UCL Anthropology

UG Lecture 4pm – 6pm; PG Seminar – Thursday 2pm – 3.30pm

Prof Chris Pinney

This course has three central purposes: to provide a historical introduction to the way in which anthropologists have used photography, to provide a grounding in photographic theory, and to encourage students to think how they might best use photography in their own anthropological projects. We will explore how photography was used both before and after the systematization of fieldwork as the central anthropological method, explore criticisms of photography's "externality", and look at recent ethnographies of  "vernacular" photographic practices. The course is assessed by an essay and a portfolio.

PG Seminar – Tuesday 2pm – 4pm

Dr Rodney Reynolds; Dr Olga Lupu

This course is designed to integrate a short applied placement or internship in an NGO, governmental, community, or business organisation, within a supporting framework of lectures, tutorials, seminars and supervised coursework.  A series of lectures and tutorials will provide instruction on applied studies, including methods training.  In addition to lectures and tutorials, students will have the opportunity to apply their skills in a work environment.   Placements total 10-20 days, usually on a one-day a week basis.  Available opportunities are listed at www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/placements.  Care will be taken to ensure that placements are directly relevant to students' interests and overall programme of study.  Places on this course are limited.

UG Lecture - Thursday 11am – 1pm; PG Seminar Tuesday 1pm – 2pm

Dr Lane DeNicola

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.

UG Lecture – Friday 9-11am; PG Seminar - Thursday 11-1 pm

Dr Joe Calabrese

This course provides a framework by topic on which to construct an analysis of medicine and human wellbeing as practiced in any one system of healing--cosmopolitan, traditional, or hybrid. Examples and readings are drawn from a range of contemporary cultures as well as from ‘classic’ ethnographic texts, addressing in particular how diverse forms of embodiment challenge the anthropologist as participant observer. The course focuses on the ‘therapeutic triangle’ of patient, healer, and community, as well as the manner in which each of these components functions in the construction of illness and wellbeing. In addition, the course examines the cognitive construction of illness and medical expertise, the epistemologies of healing and healing systems, and the ways in which risk and efficacy are understood and managed in therapeutic encounters by individuals and groups.

Seminar - Tuesday 1pm – 2pm

Dr Rebecca Empson

The anthropology of kinship, the study of how we are related and what it means to be related, lies at the heart of the discipline of anthropology. This course will introduce you to classic and new debates in kinship theory. Focusing on topics such as love, sex, social networking sites, houses, the body, ancestors, and the role of the state in shaping family lives and histories, we will see how these topics are being questioned in light of new ethnographic concerns.

Wednesday 9-11am

Dr Michael Yorke

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 course as well (ANTHGS17). 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.

PG Seminar – Monday 9am -11am

Dr Michael Stewart

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.

PG Seminar – Thursday 2pm – 4pm

Dr Rodney Reynolds; Dr Olga Lupu

This course is designed to integrate a short applied placement or internship in an NGO, governmental, community, or business organisation, within a supporting framework of lectures, tutorials, seminars and supervised coursework.  A series of lectures and tutorials will provide instruction on applied studies, including methods training.  In addition to lectures and tutorials, students will have the opportunity to apply their skills in a work environment.   Placements total 10-20 days, usually on a one-day a week basis.  Available opportunities are listed at www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/placements.  Care will be taken to ensure that placements are directly relevant to students' interests and overall programme of study.  Places on this course are limited.

UG Lecture – Tuesday 11-1 pm; PG Seminar – Friday 2pm - 4pm

Prof Susanne Kuechler

The course is aimed at those who wish to deepen their understanding of the material in visual culture. It provides an overview of 19th century theory of style and reveals the long shadow it cast on contemporary art. Both theoretically and materially, the course will focus on 'assemblage' art, tracing phenomena such as the 'scrap-book', collage, and recyclia in western culture as well as contemporary 'non-western' examples as found mainly in the culture of Voodoo, and in the cultures of Oceania.

