Eddy Jackson MBE | Media Bot Maven

Social Anthropology MA 

 Ethnography Reading Seminar 

Aims 

 In this course, we will explore what is considered to be the core product of anthropological inquiry: the ethnography. An ethnography is a monograph about the lives, social worlds, and practices of specific people living, dwelling, resting or working in (or travelling between) specific places at a particular time. More often than not they draw on ethnographic fieldwork and contribute to wider anthropological debate. The point of the course is to provide students with a forum in which ethnographies are read, discussed, and analysed in-depth. The course aims to develop critical reading skills. The module is organised around four ethnographies and we will look at how (If at all) they talk to one another. We will read them partly in terms of how they contribute to wider debates within anthropology. We will be concerned with writing styles, issues of voice and evidence, and with locating specific ethnographies in the history of the discipline. The course will be run like an extended and intensive 'book club'. Individual students (identified in advance) will take the lead in presenting different aspects (highlighted in advance) of the specific ethnography under discussion. But all students will be expected to actively participate in reading and discussing all four key texts.  

Learning outcomes 

 Students will be able to build upon their learning and knowledge of these specific ethnographies in their other work for the MA or Diploma in Social Anthropology.  Discussion and course work will help students read ethnography, extract relevant material and get to grips with different ethnographic writing styles and strategies, as well as demonstrate their understanding of the relationship between fieldwork, ethnography and theory within anthropology. The course further enables students to present their ideas orally and in writing and in collaboration with other students and the lecturer. 

Teaching and learning methods 

Lectures 

Overview of the course 

 Four ethnographies 

 Kwon, Hoenik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

 Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and Experience: The religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

 Shostak, Marjorie. 1983 [1981]. Nisa: The life and words of a !Kung woman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 

 Edmonds, Alexander. 2010. Pretty Modern: Beauty, sex and plastic surgery in Brazil. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 

Recommended reading

There are a number of texts that can accompany you in your reading of the four ethnographies listed above. They may act as reference points and provide you with background and additional reading when it comes to writing your essays.  We will dip in and out of some of them over the course. As in much of your studies of Social Anthropology at graduate  level, nothing will be wasted, and the more you read the more you'll get out of your study of Social Anthropology at Manchester. All of the texts listed below would be helpful in expanding your anthropological horizons  (even if it is not obvious at the time of reading), but you are not expected to read them all.  

 Gay y Blasco, Paloma and Huon Wardle. 2007. How to Read Ethnography. Routledge. (NB Available as e-Book through the library) 

 Borneman, John and Abdellah Hammoudi (eds). 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. University of California Press. 

 Atkinson, P. 1990. The Ethnographic Imagination: textual constructions of reality. London: Routledge. 

 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2001. Small places, large issues: an introduction to social and cultural anthropology. London: Pluto Press. 

 Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1997. Anthropological locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press 

 Brettell, Caroline B.  (ed.) 1993. When they read what we write: The politics of ethnography. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. 

 Narayan, Kirin. 1993. How Native Is a Native Anthropologist. American Anthropologist,  95[3]:671-686. 

 Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds). 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography.  Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Key Approaches in Social Anthropology 

Aims 

This course aims to give students a broad grounding in some major theoretical approaches in social and cultural anthropology. At the same time, it places anthropology as a discipline and a practice in its intellectual and social context. The aim is to enable students to understand what anthropology is as a discipline and an institution, what it has tried to achieve and how it has developed, and thus to prepare students to proceed to further, more specialised study in anthropology. 

Learning outcomes 

The specific objectives of the module are that, on completion of it, you should have an advanced grasp of  
 
i) the frameworks anthropologists have used to explain human cultural diversity;  
 
ii) why these frameworks emerged when they did and their strengths and weaknesses; 
 
iii) how anthropology has grown and changed in an interactive, if unequal, encounter with its 'objects' of study;  
 
iv) the challenges facing anthropology today. 

Teaching and learning methods 

Lectures 

Recommended reading 

Overview texts: 

 Barnard, Alan. 2000. History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

 Barth, Fredrik, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. 2010. One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

 Gay y Blasco, Paloma, and Huon Wardle. 2007. How to Read Ethnography. London and New York: Routledge. (available as an e-book via JRUL) 

 Ingold, Tim, ed. 1995. Companion encyclopaedia of anthropology: humanity, culture and social life(London: Routledge). [This is a collection of long essays on different aspects of anthropology.] 

 McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms. 2000. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. 2ndedition. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. 

 Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. Theory of Anthropology Since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26[1]: 126-166. 

 Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing, eds. 2006 (2nd ed.). Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts. London: Routledge. (available as an e-book via JRUL; referred to below as ‘Rapport and Overing’) 

Contemporary Debates in Social Anthropology 

Overview 

This course is designed to provide an in-depth understanding of the development of theoretical approaches and contemporary debates in social anthropology. Its objective is to give students an opportunity to think at a more advanced level about a range of problems relating to the acquisition, production, communication and uses of anthropological knowledge as well as its substantive content and relevance to the world in which we now live. Students will engage with debates concerning anthropological description and its political, historical, philosophical precedents and implications, and its emergence through particular relations and particular discourses. 

Learning outcomes 

 This course will examine the latest debates and anthropological models that have been employed in understanding of the complex dynamic in the domains of society and integration, ideologies of kinship and gender, memory and movement, affect and materiality, political alterity and gift theories, rationality and subjectivity, agency and violence. The course will be based around discussion of key readings and structured debate. All students will be expected to prepare for and engage in set debates in class. This will involve a close reading of the set readings for each week. The debates will be adjudicated and students will get the opportunity to express their own opinions and ground the topics that are debated in everyday experience. Through this process, students will be able to discuss what they have read, how they have understood what they have read, and where and how the insights they have read can be taken further. It is an opportunity to critically evaluate what it is exactly we may be advocating/arguing in anthropology and why. The written assessment for this course will allow students to demonstrate a critical and in-depth understanding of contemporary, on-going debates in anthropology whilst reflecting on the debates and discussion that take place in class. Students learn a great deal by applying their own efforts. Remember, all efforts and input are ways of learning and points of discussion. 

Teaching and learning methods 

The course is structured in ten weeks, with a debate taking place every other week. A lecture one week will be followed by a debate on that topic the following week. 

Recommended reading 

 Kapferer, B. 2013. How anthropologists think: configurations of the exotic. In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (4): 813-36. 

McClancy, J. 2002. Paradise Postponed: The Predicaments of Tourism. In Exotic No More: Anthropology at the Front Line. (Ed. McClancy, J.). Chicago: University of Press.  pp.418-429. 

Documentary and Sensory Media 

Overview 

The course is a combination of practical exercises and critical reflection and each weekly meeting will involve the presentation of work that you have produced for class and discussion about this work against the background of the readings for the week. To prepare you for the practical exercises in the course, there will be a number of workshops which will introduce you to the operation of the sound recording and photography equipment that we have available for use. These will be delivered by the GCVA technician, Bill Brown who will also oversee their maintenance. There will also be a workshop to introduce you to sound editing software, run by the University's Media Centre. Finally, besides the eight class meetings there will be two seminars delivered by visiting lecturers/artists, which focus on the use of audio-visual methods in their own work. Details of the times, locations and subjects of these workshops will be discussed at the first meeting of the semester. 

Aims 

The course addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. The course suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more appropriate forms of representation that are not simply based in text, writing or correspondence theories of truth. We need to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural, and textual forms'for example text and image, image and sound, image and voice. The course argues for a necessary, critical development in our ways of knowing that must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. By employing such an approach, the documentary imperative in most anthropological applications of media might productively be transformed into ethnographically grounded skills and modes of representation, to better communicate the corporeal and sensory dimensions of thinking and being in the world. What'we will ask'is the relationship between the interiority of a person's experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make the experience 'open' to anthropological forms of documentation, theorisation and representation? By concerning itself with the outward appearance of things, social science remains content to deal with and draw conclusions from surface behaviours while writers, philosophers and artists strive to better understand the complex processes of consciousness, inaccessible to the primary senses, which underlie all human behaviour and makes the world meaningful. Moreover, social scientific measures and modes of rhetoric are often too static and fixed to allow for an understanding of the fluidity of time, imagination and experience. The aim of the course is to develop a critically aware and creative approach to cultural analysis, media production and field research. Another objective of the course is to overcome the perceived absences of context, ethical responsibility and intellectual rigor when using images, objects and sounds as primary modes of research and representation and to recognise that certain subjects and experiences are better approached through different combinations of media rather than speech and writing alone. As such, the course will engage students with the following key questions: 
i. What is the relationship between the sensory condition of the environment and the application of different media technologies of record that seek to represent it?  
 
