ANTH40C15: Advanced Studies in the Anthropology of the Body

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• To provide students with an advanced understanding of how socio-cultural anthropologists have understood the relationship between life as a social phenomenon and the body as a material reality.
• To engage critically with contemporary research about bodies and embodied experience as socially contingent phenomenon.
• To evaluate the extent to which study of the body can provide insights into contemporary experience, questions and problems of both a global and local scale.
• To explore the implications of understanding socio-cultural anthropology as a fundamentally embodied practice.

• Key theoretical paradigms in socio-cultural 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:
• Body size, shape and modification - the aesthetics of class and inequality
• Death and dying
• Religion, faith and spirituality as embodied experience.
• Understanding place through bodily movement.
• Anthropologies of disability.
• Commodification and circulation of bodies and body-parts.
• Skin and boundaries where bodies end and begin.
• The senses as socially contingent.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Demonstrate an advanced understanding of key theoretical paradigms in the anthropology of the body, and relevant critiques of these paradigms.
• Deploy advanced theoretical approaches to critique contemporary ethnographic research, and use contemporary research to critique established paradigms of embodied experience as socially contingent.
• Understand how to apply anthropological approaches to the body to contemporary questions and contexts in students everyday lives and beyond.
• Develop knowledge of how to access and assimilate specialised research literature of an advanced nature.

Subject-specific Skills:

• By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Synthesise and critique different anthropological approaches to life as an embodied and material phenomenon, demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of the field.
• Link advanced anthropological theory to contemporary events beyond the classroom.
• Re-evaluate ethnography and theory in light of contemporary events and dynamcis.
• Apply advanced key skills (see below) to core concepts and debates in the anthropology of the body.

Key Skills:

• By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Demonstrate advanced competence in the preparation and effective communication of research methods, data, interpretation and arguments 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 at an advanced level.
• Preparation and effective communication of research methods, data, interpretation and arguments in written form.

• 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 (for instance blog posts, vlogs and message boards) 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.
• Formative assessment (750 word short assignment) will allow students to practice analysing contemporary events using anthropological research and concepts.
• Summative reading log (1000 words) will give students the opportunity to engage critically with anthropological concepts prior to major summative assessment.
• Summative essay (2500-words) will involve students applying concepts and perspectives in social anthropology to relevant contemporary events, questions and dynamics using each to evaluate the other.

Short assignment analysing contemporary events and dynamics through anthropological approaches to the body, and vice versa (750 words or audio/visual equivalent).

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