Details are provided below on the most relevant options taught within the department. Additional options can be found online under their respective postgraduate programmes, and may also be available in other UCL departments (e.g. Information Studies) or other schools within the University of London system (e.g. the School of Oriental and African Studies).
Anthropology of Art & Design
The course is aimed at those who wish to deepen their understanding the place of art and design in society. We will identify the performative, textured and material dimensions of artworks and products of design through cross-cultural case studies and explore the role of the material aesthetic in a world dominated increasingly by digital media and modalities of communication.
Alfred Gell 1998, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory
Alison Clark 2010, Design Anthropology
Svasek, M. 2007., Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production, Pluto Press
Morphy, H. and M. Perkins 2005, The Anthropology of Art, Blackwell
Pinney, C. and N. Thomas (eds) 2001, Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technology of Enchantment, Oxford: Berg
Bourdieu, P. 1996, The Rules of Art, Polity
Mason, Peter 2001, The Lives of Images, Reaktion Books
Anthropology of Consumption & Media
This is a specialist course for postgraduate students only.
The intention of this course is to provide students with an introduction to a relatively new area of study and one that hopefully points some directions towards the future of material culture and anthropological studies. It will not attempt to provide comprehensive and `fair' coverage of the literature in the manner of a second year course. Instead the course will try to bridge the gap between taught courses and academic research work by using the term to pursue certain research ideas and show their value in exploring new areas. The structure of the course follows from this intention. The first part of the term is devoted to different ways we can consider the relationship between media and social relations, this includes an examination of social networking sites, of blogging and of cybersex as well as more traditional forms of media. The final week of this section examines a current research project that tries to assess the impact of new media on long distance parenting by Filipinos. The second part of the term looks at consumption starting with the background literature from various disciplines. It then examines the larger context for modern consumption in the study of capitalism and particular facets of capitalism such as the advertising industry. We then examine consumption in non-capitalist contexts, followed by a study of how people accumulate and divest themselves of goods. A week devoted to a theory of consumption is followed by its application to the study of the home and Christmas as a festival of the home. The course ends with a consideration of theories of value and objectification and the wider poltical and environmental consequences turning to the impact of the internet and mobile phone in the Caribbean.
Week 1 : Old Media
Media Production and Consumption Soap Opera
Week 2 : New Media (Caribbean)
Internet Studies and Mobile Phones
Week 3 : Media & Relationships
Relationships sex and cybersex
Week 4 : Media & Relationships 2
Facebook and social network sites; the Philippines and migration; parenting by New Media
Week 5: reading week
Week 6 : Migration and Media
Impact of media on transnational relationships
Week 7 : Approaches to Consumption
What is consumption, where does it lead? Disciplinary approaches to consumption
Week 8 : Advertising and Capitalism
Local and global consequences of consumption
Week 9: Home and Shopping
Consumtion in the private sphere including the domestic, shopping and the festival of Christmas
Week 10 : Theory: Objectification, Virtualism, and Value
Anthropology of the Built Environment
Buildings are good to think with. This course will explore anthropological approaches to the study of architectural forms. It will focus primarily on the significance of domestic space and public private boundaries, gender and body, the materiality of architectural forms and materials and the study of architectural representations. The course will be structured chronologically beginning with early anthropological encounters with built forms and the philosophical, historical and social context of these approaches up to the present day within anthropology.
Anthropology of Games & Simulation
While being “just a game” is usually a trivializing qualifier reserved for leisure activities and child's play, games are a form of social interaction that have persisted for millennia and are present in all cultures. As a set of practices, artefacts, and protocols, games are distinct from literature or drama, art or audiovisual media, worship or education (though they have overlapped with each). With the proliferation of digital technologies, computer games now challenge the primacy of television and cinema as the dominant entertainment media, and together with professional sports, “games” represent many billions of dollars in revenue. This course will effect a deep reading of games as a key cultural phenomenon and will illuminate the role that anthropologists have to play in their design. The course will begin with classic anthropological work on the games and gameplaying of disparate cultures, gradually moving into the burgeoning game studies literature and ethnographic accounts of diverse forms of play and mimicry. For the final essay, students are tasked with building a “deep reading” of a specific game, simulation, or related event or institution.
