BSocSc Social Anthropology

On completion of this unit successful students will be able to:

• Understand what it means to think and argue anthropologically.
• Each section focuses on one or more major theoretical approaches in anthropology, and enables students to understand the differences between them.
• Understand the historical and regional differences in theoretical approaches.
• Use the material in this course to develop more subtle arguments in their written work, and use anthropological theory themselves to develop their own intellectual arguments (e.g. in a dissertation)
• Identify the distinctive contributions made by the Manchester School.
   

This module is team-taught in four blocks of five weeks each. Each week will have a two-hour session consisting of lectures, group discussions and perhaps other tasks as set by the lecturer. For the duration of each block, the relevant lecturer will have a dedicated drop-in office hour reserved for students on this module. All the module details will be available in the modules Blackboard zone.

• 2 x 250 word writing task (worth 20%);
• 2 hour Final Exam (worth 80%);

Electronic and personalised feedback

This list is only indicative of the type of literature that will be used for the course: the lecturer who will be running each block will, in consultation with the course convenor, be free to use the literature that they feel is most appropriate.

Abram, S. & J. Waldren (eds) 1998. Anthropological perspectives on local development: knowledge and sentiments in conflict. London: Routledge.

Austin, J L (1962) How to do things with words:  The William James Lecstures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Besnier, N (2009) Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, University of Hawaii Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1995 (1990). The Logic of Practice (trans.) R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cameron, D (2001), Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage.

Das, Veena. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Douglas, M. (ed.) 1973. Rules and meanings: the anthropology of everyday knowledge - selected readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education.

Duranti, A (2009) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell

Durkheim. E. 2008 [1912]. Elementary forms of Religious Life. Oxford. Trans. Cosman. C.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1992. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Evens, T.M.S. & D. Handelman. 2006. The Manchester School: practice and ethnographic praxis in anthropology. New York ; Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Evens, T M S and D Handelman,(2006), The Manchester School: practic and ethnographic praxis in anthropology. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Fardon, R. (ed.) 1995. Counterworks: managing the diversity of knowledge. London; New York: Routledge.

Fischer, M.M.J. 1999. Emergent forms of life: Anthropologies of late or postmodernities. Annual Review of Anthropology 28, 455-478.

Foucault, M. 1974. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (tr. anon.) London: Tavistock.

Geertz, C. 1983. Local Knowledge: further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Gluckman, M. 1965. Politics, law and ritual in tribal society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hanks, W (1996) Language and Communicative practice.  Boulder, CO: Westview.

Ingold, T. (ed.) 1996. Key debates in anthropology. London, New York: Routledge.

Kapferer. B and Meinert. L (eds.). In the event. Towards an anthropology of generic moments. Social Analysis, 54(3)

Kuklick, H. (ed.) 2008. A new history of anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Leonardo, M.d. (ed.) 1991. Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Levi-Strauss, C. 1977. Structural Anthropology 1 and 2. London: Peregrine Books.

Lewis, I.M. 1999. Arguments with ethnography: comparative approaches to history, politics & religion. London; New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press.

Marcus, G.E. & M.M. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mauss, M. 1990. The Gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. (tr. W.D. Halls) London: Routledge.

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