Информация для студентов 2021 года набора

Ограничения для выбора образовательным программам: нет

Максимальное число слушателей: 120

Целевая аудитория: студенты 2021 года набора

The Anthropology of Kinship and Gender

Social anthropology explores social and cultural diversity of contemporary world drawing on a distinct research method of ethnography — an in-depth participant observation of human communities and institutions. This English language-taught minor offers a project-oriented introduction to contemporary theories and methods of social anthropology. The minor’s first course introduces anthropological approaches to social and cultural analysis by looking at anthropology’s foundational problematic of kinship and gender. These topics formed the core of anthropology since its inception and constitute vibrant fields of study today. The aim of the course is thus both to convey one of the state-of-the-art areas of anthropological research while also serving as a window into the history of anthropology. 

 The Anthropology of Belief and Knowledge 

Anthropology of belief and knowledge seek an understanding of an understanding: it aims at grasping what people across cultures admit to be true. How various systems of knowledge and belief distinguish the rational and the irrational? What is sense and senselessness? How knowledge, belief, intuition and revelation are distinguished in different social and cultural contexts? How are epistemologies related to aesthetics, ethics, moral order and everyday knowledge practices? We consider these questions by drawing on detailed ethnographies of science and religion. Cases that we explore range from studies of witchcraft and shamanism to laboratory and computer science, from conspiracy theories to knowledge about climate change and different religions.

The Anthropology of Economy and Ethics 

Does the economy constitute an autonomous field of relations, driven by the logic of maximising profit or other outcome? If not, what are relations and value systems where it is embedded? Conversely, what kinds of practicalities and pragmatics different systems of value and ethical orientation engender? These are key questions that are asked by economic anthropology and the anthropology of ethics. Both share these concerns as well as some of the key theorists such as Marx, Weber and Foucault. In this course, we examine issues and concepts of these two fields of anthropology. 

Writing power

This final paper of the social anthropology minor links two themes of this course. The first is political anthropology that looks at hierarchies and relations of power. The second is the linguistic turn (‘writing culture’) of the 1980s that marked a radical shift from ‘classical’ to ‘contemporary’ anthropology. It did so by looking not just the anthropology of home, rather than far away places, but also at the social and political relations between anthropologists and the people, communities and relationships that they studied. This put forward the relations of power between the observer and the observed, and also paved the way to the current prominence of such theorists as Foucault. This course takes this ‘home’ also by looking at case studies from Russia/Eastern Europe.