Suspended in 2025/26
AN324 Half Unit
The Anthropology of Melanesia
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Prof Michael Scott
Availability
This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Erasmus Reciprocal Programme of Study, Exchange Programme for Students from University of California, Berkeley, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course is freely available to General Course students. It does not require permission.
Requisites
Mutually exclusive courses:
This course cannot be taken with AN205 at any time on the same degree programme.
Course content
This course provides an introduction to selected themes in the anthropology of the region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean known as Melanesia. It gives students a grounding in the contemporary anthropology of the region, primarily through a close reading of three book-length ethnographies.
The three ethnographies, which are all new since 2021, are Tom Bratrud's Fire on the Island, an analysis of the hopes and fears expressed in a Christian charismatic revival on the small island of Ahamb in the nation-state of Vanuatu; Melissa Demian's In Memory of Times to Come, an account of memory, time, and history among a people living on the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea who feel nostalgia for the colonial past; and Matthew Lauer's Sensing Disaster, a study of how nearly everyone on Simbo in the western Solomon Islands managed to escape a destructive tsunami.
These ethnographies not only provide students with focused accounts of three very different national contexts in Melanesia, they also address histories, dynamics, and concerns familiar to people living throughout the region. Furthermore, because the three authors draw on different intellectual antecedents and disciplinary traditions, their work provides an entrée into the most influential theoretical debates animating Pacific anthropology today.
Topics to be traced throughout the course include landscape and place, personhood and sociality, religion and cosmology, the past and the present, colonialism and its consequences, development, globalization, the state, and the nature of ethnographic fieldwork. Engagement with these three books will be enhanced and supplemented by other readings, including works by Pacific Islanders.
Teaching
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.
Formative assessment
Essay (1500 words)
Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.
Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.
Indicative reading
Tom Bratrud, Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (2022); Melissa Demian, In Memory of Times to Come: Ironies of History in Southeastern Papua New Guinea (2021); Matthew Lauer, Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania (2023). Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3000 words)
Key facts
Department: Anthropology
Course Study Period: Autumn Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 6
CEFR Level: Null
Total students 2024/25: Unavailable
Average class size 2024/25: Unavailable
Capped 2024/25: NoCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.