This module is not currently running in 2021 to 2022.
The curriculum for this module will consist of reading four professional ethnographic monographs in their entirety. The selection of the ethnographies will be determined by thematic conjunction with the thematic topics to be taught in the Advanced Social Anthropology I module, i.e. Kinship and Social Organisation, and Economic Systems. Students will be expected to come to seminars with notes from their reading and will be encouraged to discuss that reading and to relate it to wider anthropological issues raised or implied by the authors of the ethnographies and also dealt with historically and analytically in the co-requisite module Advanced Social Anthropology I. Considerable time will be spent, particularly in the earlier class meetings, on instruction about how to ‘read’ an ethnography e.g. on how to examine its implicit (as opposed to explicit) theoretical assumptions, on how to place it within the historical development of the discipline, on how to evaluate its empirical exemplification of particular theoretical problems, on how to evaluate the relationship between description and analysis, on how to evaluate it contribution to particular issues and topics within anthropology, and on the examination of its structure, presentation and ability to communicate an understanding of a social group through the written word.
6 x 1 Hour Lectures; 6 x 2 Hours Seminars
18 hours
This module contributes:
BA Social Anthropology; Joint Honours; with a Year Abroad
Assessment is by 40% unseen examination and 60% coursework.
Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg (2009) Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paige West (2012) From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Yale Navaro-Yashin (2012) The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Michael Jackson (2000) At Home in the World. Durham: Duke University Press.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
To describe the contents of a number of ethnographic texts.
To identify the authors of specific ethnograhic texts and indicate when and where the fieldwork described in the text was undertaken, as well as their conceptual background of problem-solving.
To discuss the strengths and weaknesses of specific texts.
To relate specific texts to general theoretical anthropological topics, for examples to the analysis of systems of exchange or the practical and ideological operation of descent groups.
To compare and contrast the approaches of different anthropologists and their ethnographies to questions of descriptive representation.
To explain the methods of research specific to the discipline of anthropology and illustrate them with reference to the studied local and regional ethnographies.
To relate their reading for this module to wider conceptual and ethical concerns in anthropology, and within the social sciences in particular.
To relate the dilemmas faced by authors of the reading for this module to the challenges they themselves face as amateur ethnographers
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