BA (Hons) Anthropology

The module will invite you to explore being human through the relations that make and complicate us. This introduction to anthropological thinking encourages us to think about self, other and social world(s) through the relations that connect and differentiate our species. Our critical conversation on human being follows a path of thinking about social relations across multiple scales & contexts: 

• Personhood 
• Bodies: Race/Gender/(dis)Ability 
• Anthropological Selves/Others/Collaborations 
• Kinship/Relatedness/Friendship 
• Non/other-than human/ Mystical/ Devine (animals, spirits, sorcerers, gods....) 
• Infrastructures/ Objects (artefact, document, attire...) 
• Exchange/Exploitation (gifts, comrades, world systems, assemblages....) 
• Citizen/Nation/Border 
• Present Pasts/ Empire/Hauntings 
• Planet/Futures 

As you progress through the course, your thinking will move outwards from selves and persons; through bodies, kin and others; into infrastructures, world systems and planetary futures.

The aim of this module is to acquaint you with contemporary social anthropology, as well as to give you the confidence and the tools to think critically and work collaboratively. The module begins by locating the discipline within the social sciences and humanities before proceeding to an exploration of central themes, methodologies and ethical concerns.

The course is structured around lectures, seminars and workshops. Lectures and seminar discussions will draw on late-20th century and contemporary anthropological texts and debates. The emphasis will be on exploring how anthropology can give us a unique perspective on key contemporary social issues. Workshops will include practice-based activities to encourage the development of your critical awareness, thinking and reading, as well as collaborative work skills. The module will also include career-centered discussions.

As the module progresses you will gain a growing sense of what social anthropology is and hopefully feel more confident to enter discussion concerning the kinds of questions it asks. Reflecting this gradual build-up of confidence and understanding, the portfolio assignment – which will involve a series of short texts and/or visual submissions – will be guided by regular discussions, receiving interim feedback at the end of the Autumn term, before final submission and assessment at the end of the Spring term.

Anthropological Methods is an introduction to practices of ethnographic research. The module examines the relationship between theory and method within anthropology. You will learn about the specific techniques that are used by anthropologists as they conduct their fieldwork.

This module also draws attention to how ethnographic knowledge produced during fieldwork is both relational and contextual. It considers certain historical conjectures and power dynamics that have contributed to the way ethnography is (perhaps at times rather paradoxically) at once defined as a product and perceived as a process.

The module explores the epistemological and ethical foundations of anthropological methods in order to encourage you to think about fieldwork as an encounter and ethnography as the relation between anthropological practice and theory.

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.  

Each week there will be a short lecture and a film screening, which will be followed by group discussion. 

The module offers you a forum for general discussion of anthropological theory and practice while focusing on the work of particular filmmakers. This module will introduce you to the critical appreciation of ethnographic film, some of the growing literature on visual anthropology, and raise general issues of representation in anthropology as a whole. Although you may refer to any visual material that is relevant to your report, you must refer to at least one ethnographic film, and you should not refer to any film that you have not seen.

This module will allow you to develop inter-disciplinary academic and independent research skills which will allow them to study successfully at degree level.

You’ll learn transferrable skills such as time management, critical analysis, essay writing and digital research, through anthropological topics. You’ll not only learn to ‘think anthropologically’ but to engage with critical academic theory and research from other disciplines. You’ll gain the skills and confidence to communicate in a clear, concise and articulate manner.

Not only are these skills important for your studies, but they will also be transferable to the workplace, aiding your future employability.

In this module, you'll explore some of the ways in which it might be possible to begin to understand something as complex as London from an anthropological perspective. Beginning with a distinction between an anthropology of London, as opposed to an anthropology in London, you'll examine whether there really is any kind of stable entity or ‘thing’ we could begin to study as ‘London’, or actually a plurality of ‘London’s’ - a multitude of different forms? If it is so difficult to define a distinct ‘field’ or an object of study, how do we begin an anthropological study? 

These questions and others will be tackled through a range of field trips and practical documenting exercises, as well as lectures and screenings. We will consider what an anthropology of London would need to include, how it would go about collecting the relevant information, and we will be putting some of this into practice by taking a series of direct experiences of London as the starting points for considering possible anthropological approaches to the city. The module will involve exploring London at first-hand, as well as looking at its portrayal by anthropologists, writers, artists and filmmakers.  

By the end of the module, you'll have an understanding of a variety of different anthropological approaches to the complexity of London, and have experience of putting some of those into practice. 

