Dr Michael W. Scott, OLD 6.16

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

This course provides an introduction to selected themes in the anthropology of the region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean known as Melanesia.  It gives students a grounding in the contemporary anthropology of the region, primarily through a close reading of three book-length ethnographies.

The three ethnographies, which have all been published within the last two years, are Christopher Wright's The Echo of Things, an account of what photography means to people in the western Solomon Islands; Alice Street's Biomedicine in an Unstable Place, an analysis of how persons and diseases are made visible or invisible in a hospital on the north coast of Papua New Guinea; and Alex Golub's Leviathans at the Gold Mine, a study of the relationship between indigenous landowners and a large international gold mine in their valley in the highlands of New Guinea.

These ethnographies not only provide students with focused accounts of three very different contexts in Melanesia, they also address histories, dynamics, and concerns familiar to people living throughout the region.  Furthermore, because the three authors draw on different intellectual antecedents and disciplinary traditions, their work provides an entree into the most influential theoretical debates animating Pacific anthropology today.

Topics to be traced throughout the course include personhood and bodies, kinship and sociality, religion and cosmology, technology and infrastructure, development, globalization, and the state.  The readings will be supplemented by ethnographic films.

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

Students are expected to prepare discussion material for presentation in classes and are required to write assessment essays.

Christopher Wright, The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands (2013); Alice Street, Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital (2014); Alex Golub, Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea (2014).

Exam (70%, duration: 2 hours) in the main exam period.
Essay (30%, 2500 words) in the MT.