Информация для студентов 2022 года набора
Ограничения для выбора образовательным программам: нет
Максимальное число слушателей: 60
Целевая аудитория: студенты 2022 года набора
Язык реализации: английский
Дисциплины майнора:
2023-2024
1 семестр - Антропология родства и гендера / The Anthropology of Kinship and Gender
2 семестр - Антропология веры и знания / The Anthropology of Belief and Knowledge
2024-2025
1 семестр - Антропология экономики и этики / The Anthropology of Economy and Ethics
2 семестр - Письмо и власть / Writing Power
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. It does so by looking at anthropology’s foundational problematic of kinship and gender — the 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 are knowledge, belief, intuition and revelation distinguished in different social and cultural contexts? How are epistemologies related to aesthetics, ethics, moral order and everyday knowledge practices, and how are they embedded in forms of society that that articulate and constitute? 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 these different systems of value and ethical orientation engender? These questions are asked both by scholars engaged in the 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 engagement with critical theory that was marked by the linguistic turn of the 1980s (‘writing culture’) and that has designated a radical shift from ‘classical’ to ‘contemporary’ anthropology. This critical theory (Foucault, Haraway, Agamben) also prompts questions about what does it mean to do anthropology ‘at home’, rather than far away places, and what are the relations of power between the observer and the observed — the social and political relations, an hierarchies between anthropologists and the people, communities and relationships that they study.