The aim of this module is to push you to think about history, theory and ethics in anthropology. This will be explored through the prism of controversy. We will be looking at a number of different controversies in anthropology, how they shaped the discipline and what we can learn from them. While doing this we will be looking at some of the key figures in the history of anthropology, the relationship between anthropology and the public and locating these people and events in an historical perspective. Anthropology is not static – it changes constantly. This module is designed to interrogate some of these changes through one particular driving force – controversies. While controversy may sound enticing or exciting, it should be kept in mind that many of these controversies massively affected the lives of researchers, research participants and others – in some cases resulting in deaths or policy shifts that detrimentally impacted on the lives of informants and those around them.

In this module, you'll examine the anthropological contributions to public understanding and dismodule, emphasising the unique methodologies that anthropologists use to engage with contemporary issues that affect us all, including exploitation and the distribution of wealth, gender inequality, social networking, and illegal immigration. These are age-old topics of anthropological analysis, but take on new meanings in rapidly evolving contexts, even as anthropologists themselves devise new methodological strategies for understanding them through the process of ethnographic fieldwork.

You'll explore anthropological contributions to such public debates through four key ethnographies that represent a range of approaches and perspectives on the meaning of anthropology and its role in the world. In the process of understanding anthropological perspectives on important topics that affect our everyday lives and the world as a whole, we will develop a familiarity with the state of anthropology today and how we got here.

The aim of the module is to introduce you to black, indigenous and transnational feminist analyses of the historical and sociopolitical foundations and consequences of predatory capitalism. You'll explore the challenges different communities face in relation to different forms of large-scale resource extraction and climate change, and the actions undertaken by those communities to deal with those challenges.

You'll be introduced to these themes via literature and audio-visual content that offers important ways forward, developing the critical analysis skills necessary to explore practical solutions to these problems.

You'll work towards answering the question 'How can reimagining ecology help us to rethink possible responses to large-scale extraction and climate change and to continue to fight for measures that might slow down climate change?'.

The course offers an in-depth and critical anthropological analysis of western political economy through a Marxian and post-colonial framework. Combining historical contextualization and anthropological comparison, the course develops not only an historical materialist and cultural critique of western capitalism, but also a space of hope and prefiguration of post-capitalist life.

Overview of the module content:

To 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.

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.

Thinking through race foregrounds several contemporary debates that bring to the fore why race – a concept which purports essential, biologized 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.

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

This module provides a critical introduction to the anthropology of policy and engages with key questions of power, governance, and the role of institutions in social change. The aim of the module is to promote a better understanding of public anthropology in ways that provide learning opportunities that both enhance your academic skills and provide opportunities for personal development by engaging with real-world problems and their possible solutions.

We'll explore a range of issues involving contemporary policy interventions that seek to provide solutions to societal problems, including the rationalities that policies embody, the instruments mobilized for their implementation, and key issues around policy travel and translation, policy discourses and their effects, and the complex ways that people engage with, and sometimes resist, policy processes.   

You'll work in groups to build a policy for institutional change relating to an area of your choice. This could be for example lowering the attainment gap in educational institutions, the challenges of creating a carbon-neutral workplace, grappling with the ethical nuances of generating historical transparency regarding cultural heritage, or building more care-driven spaces.

Each week focuses on a different area of research and delivery practice. Teaching comprises a combination of lectures and workshops (depending on class size) ranging from sessions focused on theory building and critical thinking  (what policy does, what does it reveal about practices of inclusion and absence/exclusion etc), to practical sessions addressing the how-tos of policy research (eg where do you find institutional policies and what are the methodologies for reading them) and to creative methodologies for creating and communicating policy (e.g community action research models).  

This module examines indigenous cosmopolitics (political claims, epistemologies and imaginaries which exceed the terms of ‘politics’ as understood and practiced in the global North) across the globe and their entanglements with and inspirations for diverse movements for global justice, decolonization and transformations in relations between humans and the environment. We'll read contemporary cosmopolitical practice and theory to understand the claims (philosophical, legal, political, cultural) made by diversely positioned indigenous groups, and critically position this in dialogue with the history of Western political thought. The module will chart the movements of cosmopolitical thinking across the global South and examine the modes of political and legal practice which it inspires.  

Cosmopolitical philosophies emerging from indigenous thought and practice directly address issues of social and environmental justice, decolonization, and sustainability, and these will therefore be key topics of debate and discussion. The teaching will be research-led and will draw on expertise within the department, and will utilise interdisciplinary perspectives (particularly those from Media, Sociology, Law and Art) in addressing issues of contemporary concern. 

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 introduces you to different anthropological approaches to visual and material culture and gives you the opportunity to conduct a piece of visually oriented anthropological research.

It 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.

The module provides you with an introduction to the anthropology of work and organisations alongside a practical work placement. You'll develop and apply your anthropological knowledge while gaining key career development skills. The placement will last  5 days per week for 2 weeks, or at least 10x8 hour days spread over a longer period.

