Module ANTH2091: CULTURES AND CLASSIFICATIONS

Department: Anthropology

ANTH2091: CULTURES AND CLASSIFICATIONS

Prerequisites

• ANTH 1061 People and Cultures

Corequisites

• None.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To provide ethnographic perspectives on classification, I.e., a cross-cultural overview of how humans perceive their worlds.
• to look at various forms of classification, including spoken and written language, ritual systems, ideas of the self and kinship.
• to focus on the relationship between classification systems and social organisation in order to build on modules that have been taken in the Level 1.
• To provide students with a solid background in current anthropological theories and enhance their critical and analytical skills.

Content

• Overview of key issues, trends and debates in current anthropological theory.
• Overview of cross-cultural ideals of the self and person, including such themes as the body, gender, the presentation of self, the life-cycle and death.
• Concepts related to kinship, including such themes as achieved versus ascribed status, incest, kinship versus friendship, affinity and alliance.
• The significance of language, including such themes as literacy and media of communication, myth, speech acts and narrative.
• Understanding and classifying the environment, including such themes as space and time, indigenous knowledges and environmentalism.
• Notions of ideology, incorporating ideas of culture as a system of symbols versus culture as embodied/performed.
• Notions of the self, embidoment, gender, agency and human creativity.
• Notions and theorizations of power, consumption, social capital, class, sexuality, agency and human creativity.
• Varying anthropological notions and uses of the idea of classification, from ethnomethodology to culture as text.

Learning Outcomes

• By the end of the module students will: have gained an adequate grounding in the social and cultural anthropology of classification and culture theory.
• Be familiarised with the most prominent, current theories and concepts in social anthropology.

• To be able to analyse other communicative genres, such as ritual performance or visual systems.

• Essay writing.
• Library research.

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Lectures
• Tutorials
• Essay and Class Write-Up
• Essay.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

1000 word essay plan in Term 1; 1000 word draft essay plan in Term 2.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University