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Professor Katy Gardner will teach AN100 in Autumn term. The Winter term teacher is Dr Fahad Rahman. 

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 Economic History and Geography, BSc in Environment and Development, BSc in Environment and Sustainable Development, BSc in Politics 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. In it, 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. Drawing on both classical and contemporary work, the course starts by posing the question: What is Social Anthropology? After exploring the ethnographic method and considering some historical background, the rest of the course is organised around core themes in the discipline, including (in the Autumn term) Relatedness, Exchange, and Power. Through comparing different ethnographic examples, students will learn to consider key questions through anthropological perspectives. How do we become people and become related to others? What is love, and is it natural? Why do we think of some people as different and others as the same? Why are gifts and exchange so central to human societies? Does work empower or enslave us? What is power, and why do some people have it and others don’t?

The Winter 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, 2) Place, 3) Technology. Some questions considered during the term include:

Is it valid to distinguish between people and things? What are the politics of human animal relations? To what extent is place a product of power? Can people only be dispossessed of material belongings? In what ways does technology mediate and reinvent expressions of race and racism? Do infrastructures only become visible on breakdown?

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the AT. 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the WT.

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected. This course has a reading week in Week 6 of both the AT and WT.

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 AT and one in the WT. For non-Anthropology students taking this course, a formative essay may be submitted to the course teacher in the AT and in the WT.

M Engelke, Think Like an Anthropologist (2017)

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

MacClancy, J. ed., 2002. Exotic no more: Anthropology on the front lines. University of Chicago press.

Eriksen, T.H., 2015. Small places, large issues: An introduction to social and cultural anthropology. PLUTO press.

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