The aim of the module is to provide you with experiential learning opportunities to enhance your academic studies and offer the opportunity for personal development.

Previous partner organisations offering placements have included The Migration Museum, Lawyers Against Poverty, and Lewisham Community Gardens.

Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.

The individual project is an extended piece of written work of academic standard, i.e. 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).

The project is an extended piece of written work of academic standard, i.e. 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).

The module provides you with an introduction to the anthropology of work and organisations alongside a practical work placement. You'll develop and apply your anthropological knowledge while gaining key career development skills. The placement will last  5 days per week for 2 weeks, or at least 10x8 hour days spread over a longer period.

The aim of the module is to provide you with experiential learning opportunities to enhance your academic studies and offer the opportunity for personal development.

Previous partner organisations offering placements have included The Migration Museum, Lawyers Against Poverty, and Lewisham Community Gardens.

This module uses a range of data to focus on the relationship between Anthropology and Psychology. Although anthropology has often been described as a `bridge’ between the natural sciences and the humanities, the relationship between anthropology and psychology (or Psychoanalysis) has always been fraught with tension. This module explores these tensions and some attempts to overcome them.

In this module you'll explore understandings and experiences of health and illness by engaging with classic and contemporary ethnographic work to ask: 

• How are health and illness understood and experienced; how are healing practices assessed? 
• What is the relationship between health and inequality, both with reference to professional status and economic disparities?
• What can anthropology contribute in practice? 

Adopting an expansive understanding of ‘art’, this module examines the history, ethics and socio-political implications of aesthetics, beauty, and exhibiting.

Using ethnographic case studies and evaluating varied analytical frames, you'll consider anthropological approaches to and uses of art, both historically and thematically.

Topics range from ‘ways of seeing’, to art on the body art; from the politics of photography to art-as-research-method; from capitalism to liberation. Throughout the course we will contemplate the multiple ways in which art and anthropology are entangled with each other, highlighting shared disciplinary practice of critical reflection on the relationships between images, objects, and persons.

In this module, you'll examine 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 (e.g. Amazonia, West Africa, Indonesia) and relating to different resources (e.g. forests, soil, water, oil). Throughout the module, you'll also discuss the bearings of the anthropological ideas examined on public dismodules of environmentalism and on conservation policy.

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. You'll gain an understanding of the emergence of development as an idea, the architecture and infrastructure of aid, and key theoretical approaches in the study of inequality.

You'll examine the tensions inherent in anthropology’s long and intimate relationship with development, through the early production of expert knowledge about tradition and culture; through its critical engagement with policy processes and planned interventions, and through the professional negotiation of the fields of development anthropology and the anthropology of development.  

The module then goes on to contextualise these theoretical and critical approaches to development through a series of interlinked topics and ethnographic case studies. These take students beyond the idea of development as linear progression, or as a monolithic force acting on the world, and instead reveal a field fractured by contradictions, contestations and contingencies that are produced, reproduced and interpreted across multiple locations and cultural contexts.

In this module, you'll learn about the social and cultural constructions and understandings of gender, sexuality and the body as discussed in anthropology and beyond. You'll 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 male and female.

In this module, however, using a range of ethnographic examples we 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 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 be exploring human rights and humanitarian law as 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. 

The aim of this module is to allow students to explore the possibilities of communicating anthropological themes and issues through visual and aural media by producing practical work.

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. As such the contact hours are made up of some joint screening sessions and group workshops, as well as some one-to-one tutorials.

The module requires you to engage in a PROCESS of making a visual piece of work, 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 this module, you'll 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. You'll examine 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 is to give you a challenging and creative view of the potential for using audio-visual material within anthropology.

This module takes two approaches to the anthropology of violence. First, when societies break down and engage in violence, the question of culture comes up. How has a convivial society with certain cultural practices turned to extreme violence? After violence, a related question comes up: “can cultural practices help reconciliation, justice, truth finding and aid in overcoming violent memories?” Second, anthropology is also the study of the species human. What kind of political and social environment does violence create? How does that change preconceived notions of the human and humanity?

This module starts with a theoretical overview of how anthropologists have approached violence, specifically genocide and war. By providing ethnographic case studies you'll interrogate concepts such as solidarity, kinship, “religious wars,” “ethnic conflict,” and memory. You'll take social practices as the main lens and combine it with larger frames of modernity, globalization, and securitization. Building on colonialism, nationalism and the question of human life therein, you'll be provided with an understanding of how different groups navigate social life during and after violent events.

This module introduces you to contemporary debates in the anthropology of social movements. You'll consider 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 we'll 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. You'll 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 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 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.