Prof Mathijs Pelkmans and Prof Michael Scott

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available on the MA in Modern History, MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in China in Comparative Perspective and MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

The aim of this course is to examine the development of theory and ethnography in anthropology in the contexts of colonialism, anti-imperialism, postcolonialism, and decolonialization.

The first term focuses primarily on the period before the 1980s, with particular attention to the British, American, and French schools of anthropology and their interrelations.  Work by intellectuals from oppressed minorities, the Global South, and indigenous communities elsewhere will be recognized alongside and in comparison with work often regarded as foundational.  Through analytical examination of fieldwork practices, theoretical problems, core concepts, and the politics of exclusion and inclusion, this half of the course will explore how knowledge is produced (and forgotten) in anthropology and how those processes continue to inform disciplinary practice and debates today.  Topics covered may include: expeditionary versus individual fieldwork practices; ethnography as a genre; ethnographic particularism and the problem of comparison; origins and the idea of the ‘primitive’; colonialism and colonial situations; race, culture, and relativism; the promise and perils of popular and public anthropology; gender in anthropology and the gender of the anthropologist; classic sites of theorization such as kinship, totemism, and animism.

The second term focuses on recent and ongoing debates in anthropology.  How is anthropological knowledge produced and what are the politics of ethnographic writing?  How should we think of cultural differences: as surface or substance?  To what extent is an anthropology beyond the human necessary and possible?  How do emotive energies affect human agency, the production of meaning and the circulation of knowledge?  We will address these and other questions by exploring a range of theoretical frameworks, including interpretive anthropology, postmodernism, actor network theory, affect theory, and the anthropology of temporality and the future.

The precise emphasis and distribution of topics may vary from year to year.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the AT. 10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the WT. 2 hours of workshops in the ST.

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

Formative coursework consists of participation in weekly seminars, and the opportunity to discuss one formative essay in each of the AT and WT with the course convener or the student's academic mentor, as per normal departmental arrangements.

Abu-Lughod, L. (1993) Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories.

Biehl, J. (2013) Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.

Chua, L., and N. Mathur, eds (2018) Who are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology.

Deloria, E. C. (2009 [1988]) Waterlily.

Firmin, A. (2002 [1885]) The Equality of the Human Races.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures.

Hurston, Z. N. (1935) Mules and Men.

Kenyatta, J. (1938) Facing Mount Kenya: Tribal Life of the Gikuyu.

Kuper, A. (2005) The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth.

Larson, F. (2021) Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind.

Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Mead, M. (1935) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.

Moore, H. (2011) Still Life: Hopes, Desires, and Satisfactions.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012) The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity.

Powdermaker, H. (1966) Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist.

Riberio, G. L., and Escobar, A. eds (2006) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power.

Sahlins, M. (2000) Culture in Practice.

Srinivas, M. N. (1976) The Remembered Village.

Thomas, M. and A. Harris, eds (2018) Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’.

Trouillot, M.-R. (1991) ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’.

Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours) in the spring exam period.