concepts in social anthropology fit together.

The focus of the module is how the discipline’s main 20^th century schools of thought have developed, how they relate to one another and what they have contributed to our understandings of the world.

Our concern is with the different ways in which anthropologists have conceived of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ in their efforts to account for the myriad of ways in which humans live.

We shall explore how these approaches to anthropology compete with, and sometimes contradict, one another and how these dynamics have driven the discipline through the political landscape of the twentieth century to where we are now so that we can, in the last, pause to envisage where we can and should go next.

This module provides a critical introduction to the many ways anthropologists engage with the visual, from their use of visual methodologies and analysis of representations, to their ethnographic study of everyday visual forms. Focusing on a wide range of visual media, from photography, museum exhibitions and popular representations on TV, to dress, body art, architecture and other everyday visual and material forms, the module raises issues about the significance of visibility, the politics of representation, the social life of visual and material forms and the relationship between seeing and other senses.

Adnvanced Visual Practice will build on technical skills introduced in the first year of the programme and will ask you to investigate how theory relates to your practice. You will explore the relationship between theory and practice in image use in Anthropological research and publication. You will also have hands on training in a number of professional level software packages, as well as high level visual and audio equipment (cameras, recorders, microphones).

Thinking through race foregrounds several contemporary debates that bring to the fore why race – a concept which purports essential, biologised difference between humans – continues to get reproduced in policy, media representations, expert knowledge, and everyday encounter across the globe even though it was debunked in the previous century. The module also engages with ethnographic accounts that think through how race, gender, and class are experienced and inhabited in relationship to one another in the contemporary moment.

This module explores the ethnography of a specific region, which may change from year to year. Through detailed reading of ethnography, as well as films and other relevant media, major themes of anthropology such as identity, community, local and global politics, inequality and processes of social and economic change are explored.

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).

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

This module is designed to offer students the opportunity to conduct a short piece of research in the field broadly defined as the Anthropology of Art. Picking up on theoretical issues introduced in Anthropology of Art I, you will be expected to select your own topic for fieldwork. You may wish to analyse the practice of a particular artist (especially one whose work relates to ethnography in some way), concentrate on aspects of art institutions in London (techniques of display, audiences, exhibitions), or on lives of art objects (their production, consumption, circulation, interpretation). Key issues include: aesthetics and the culture industry: the role of the avant-garde: Frankfurt School critical theory: popular art, resistance and accommodation: the rise of film criticism: museums and collecting.

This core module will enable you to explore the theoretical concepts underpinning development, the history of development and its institutions – from NGOs to the World Bank and IMF, while considering diverse case studies from around the world. You will also explore the historical role of anthropology’s involvement in development, as official mediators between ‘the West and the rest’ through imperial conquest, colonial administration and a post-war development industry.

As a central component of the module you will critically analyse current trends that have emerged to dominate the field of global political and economic interventions and/or policies – ‘participation and empowerment’, ‘gender awareness’, ’sustainable development’, ‘community development’, ‘NGOs’, and ‘environmental conservation’.

This core module will enable you to explore the theoretical concepts underpinning development, the history of development and its institutions – from NGOs to the World Bank and IMF, while considering diverse case studies from around the world. You will also explore the historical role of anthropology’s involvement in development, as official mediators between ‘the West and the rest’ through imperial conquest, colonial administration and a post-war development industry.

As a central component of the module you will critically analyse current trends that have emerged to dominate the field of global political and economic interventions and/or policies – ‘participation and empowerment’, ‘gender awareness’, ’sustainable development’, ‘community development’, ‘NGOs’, and ‘environmental conservation’.

The module examines anthropological understandings of human-environment relations and their bearing on public discourses of environmentalism. It deals with: different ways of encountering biophysical surroundings across societies; European traditions of environmental thought and their impacts; management practices, colonialism, and cultural elaboration of the idea of nature; environmental social movements, identity politics and social justice in environmentalism.

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 examines a variety of anthropological approaches to the study of violence, ranging from evolutionary explanations for male aggression to studies of changing American attitudes toward terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It looks critically at the theoretical, methodological and ethical questions raised in studies of violence through ethnographic case studies from around the world.

The module considers attempts to define violence as a concept in the social sciences and explores the possible causes, meanings, and uses of violent practices from a variety of different cultural contexts and perspectives. It gives particular attention to the political and economic conditions that promote war and other violent behaviour as well as specific cultural expressions within violent practices.

We will also discuss ethnographic descriptions of “peaceful societies” and examine the ways in which peace is made in the aftermath of conflict. In addition to the required and additional readings, the module will also include a number of films that coincide with weekly topics.

This module will explore 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. We will 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, 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 it to provide a strong theoretical background for those students going to take the Anthropology and the Visual Production Course in the spring term, and to give students a challenging and creative view of the potentials of visual material within anthropology. 

Following on from Anthropology and the Visual II, this is a practically based module in which you will explore the techniques of video-making/photography.

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.

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

Animals are famously good to think with and feature in some of the most controversial thought experiments in anthropology. This course introduces a pantheon of anthropological animals, from Bororo parrots and Lele pangolin to Derrida’s cat and Haraway’s dogs. What does it mean if people can become animals and vice versa? How do we turn animal into edible? Can dogs be heroes?

We also look at the political economy of animal production, the largest industry in the world. The consumption of animals has recently entered an unprecedented phase of extreme exploitation epitomised by the factory farms of Euroamerica. At the same time, ‘wild’ animals have been commodified in zoos and rare species preserved in parks that exclude human inhabitants. How are we to understand these apparently contradictory impulses? Why are cows food and pandas poster children for the Worldwide Fund for Nature? As we adapt to new forms of biotechnology what is at stake in our exchanges with animals, of genes, organs, diseases and labour? The module uses a wide range of resources including film, ethnography and fiction to explore these and other questions.