UG Lecture - Tuesday 2-4 pm; PG Seminar – Tuesday 10am – 11am

Prof Chris Tilley

Landscapes are never inert: people engage with them, re-work them, appropriate them and contest them. They are part of the way in which identities are created and disputed. Criss-crossing between history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions, landscape is a ‘concept of high tension’. It is also an area of study that blows apart from conventional boundaries between disciplines. This course looks at the number of theoretical approaches to the Western Gaze; colonial, indigenous and prehistoric landscapes; contested landscapes; and questions of heritage and ‘wilderness’.

Seminar - Wednesday 4pm – 6pm

Dr Ludovic Coupaye

This seminar series will approach two interrelated topics: the first is the question of technology within anthropology and other social sciences. The second will consider objects as “processes-made-things”, that is, objects as the coalescence of what we call “practices”, “techniques”.  Technology is always about more than material production, but can in fact recruit and produce ontologies and meta-physics.  Through this perspective, we hope to investigate how an anthropology of techniques (disentangled from its colonial and determinist past) contributes to our understanding of the relations between material culture, environment and sociality. Our exploration might take us through a series of examples ranging from indigenous gardening systems to modern transport technology, and from carving or cooking to rituals and magical operations, as well as digital technology. Complementing contemporary approaches of material culture, and issues of heritage, environment, development and technical innovation, these anthropological analyses of techniques show how to link body, mind and materiality through the course of choices, strategies, and actions on materials.

UG Lecture – Thursday 4-6pm; PG Seminar – Friday 11- 1pm

Dr Victor Buchli

Buildings are good to think. 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 form 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.

Prof Danny Miller

As a specialist course for postgraduates this has been designed around research work and to give a sense of how to actually engage with research on media and consumption issues as an anthropologist. The intention is to focus on readings, with a short introductory lecture but mainly a focus upon discussion. For that reason there will be approximately 4 article length readings per week and a strong expectation that students have read these prior to that weeks discussion. The idea is for you to imagine yourselves as potential researchers, the issues that you have to face and the way you draw conclusions from the ethnographic evidence. By the final week we will also turn to the construction of general theory as appropriate to the study of media and consumption, though theoretical issues will be tackled throughout. Two of the weeks will be led by individuals who have recently finished their PhD’s which will also give an opportunity to discuss research while it is still fresh and discuss with them the ethnographic method and how actually one undertakes research. This includes the first week since I am not in London on that date. You might consider purchasing my book Stuff since I use quite a bit of this in the course and it is intended as a teaching volume.

UG Lecture – Tuesday 4-6 pm; PG Seminar – Monday 4-6 pm

Prof Roland Littlewood

Through a series of seminars involving personal reading and presentation, the course examines (a) popular understandings of psychology, self-hood and abnormal experience in different societies, and how they may be organised into a body of knowledge; (b) the relationship between popular and professional notions of "mental illness" and their roots in the wider social, economic and ideological aspects of particular societies, with particular respect to women and minority groups; (c) the contribution of academic psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis to social anthropology.The subjects include the development of colonial psychiatry and of ethno psychiatry; the experience and classification of sickness and dysphoria; is therapy universal?; the cultural specificity of abnormal experience and social response; psychoactive substance use; the self, its body and its emotional states; gender and mental illness; racism and mental illness-symbolic embodiments; psychoanalysis and anthropology.

Thursday 2pm – 4pm

Dr Jennifer Randall

The course covers major dimensions of clinically relevant medical anthropology, but focuses particularly on dimensions of primary care giving in the contemporary UK, and especially among ethnic groups where compliance to therapy is influenced by cultural, ethnic, and religious factors.  Course designed to assist medical students in career choices.

PG Seminar - Monday 2-4pm

Dr Luke Freeman

Much of the twentieth century was spent in an effort to realise various utopian social projects designed by both the left and the right. At the end of that century a darker view of human potentialities has re-emerged and this course examines some of the main issues in political and economic anthropology in the light of recent developments. The issues raised in the course also concern debates regarding the basis of social anthropology, and the political implications of its practice.

Course Topics: Gift and Commodity, property, peasant farming; the nation state; political violence; the politics of identity.

