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Dr Catherine Allerton OLD 6.13 and Dr Gisa Weszkalnys

This course is compulsory on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology and BSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available on the BA in Geography, BSc in Environment and Development and BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

This course provides a general introduction to Social Anthropology as the comparative study of human societies and cultures. Students will be introduced to key themes and debates in the history of the discipline. Ethnographic case studies will be drawn from work on a variety of societies, including hunter-gatherers, farmers, industrial labourers, and urban city-dwellers.

The Michaelmas Term will explore the relationship between nature and culture, drawing on classic and contemporary debates about human difference and similarity. The term is divided into three blocks: 1) Culture, fieldwork and history; 2) Rites of passage; 3) Bodies and Difference.

The Lent term will address different kinds of relations between and among people, animals and things, and how these are mediated in different ways. The term is also divided into three blocks: 1) Relations & difference, 2) Senses of Place, 3) Society & Technology.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of both the MT and LT.

Students are expected to prepare discussion material for presentation in the classes and are required to write assessment essays. Anthropology students taking this course will have an opportunity to submit one tutorial essay for this course to their academic mentor in the MT and one in the LT. For non-Anthropology students taking this course, a formative essay may be submitted to the course teacher in the MT and in the LT.

M Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist (2017)

R Astuti et al (eds.), Questions of Anthropology (2007)

M Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures (1992)

T Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (2001)

M Bloch, Prey into Hunter (1996)

L Tuhiwai Smith Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999)

B Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (2008)

R. Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (2018)

K. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (1996)

Essay (50%, 2500 words) in the LT.
Essay (50%, 2500 words) in the ST.

In interpreting the Course Survey results, bear in mind that over the period covered by the survey this course has been taught by a number of different teachers (who might not be teaching you in the next session). In addition, the course material may have changed quite considerably.