An introduction to key areas of medical anthropology, ranging from ideas about healing to social inequality and the ‘new biology’. The module addresses issues of biomedicine in the UK alongside alternative therapies and explanations of health/illness in different parts of the world, and approaches to the political economy. Specific sessions include the application of medical anthropology, ‘new’ diseases and technologies.

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.

Is Friedrich Nietzsche’s clarion call, ‘God is Dead’, still relevant in an increasingly reflexive cosmopolitan and pluralistic world? Starting with a critique of secularism as a self-evident category, this module seeks out ethnography that enriches our critical understandings of the misplaced distinction made between religious and secular domains.

In tracing the historical formation of the ‘secular’ - as a broad ideology with deep impact on the effects of the state on its subjects’ bodily dispositions, consciousness and desires - we approach anthropological questions of individual and social transformation through examining ethics, morality and the law in a variety of ‘secular’ contexts.

These contexts include, but are not limited to:

• Anthropological considerations of the ideological premises of mass political movements such as Nazism and Bolshevism;
• The everyday Kemalist state in Turkey
• The infrastructural power of fiscal authoritarianism
• The family resemblances between multiculturalism, Indirect Rule, and apartheid
• The very idea of the human/Humanism in prescriptive social engineering organised through the state apparatus and executed in the name of freedom and equality

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 looks at Amazonian societies from pre-history to the present – indigenous, peasant, colonial, developmentalist – and includes discussion of modern social movements (Landless Peoples Movement) as well as classic themes of Levi-Strauss's 'world on the wane', human ecology and extractivist economies. 

There was a time when myth and ritual were seen as products of the childhood of humankind, before Science came along and disenchanted everything, a time when people languished (or gloried, depending on one’s point of view) in a kind of poetic consciousness. Nowadays, anthropologists tend to assume myth and ritual are aspects of all human societies, our own included; what they can’t agree on however is why. What is it that myth and ritual actually do? Are they ways of resolving existential dilemmas? Or reflecting on the fact they can’t be resolved? Are they ways of establishing unquestionable authority? Forms of artistic self-expression? Media for political action? Or some combination of these?

This module will explore some of these questions, by way of (hopefully colourful and interesting) concrete case studies.

As we enter the third millennium, the percentage of urban dwellers exceeds 50% of the world’s population. The sub-field of urban anthropology was born as ethnographers followed rural migrants to cities; but at the beginning of the 20th century, the emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline was intertwined with a fascination with the urban locus across a wide range of arts and social sciences.

Through historical and ethnographic perspectives this module considers the changing use and valorisation of different urban spaces at different times; how cities are represented; ideas of order and disorder, of public and domestic places, of control and resistance through carnival, informal economies and kinship networks. The module covers both third-world and Euro-American cities, and supplements theoretical discourses and ethnographies with films and novels.

Following on from Anthropology and the Visual II, this is a practically based module in which you will explore the techniques of video-making/photography.

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 examines three areas of anthropological enquiry into human-environment relations:

• different societies’ experience of and thoughts about their biophysical surroundings (beliefs, practices, dwelling)
• human shaping of landscapes (living in balance with nature, enhancing or destroying it)
• environmental politics, or political ecology (small and large scale resource conflict, science and policy processes, environmental movements)

Each topic is examined through one or two key studies, drawn from different regions of the world (eg Amazonia, West Africa, Indonesia) and relating to different resources (eg forests, soil, water, oil).

Throughout the module, we will also discuss the bearings of the anthropological ideas examined on public discourses of environmentalism and on conservation policy.

The link between anthropology and psychology has always been tantalizing. On the one hand, any boundary between the two disciplines seems fuzzy and arbitrary. On the other hand, at latest since Durkheim’s notion of ‘homo duplex’, the two perspectives have seemed irreconcilable.

This course aims at exploring some of the connections between anthropology and psychology. Anthropology, by placing social constructionism as a key and entrenched conceptual footing, has tended to draw on psychology only in certain regards. Equally, though there have been works in cross-cultural psychology, the discipline as a whole, given its predominantly experimental bias, has frequently distanced itself from anthropology.

The course is both historical and thematic, and discusses in relation to a number of key themes how psychological dimensions have been brought into anthropological discussions of society and culture.

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 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.

This is a hands-on research module aimed at providing students with grounded, meaningful research experience. This will take the form of participation in research led by staff with the aim of contributing to real, concrete outputs with public and/or academic audiences. The preparation for research will take the form of two day-long workshops in summer term, the research itself will take place over the summer, with a third writing up/dissemination workshop in the Autumn term of the following academic year. As with the Placement module, this will be a Level 6 module which takes place in the summer at the end of the 2nd year, with assessment submitted in the Autumn term of the 3rd year.

While specific research skills will vary depending upon the research project, they are envisaged to include fieldwork skills (EG - interviewing; participant observation; field notes; audio & video data gathering), research ethics training, software use (EG - NVivo; website design packages such as Wordpress; mapping software; film editing) along with dissemination related skills such as blogging or collaborative writing up of research for other forms of publication. 

The aim of this course is to provide concrete skills and outputs that can be straightforwardly added to the CV's of students while also allowing them to participate in meaningful research. Depending upon the specificities of the research project - students will also be encouraged, where possible, to contribute towards the research design.