This module is not currently running in 2022 to 2023.
Since Durkheim, social scientists have explored the ways in which people's thought and ethics reflect the structure of their societies and cultures. Meanwhile, economists, psychologists and moral philosophers have explained human thought and action in terms of individual actors’ beliefs and motivations. Both approaches seem to have important things to teach us, but they also appear to be mutually contradictory.
From at least the 1970s, anthropologists have been making attempts to resolve this tension—which came to be known as the structure and agency problem. Their efforts have given rise to some of the most exciting debates in anthropology from its beginnings down to the most recent issues that divide scholars working in the field today on issues such as the anthropology of ethics. In this module students will learn about the most important of these controversies, learning to address questions such as the following:
• Are you truly responsible for your thoughts and actions or are you just a product of your society?
• If we understand things through cultural categories, can there be real communication with people from other cultures or are we doomed to misunderstand each other?
• Does everyone think about freedom in the same way or is it something specific to western liberal societies?
• Is what we don’t know just as much a product of culture as what we do know?
• Is the concept of 'culture’ helpful or misleading in studying human action?
• Can individuals’ actions be explained in terms of the social functions they fulfil, or only in terms of the individuals’ personal interests?
BSc Anthropology and associated programmes
BA Social Anthropology and associated programmes
Available as an elective module
Total contact hours: 24
Private study hours: 126
Total study hours: 150
Essay 1, 1000 words (40%)
Essay 2, 3000 words (60%)
Reassessment Instrument: 100% coursework
• Hollis, M. & Lukes, S. (1982), Rationality and relativism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Abu-Lughod, L. (1996). 'Writing against culture'. In R. G. Fox (Ed.) Recapturing Anthropology. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.
• Humphrey, C. (2007), 'Alternative freedoms', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 151 (1).
• Mair, J. & Evans, N. H. (2015), 'Ethics across borders: Incommensurability and affinity', HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5 (2).
• Mahmood, S. (2009), Agency, performativity, and the feminist subject. Leiden: Brill.
• Pelkmans, M. ed. 2013, Ethnographies of doubt: Faith and uncertainty in contemporary societies. London: IB Tauris.
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
8.1 understand key debates in the anthropology of belief, thought and ethics, and critically evaluate the arguments that make them up;
8.2 understand how these debates relate to the problem of structure and agency in the social sciences;
8.3 critically evaluate attempts to resolve the question of structure and agency through the use of ethnography;
8.4 construct persuasive written and oral arguments in response to issues raised in the course.
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