TLÜ ÕIS

Anthropology of Anthropology

Course code

HIA6324.HT

old course code

Course title in Estonian

Antropoloogia antropoloogiast

Course title in English

Anthropology of Anthropology

ECTS credits

6.0

Assessment form

Examination

lecturer of 2024/2025 Autumn semester

Not opened for teaching. Click the study programme link below to see the nominal division schedule.

lecturer of 2024/2025 Spring semester

Not opened for teaching. Click the study programme link below to see the nominal division schedule.

Course aims

This course provides the basis for reflection on the major trends, ideas, methods and theories in the wide ranging reflexive genre of social anthropology. It will examine some of the main debates, both current and historical that anthropologists have grappled with. Discussions will connect these issues to broader theoretical, methodological and epistemological concerns within the humanities and social sciences.

Brief description of the course

Anthropology has traditionally been conceived as the study of the ‘Other’ and non-Western cultures. The reflexive and critical approaches within the social sciences, especially during the mid-20th century, have re-focused the epistemological lenses of theory and methodology (amongst others ‘ethnography’) back at many such things as the Imperial gaze and Empirical haze, Western intellectual thought and academic pursuits themselves – hence back at the very activities of the discipline itself. This move was accompanied, perhaps even prompted, by an historic shift in the field for accepting the validity of situated studies of the ‘self’, anthropologies at home and even the auto-deconstruction of western intellectual communities. After exploring such epistemological questions, the course examines the effects of recent socio-political transformations in the traditional ways of doing socio-cultural anthropology and of being a card-carrying ‘anthropologist’. Consequently, a number of themes will be dealt with implicitly. These include: identity and the nationalisms of ideas; post-colonialism; multiculturalism; intellectual diasporas and transnational migration of anthropologists; and so on.

Learning outcomes in the course

Upon completing the course the student:
- is expected to be familiar with some topics and approaches that anthropologists have contended with and be able to relate these issues to their own research and practice.

Teacher

Carlo Cubero Irizarry

Study programmes containing that course