ii. What are the sensory qualities of the medium and the techniques derived from it that can create a representation able to communicate the corporeal presence and forms of social relatedness that constitute the world under study?  
 
iii. What are the dynamics and sensory affects through which representations work to simultaneously reveal the processes of their creation/destruction, and how can these become the locus of new forms of knowledge? 
 
iv. What are the consequences and responsibilities of meetings, exchanges and collaborations between aesthetic practices and anthropology? 

Learning outcomes 

On completion of this unit students will have developed an awareness and appreciation of the potential of particular visual and aural based productions in the following ways: as methods of social engagement; as intellectual projects for critical analysis and as forms of advocacy. They will be able to offer a critical commentary on the limits of existing research techniques and practices of representation and through their own work, demonstrate the potential of new forms and processes. They will have had hands-on experiences of the creation and interpretation of images and sounds and the various possible ways in which they may be applied in anthropological enquiry. 

Teaching and learning methods 

Lectures, Museum visits and film showings. Also there will be workshops in the University's Media Centre on practical techniques of sound and image production. 

Assessment methods 

Students must produce a portfolio comprising a written text and a CD/DVD with audio and visual material. This is worth 100 % of the total marks for the course. The audio-visual material on the CD/DVD will be based on the weekly exercises carried out during the course. The portfolio may re-use the material created for those exercises directly and it may also add new material. The portfolio may bring together audio-visual material and text to address a single research subject of the student's own choosing OR it may select a number of separate subjects each presented on its own terms as an example say of a photo-essay, photo-elicitation, a soundscape recording, a mixed composition of voice, image and sound. The choice of these will be informed by the class exercises and should be discussed with the course giver. 
Overall the written text for the portfolio should not exceed 9000 words, including all references and footnotes and not be less than 6000 words. There is no absolute rule for the number of images or length of sound material presented, but you must discuss this with the course giver. 
The audio-visual material should include some combination of the following: 
1. Spoken word: Recorded by the student or by others. It may therefore be 'found' material or material from an archive. 
2. Images: These may be photographic images created by the student or by others. They may therefore be 'found' material or material from an archive. 'Images' may also include moving images and this can be discussed with the course giver. 
3. Sound: Recorded by the student or by others (and comprising environmental sounds rather than voice, see 1. above). This may be 'found' material or material from an archive. 
4. Text: Typically text included on audio-visual material will be presented as inter-titles. Such text may be ethnographic description, interviews conducted by the student and/or 'found' material or material from an archive.  
Writing of portfolio: A substantial portion (usually at least one third) of the word count of a portfolio will provide an academic context to the work presented (including the audio-visual work) and a background to the subject of the research. However, 'text' here also refers to the writing that may accompany images presented as 'hard-copy' within the portfolio, in the form of a photo-essay. Written text may also include 'found' material or material from an archive 

