Anthropology, Art, Aesthetics and Material Culture
The study of ‘things’ that we value, produce, consume, and exchange is a growing area of anthropological investigation and theorizing. Anthropological theories of art, aesthetics and material culture including archaeology, regimes of value, consumption, exchange, materiality, exhibition, heritage, and repatriation, to name a few, have been a subject of anthropological attention from the inception of the discipline in the 19th century. Contemporary anthropological studies of art, aesthetics and material culture, continue to draw from these ideas and frameworks, as well as challenge them. Recent anthropology also draws from other areas of scholarly enquiry including literary criticism, history, and science to critique and unpack the world of things and the relationships between things, the world and human life. This course introduces you to a range of theories, approaches and frameworks to help you to develop an understanding of how to study social life from the perspective of things.
Ethnicity and Nationalism
This course examines the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationalism’ as anthropologists and others understand them. These concepts are examined in theoretical terms and with close reference to ethnographic case studies. The case studies are drawn from a range of historical and geographic contexts both in the first and third worlds. The concepts of ethnicity and nationalism are also discussed in relation to gender, space, religion, regionalism, and representation and commoditization (i.e., in visual media, museums, archives, and performance contexts). The aim of the course is to provide you with a theoretically nuanced and ethnographically grounded understanding of ethnicity and nationalism.
Themes in the Ethnography of Islam and Muslim Societies
This course examines key themes in the ethnographic study of Islam and Muslim societies in a range of geographical contexts, with particularly reference to the production, transmission and reception of knowledge. More particularly, the course examines how Muslims transmit and receive scriptural and other types of knowledge through social institutions such as madrasas, learning circles, formal schooling, teachers and other experts, ritual forms, gendered contexts, and everyday practices, and the multiple ways in which Muslim societies frame, articulate, discursively produce and perform ‘Islamic beliefs and practices’. As such, the course examines the oral, textual, visual and kinaesthetic means through which Muslims understand self, community and other, and the social institutions and actors that support, maintain, disseminate and contest such understandings.
The course also explores how knowledge about Muslims and Islam has been framed and constructed by anthropologists amongst others. In this regard it takes as its primary point of departure the critical debates between contemporary anthropologists. In so doing, the course raises critical questions about how social and cultural production of knowledge amongst Muslims in different historical and contemporary contexts may be compared or contextualise. It asks: are there underlying continuities, points of intersection, or common foundations that allow for comparisons between Muslims; to what extent can we speak of ‘Islamic knowledge’? Does the inherent diversity amongst Muslims and the specificity of their particular contextualised experiences and expressions of beliefs and practices negate the possibility of comparison, thereby making null and void and discussion of the study of Islam and Muslim societies?
Themes in Visual Anthropology
This course provides a critical analysis of a range of themes in visual anthropology including the production and use of visual materials such as photographs and film by anthropologists, the epistemological basis on which authority is accorded/denied to the visual in the human sciences, the role of the visual in the formation and articulation of the social, and the differential impact of visual technologies on human societies. The seminar will also include practical sessions on the ethics and use of visual technologies for research.