ANTH40M15: Anthropology of the Body (Advanced)

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• To provide students with an advanced understanding of how social 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 critically 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 issues of health and wellbeing, on both global and local scales.
• To explore the implications of understanding social and medical anthropology as a fundamentally embodied practice.

• Key theoretical paradigms in social 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:
• Practices of care and therapy.
• Beauty and bodily aesthetics.
• Anthropologies of disability and impairment.
• Commodification and circulation of bodies and body-parts.
• Gendered bodies, queer bodies and reproductive bodies.
• Situated biologies.
• Sensory experience as a social phenomenon.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Demonstrate an advanced understanding of key theoretical paradigms in the anthropology of the body, and relevant critiques of these paradigms.
• Deploy sophisticated theoretical approaches to critique contemporary ethnographic research, and use contemporary research to critique established paradigms of embodied experience as socially contingent.
• Apply anthropological approaches to contemporary questions around health and wellbeing, at global and local scales.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Demonstrate advanced 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 and anthropology of health and wellbeing.
• Be competent in accessing and assimilating specialised research literature of an advanced nature.

Key Skills:

• Demonstrate a high level of competence in the preparation and effective communication of research methods, data, interpretation and arguments in written and oral form.
• Reflect critically 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.
• Re-evaluate ethnography and theory in light of contemporary events and dynamics.

• Lectures introduce students to the course material. They may consist of live presentations, guest lectures, break-out discussions, or other activities as appropriate to the material covered from week to week.
• Seminars will provide students with an opportunity to explore and discuss material from the lectures and readings in depth with their tutors and peers. They may involve student presentations, break-out discussions, or other activities as appropriate to the material covered from week to week.
• Summative assessment is by one 3000-word essay.
• Formative assessment is a 500-word outline of the summative assignment.

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