Recommended reading 

General works and Edited Collections for the course: 
Schneider and Wright. 2006. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Berg Press. 
Schneider and Wright. 2010. Between Art and Anthropology. Berg Press. 
Marcus G.E. & Myers F. R. 1995. The Traffic in Culture: refiguring art and anthropology. University of  
California Press. 
Michael, M & L.Back 2003. (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader. Berg Press. 
Collier, J 1967. Visual Anthropology: photography as a research method. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 
Knowles, C and Sweetman, P eds. 2004. Picturing the social landscape:visual methods and the sociological imagination.  
Rose, G. 2000. Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to Interpreting Visual Objects. Sage Press  
Pink, S. Kurti, L & A. Afonso, eds. 2004. Working Images: Visual research and representation in ethnography. Routledge Press. 
Erlman, V ed. 2004. Hearing Cultures Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Berg Press. 
Makagon, D & Neumann, M (eds) 2009. Recording culture, audio documentary and the ethnographic experience. Sage Press. 
Pink, S. 2006. The Future of Visual Anthropology: engaging the senses, London: Routledge. 
Pink, S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography, London: Sage 
Russell, C. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: the work of film in the age of video. Duke Press. 
Doherty, C. 2009. Situation. MIT Press. 
Johnstone, S. 2008. The Everyday. Whitechapel Gallery Press. 
Evans, D. 2009. Appropriation. Whitechapel Gallery Press. 
Ethnographies for the course: 
Taylor, J.1998 Paper Tangos. Duke University Press. 
Taussig, M.1993. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago University Press. 
Feld, S. 1990. Sound and Sentiment. University of Pennsylvania Press. 
Stewart, K.1996. A Space on the side of the Road. Princeton University Press. 
Ferme M. 2001. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. 
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press 
Biehl J. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press 
Pandolfo. S.1997. Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. University Chicago Press. 
Deger, Jennifer. 2006. Shimmering Screens, making media in an aboriginal community. University of Minnesota Press. 
Bourgois, P and J Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. University of California Press. 
 
Photo-essays 
Berger, J & J. Mohr. 1989. The Seventh Man. Granta Press.  
Brody, H. 1987. Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North. Faber and Faber Press. 
Orwell, G. 1963. Down and Out in London and Paris. Penguin Books. 
Malek Alloula. 1986. The Colonial Harem. University of Minnesota Press. 
Mohr, J & J Berger. 1999. At the Edge of the World. Reaktion Books. 
Said, E &. J. Mohr. 1999. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. Columbia University Press.  
Agee, J & Walker Evans. 1939. Let us now praise famous men. Houghton Mifflin Co. 
Websites: 
1. www.visualanthropology.net 
see essays by - James, A & Boot, J; Prosser, J; Ruby, J. 
2. http://www.photoethnography.com/blog/ 

Anthropology of Vision, Senses and Memory 

Overview 

The course begins by exploring the development of the human eye through cognitive science, evolution and pre-history so as to ascertain the biological possibilities and constraints that shape vision and visual culture. However vision cannot simply be reduced to the mechanics of perception, biological process and the human organism's phylogenetic capacity for seeing, for it is simultaneously a social, political and cultural phenomenon which is continually undergoing transformations throughout history and in relation to different social and cultural environments. Accordingly if we are to better understand the diverse ways of seeing encountered around the world then we must consider the relationship between the eye, brain and body in relation to language, the imagination, culture and power; consider how different visual practices are embodied, naturalised and articulated within different times and places; and how acts of looking not only shape the relations between persons but structure the way they encounter and understand the world. 
 
The course explores how vision has been understood within history and philosophy and then attempt to place this into ethnographic and anthropological context and by considering the role of vision in everyday social life and practices. By considering how relations between persons are framed by power, culture and gender and played out through the glance, the gaze and other ways of looking, one goes beyond the mechanics of perception to form a better understanding of visual processes. It is a journey that takes us from the art and early cave paintings of early humanity and the Sahara to the abstractions of Picasso and mass reproductions of Warhol; from aesthetics to anaesthetics; from regimes to resistance; from the power of 'the gaze' of modernity to the postmodern glance of the contemporary world. 
 
This allows us to look at vision from both a theoretical and embodied practical perspective, that is to say through the lens of art history, philosophy and anthropological theory and in terms of how visual practices are inscribed into people's lived everyday experiences; a journey that draws upon ethnographic examples from around the world including Africa, India, Japan, Melanesia and America. 
 
Week 1: Setting the Stage: Evolution and History of Seeing 
 
Week 2: The Modern Eye: Knowledge, of Vision  
 
Week 4: Crossing Boundaries: Para-aesthetics and Culture  
 
Week 5: The Phenomenology of Landscape and The Urban Eye 
 
Week 6: Surfaces of the World: Body Image and Skin 
 
Week 7: Empire of The Senses: Negations of Vision 
 
Week 8: Perception, Memory and Imagination 
 
Week 9: Images of Death  
 
Week 10: Rethinking Visual Anthropology? 