Thursday 11am -1pm

Dr Charles Stewart

This course aims to familiarise the student with the major anthropological approaches to religion. Different topics will be studied week by week and will include belief, magic and science, possession/shamanism, religious experience and reflexivity, the Protestant ethic, new religions, syncretism and fundamentalism. A solid background knowledge of social anthropology will be assumed.

PG Seminar – Friday 9am -11 am

Dr Allen Abramson

This course sets out to explore risk, power and uncertainty. Why so? Because, increasingly, late modern settings come to be specified and evaluated in terms of the hazards, risks and uncertainties they appear to generate: more so, perhaps, than the inequities, oppressions and alienations that formerly characterised the social analysis of modern malaise. The extent of this shift; the reasons for it; the place of power in its operation; its socio-cultural (and indeed, cosmological) implications are all matters of controversy that need to be rigorously examined. The course begins with a brief survey of pre-modern notions of fate, destiny and magical protection; moves onto consider key contributions in the anthropology of risk (Douglas); assesses the applicability of the concept of 'chaos' in socio-cultural anthropology; and concludes with a critical examination of the sociology of 'the risk society' (Beck) and associated ideas. The second part of the course tackles a series of special issues chosen from areas of science, environment, medicine, politics, marginality, material culture, art, finance, gambling and extreme play. It is intended that the course will link together social, biological and material cultural trends in contemporary anthropology.

UG Lecture – Thursday 11-1 pm; PG Seminar – Thursday 2-4 pm

Dr Ruth Mandel

This course focuses on theories and practices of ethnicity, race and nationalism. The reading material is divided between theoretical work on these issues and a variety of ethnographic examples. Though most of the readings are contemporary, historical sources will be used as well. The course will combine lectures, seminar discussion, student presentations, and a few relevant films. Attendance at all sessions is a requirement.

UG Lecture – Monday 11-1pm; PG Seminar – 12noon – 1pm

Dr Alex Argenti-Pillen

This course explores the linguistic construction of gendered cultures. It is built around a set of key ethnographies on language and gender:

• Veiled sentiments - Abu-Lughod
• The hidden life of girls – Goodwin
• Masking terror – Argenti
• Vicarious language – Inoue
• Pronouncing and persevering – Hirsch
• Eloquence in trouble - Wilce
• I could speak until tomorrow – Barber
• Gender in Crisis - Peteet
• In the realm of the diamond queen - Tsing
• Beauty and power – Johnson

The lectures include multi-media presentations, and draw on theory within contemporary linguistic anthropology. First of all we consider linguistic relativism, and the language socialization of boys and girls in differing cultural contexts. This initial debate provides a framework to consider gendered affective regimes, soundscapes, and verbal art. Finally, we consider the impact of rapid cultural change, globalization and modernization on language and gender: the loss of genres/gender, the postmodern construction of voices, and emerging rhetorical and ironic selves.

Friday 11am - 1pm, 4pm - 7pm

Dr Michael Yorke

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 course as well (ANTHGS17). 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.

PG Seminar – Thursday 2-4 pm

Prof Sara Randall

The course introduces students to a range of development related issues in population through examining topical issues, which are relevant to development and development interventions with a particular focus on fertility and mortality in developing countries. Data collection methods are a constant theme and we reflect on how these influence both academic and interventionist perspectives on population. There is an introductory meeting followed by 10 seminars where students are expected to present key issues from articles they have read, followed by more general discussion. Students may choose to also attend some of the Population Studies (ANTH7005) lectures in Term 1. Each student will submit two essays. The one with the higher mark will be put forward for assessment

Seminar – Tuesday 11 am-1 pm

Prof Katherine Homewood

This course introduces the ecology of four different types of rural production system in less developed countries: Gathering/hunting societies, farmers, pastoralists and fishers. The course will run from halfway through Term 1 through to the end of Term 2.  It combines social and natural sciences approaches to the study of rural populations in developing countries. Starting with rather separate bodies of knowledge the course aims to integrate insights and perspectives from the different disciplines as the course goes along. You may find the following journals useful general browsing: Human Ecology, Development and Change.

Meetings commonly involve an hour of staff talks outlining general principles behind the topic, and an hour of student presentations and discussion - these are backed up by several hours directed reading each week.