Documentary Film and the Anthropological Eye
Through the presentation of a range of ethnographic, documentary, fiction and ‘current affairs/news’ films (including historic material) we will explore the ways in which film can frame and convey ethnographic investigation. We will look at the basic possibilities and limitations of film for going beyond traditional written ethnography to communicate the significance, style and substance of other modes of life as well as considering film as a distinct means to explore social interaction through what you might describe as its ‘call to performance.’
Against the grain of current trends, rather than read films ‘intertextually,’ or as part of a closed world of ‘discourse’ we will endeavour, together, to discover the historical and social contexts in which filmic ethics and aesthetics have developed. It has become fashionable to lament a past when ethnographers were ‘orientalists.’ One of the dangers of such interpretive strategies is that they tend to glorify ourselves in a distorted mirror of ‘post modern otherness’. This course will encourage you to question such naïve (and patronising) approaches.
Practical Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking (Lab-Based)
The course will train students in the practical and creative skills of video and digital technology to represent and document social and ethnographic research to a broadcast standard. For anthropology students there will be a requirement to complete a film theory or film history course as well (ANTHGS17 or ANTHGC19). Each student will be assessed on the quality of a 10-15 minute short documentary to be devised, shot and edited during the course by each student. This course will entail a lab fee for UCL students of £1,000 on top of any fee for a Masters degree to cover the staff costs of putting on this course. Students will have full access to the UCL Anthropology Audio Visual lab with 11 Final Cut Pro enabled Macs as well as cameras for the duration of the course. Students and others from outside UCL may take this course, for an unsubsidised rate of £1,300. Students who bring their own cameras will be reimbursed £180.
Colonial and Postcolonial Visual Culture
Tracing a visual modernity from 1492 onwards, the course examines the role of mimesis in mediating cultural encounters. Case studies include Theodor de Bry's Grand Voyages of the 1590s, Guamon Poma's illustrated Peruvian treatise of 1615, the visual documentation produced during Cook's voyages to the Pacific (1768-79), nineteenth-century Orientalist painting in North Africa and West Asia, the role of photography in European colonisation, and contemporary indigenous communities' use of video and the internet.
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge 1993.
Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery Belknap: Cambridge Mass. 1992
Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: the New World and Techniques of Civilization Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008
Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru University of Texas Press, 2nd edition, 2000.
Bernard Smith European Vision in the South Pacific New Haven:Yale University Press 1985, illustrated 2nd edition.
Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India London: British Library, 2008.
Social Construction of Landscape
This interdisciplinary courses cross-cuts the boundaries of anthropology, archaeology, history and human geography to examine the relationships between landscape and the construction of social identities in the present and the past. Topics include: landscapes, biographies and identities; social values and contested landscapes, concepts of nature and culture, phenomenological approaches to experiencing landscapes, ways of walking, urban landscapes and globalization, landscape gardens and ordinary domestic gardens, the landscapes of Stonehenge. Assessment involves a written project individually chosen by students in consultation with the course tutor. This may involve the use of film and other digital technologies.
Alterity, Experiment & Transgression in Anthropological Thinking
In the 20th century anthropology made a name for itself as a discipline partly by using ethnographic descriptions as a vantage point from which to question assumptions that other disciplines take for granted. While throughout the 20th century this intellectual investment in ‘alterity’ was deemed as a form of professional ‘relativism’, in recent years anthropologists have used ethnography in order to experiment with ways of thinking that go beyond oppositions between relativism and universalism and the assumptions that underlie them. Examining ethnographically-driven experimentations with basic anthropological concepts such as ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘time’, and the ‘person’, the course also explores the transgressive potential of such forms of anthropological thinking in relation to contemporary political concerns. The course is suitable, and may appeal especially, to students with a keen interest in recent theoretical developments in worldwide social anthropology.