Aims 

The course is taught with certain overall aims in mind: (1) to convey the content of classic and contemporary understandings about vision and visual culture; (2) to support the development of your own visual, sensory and ethnographic engagement with the world we live in; and (3) to create a space to form new theoretical connections between different disciplinary perspectives on vision and the senses. A better understanding of the place and power of vision within contemporary societies not only constitutes a type of social choice/action but is a preliminary to understanding the world we live in and carrying out effective ethnographic research. 

Recommended reading 

 Selected Readers 

The following readers offer an overview of readings concerning the anthropology of vision, art, aesthetics and the senses. They are good value and highly recommended and might also be worth buying for other courses and for general interest. 

 Howes, D. (ed) 2004 Empire of the Senses Oxford and New York: Berg 

Edwards E & Bhaumik, K (eds) 2008. Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader. Oxford and New 

York: Berg 

Morphy, H and Perkins, M. (eds) 2006 The Anthropology of Art: A Reader. Oxford: 

Blackwell 

Schneider, A and Wright, C (eds) 2010 Between Art and Anthropology, Oxford: Berg 

Jay, M 1994 Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French 

Thought. Berkeley and London: University of California Press 

 
Those without a background in Visual Anthropology and the Anthropology of Art may find the following texts useful for understanding the history of the discipline: 
 
Visual Anthropology: 

Grimshaw, A. 1999. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. 

Cambridge University Press. 

David MacDougall 2005  ‘The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses’. 

Princeton: Princeton University Press 

Pink, S. Kurti, L and Afonso, A (eds) 2004 . Working Images: Visual Research and 

Representation inEthnography. London: Routledge. 

Taylor, L. (ed) 1994 Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review 

New York: Routledge 

Banks, M. 2001 Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage.Press 

Screening Culture 

This course will examine some of the main features of a complex relationship between documentary film-making and anthropology, giving special attention to questions of representation, “truth”, veracity, realism and reality, images of the Other and reflexivity, colonial relations of power, and ethnographic narrative. It will do so by tracing the historical development of various documentary styles through the works of particular authors on a week-by-week basis. This mode of presentation will give students the opportunity to explore the reciprocal influences between the practices and theoretical preoccupations of film and anthropology. They will come to understand how styles of filming relate to different ways of representing the lived world, they reflect the questions and conventions of a certain period while undergoing non-linear changes over time. Students will be expected not only to read around the particular films being shown, but also to watch related films by the same author(s) held in the Film Library of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology or elsewhere. 

Aims 

The principal aim of the course will be to examine the place of 
documentary film in visual anthropology in Europe and North America, through a 
systematic examination of the history of documentary film-making practices since the 
beginning of the twentieth century. The course will concentrate primarily on 
documentary film work that has emerged in some way in dialogue with anthropology 
as an academic discipline, even if appealing at the same time to wider audiences.

Learning outcomes 

Students will become familiar with the main debates surrounding the use of film for anthropological purposes. By reading key critical texts and watching a range of classic films, they will be able to assess critically the limits and possibilities of doing anthropology with images, and to understand what is at stake in the discussion that opposes visuality and textuality.Students will also become aware of power relations surrounding the production of images in research and as ethnographic representation. 

Recommended reading 

Crawford, Peter and David Turton, eds, (1992) Film as Ethnography. Manchester 
University Press. 
Grimshaw, Anna (2001) The Ethnographer’s Eye: ways of seeing in modern 
anthropology. Cambridge. 
Grimshaw, Anna and Amanda Ravetz (2009) Observational Cinema. Indiana 
University Press. 
Henley, Paul (2009) The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the craft of 
ethnographic cinema. University of Chicago Press. 
Loizos, Peter (1993) Innovation in Ethnographic Film Manchester University Press 
MacDonald, Kevin & Mark Cousins, eds.,(1996) Imagining Reality. Faber 
MacDougall, David (1998) Transcultural Cinema. Princeton University Press 
MacDougall, David (2006) The Corporeal Image: film, ethnography and the senses. 
Princeton University 
Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press 
Pink, Sarah (2006) The Future of Visual Anthropology: engaging the senses. 
Routledge. 
Ruby, Jay (2000) Picturing Culture: explorations in film and anthropology University 
of Chicago. 
Taylor, Lucien, ed.(1994) Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990- 
1994 . Routledge. 
Winston, Brian (1995) Claiming the Real. British Film Institute