Anthropology
Key Debates in Contemporary Anthropology
Module code: 001AN
Level 5
15 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Workshop
Assessment modes: Essay, Coursework
This module grounds you in Key Debates in Contemporary Anthropology, building on Key Concepts in Anthropology that provides a basic theoretical framework, and preparing you for Advanced Topics options. Your learning is informed by the debates that vex current anthropological inquiry at Sussex, across the UK and beyond. While these debates draw on broader social theoretical literatures, the aim is to examine how they are mobilised within current empirical anthropological inquiry, and how this can shape wider debates in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Topics will vary but may include:
- perspectivism, ontology and the new orientalism
- society beyond the human: multispecies sociality and the anthropocene
- affect and emotional labour
- precarity, politics and the popular
- secularism, religions and intolerance
- producing and claiming subjectivity and identity
- anthropology beyond ‘ethnography’: fiction, narrative and depicting the social
- anthropology beyond ‘logocentrism’: physicality and performance
- infrastructure, technology and cyborg sociality
- the ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’: anthropology and morality.
Module learning outcomes
- To demonstrate knowledge of a variety of current theoretical debates within anthropology.
- To demonstrate knowledge of anthropological contributions to broader theoretical debates within the social sciences.
- To critically assess/evaluate how key debates in the social sciences are informing contemporary anthropological research and writing.
- To demonstrate how key debates in anthropology are shaped by, and are shaping, contemporary empirical inquiry.