Module ANTH2257: Anthropology of the Body

Department: Anthropology

ANTH2257: Anthropology of the Body

Prerequisites

• Health, Illness and Society (ANTH1041) OR People and Cultures (ANTH1061)

Corequisites

• None.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To provide students with an advanced understanding of how socio-cultural and medical anthropologists have understood the relationship between life as a social phenomenon and the body as a material reality, particularly in contexts relating to health and wellbeing.
• To engage with contemporary research about bodies and embodied experience as socially contingent phenomena.
• To evaluate how studies of bodily experience and practice can provide insights into contemporary events, questions and problems of both a global and local scale, including those pertaining to health and wellbeing.
• To explore the implications of understanding socio-cultural /medical anthropology as a fundamentally embodied practice.

Content

• Key theoretical paradigms in socio-cultural and medical anthropology addressing life as a material and embodied phenomenon.
• Contemporary ethnographic and theoretical engagements with the body as locus of social meaning and experience. Indicative topics might include:
• symbolic readings of the body; bodily boundaries and porosity, purity politics, gendered, racialised, and classed bodies including in the context of healthcare; practices of care and therapy; disability and impairment; situated biologies; power and governance of the medicalised body; body modification, enhancement, and aesthetics; commodification and circulation of bodies and body-parts; embodied ecologies; death and dying.

Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate understanding of key approaches to the anthropology of the body.
• Apply anthropological approaches to contemporary questions and contexts in students’ everyday lives and beyond.
• Be competent in accessing and assimilating research literature.

• By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Demonstrate in-depth knowledge of anthropological approaches to life as embodied and material.
• Apply key skills (see below) to core concepts and debates in the anthropology of the body.

• By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Demonstrate competence in the gathering, analysis and effective communication of data in written and oral form.
• Reflect on the socially contingent nature of their own embodied experience, and on the embodied nature of their knowledge of the world.
• Link anthropological approaches to the body to contemporary events beyond the classroom.

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

• Lectures will provide students with an outline of key knowledge, approaches and debates in the anthropology of the body, will discuss literature that students should explore, and will provide relevant examples of links to contemporary events and questions.
• Seminars will explore ideas introduced in lectures in further detail, examine their relevance to different ethnographic contexts, and consider how they might be applied to contemporary events and dynamics.
• Interactive components will provide students an opportunity to develop and communicate their own thoughts and ideas with feedback from their peers. Interactive peer-to-peer technologies may be used in formative assessment.
• Preparation for seminars and reading time will allow students to develop their understanding of material prior to seminars and written assignments.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Feedback on one formative assignment. Verbal feedback in seminars.

■ Students who do not attend monitored activities shown under Teaching Methods and Learning Hours, or who fail to complete the summative or formative assessment(s) specified above, may be subject to the Academic Progress procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University.