Module Content

This module engages the past, present, and future of social anthropology and material culture studies. It is divided into two sections: firstly “Paradigms and Perspectives” and secondly “Topics and Debates”. The first half of the module examines anthropology’s relationship to colonial practices asking whether its methods and concerns encouraged complicity with power, or resistant forms of thinking. The module explores the conditions for anthropology as an ethical praxis in the light of this earlier history. It focuses on research methods, exploring the changing practice of “fieldwork” and changing locations of the field. Questions of representation are engaged with respect to text, images and sound. The first half concludes by exploring the insights of Feminist and Queer anthropology.
The second half, after Reading Week, focuses on specific debates starting with “caste”. Is it specific to South Asia, or it is an expression of a more general hierarchy that is also to found in racist ideologies and practices? Language hierarchies are the next topic, which focuses on subjugated local knowledges. Hierarchies are further subverted in the next session exploring anthropology beyond the human, assessing new anthropological models in the Anthropocene. The module concludes by looking to the future, assessing the value of anthropological knowledge and methods in a rapidly changing world.

Indicative readings:

Dipesh Chakrabarty. 1992. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts” Representations 37:1-26.
	R.C. Jobson. 2020. “the Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019” American Anthropologist 122(2):259-271
	Achille Mbembe, 2021. “Disenclosure”, in Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. New York: Columbia University Press pp. 42-89.
	Steve Feld, “Acoustemology” in Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015.  
	Michael Taussig. 2004. My Cocaine Museum. University of Chicago Pres.
	Boellstorff, T. 2007. ‘Queer Studies in the House of Anthropology’, 
	Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 17–35 
	B. R. Ambedkar Reminiscences of Untouchability. New Delhi: Critical Quest 2011.
	Morris, Rosalind.  2000.  “Writing, Exchange, Translation: A Poetics of the Modern” in The Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Duke University Press, pp. 13-54.
	Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.  2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press 
	Christopher Pinney. 2012 “Anthropology in the New Millennium” in Richard Fardon et. al. The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology. London: Sage. pp. 393-399.
Learning Outcomes

Through taking this module, students can expect to enhance their learning in the following areas:

How to evaluate and construct anthropological arguments
	How to critically evaluate and discuss divergent theoretical and political approaches in the study of social and cultural phenomena
	How to relate theoretical approaches to empirical materials, including ethnographic accounts of social and cultural phenomena
	Understanding the historical development of anthropological thinking and research and its future possibilities
	Exploring the political implications and orientations of different theoretical approaches and paradigms within anthropology
	Relate contemporary debates about the politics and ethics of anthropological research with longer historical trends and trajectories of debate within and beyond the discipline.
Teaching Methods 

The module is taught as a single one-and-a-half lecture per week and eight one-hour discussion classes (tutorials) by faculty in the Social Anthropology and Material Culture sections in the Department. Attendance at tutorials is a requirement of the module.

Additional Information 


There will be one formative essay.
The assessed essay should deal with a different topic than the formative essay.