AN404      One Unit
Anthropology: Theory and Ethnography

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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The aim of this course is to examine the development of anthropological theory and ethnography in the context of colonialism and its ongoing consequences.

The first term focuses primarily on the period before the 1980s, with particular attention to the British, American, and French schools of anthropology and their interrelations.  Work by intellectuals from oppressed minorities, the Global South, and indigenous communities elsewhere will be recognized alongside, and in comparison, with work often regarded as foundational.  Through analytical examination of fieldwork practices, theoretical problems, core concepts, and the politics of exclusion and inclusion, this half of the course will explore how knowledge is produced (and forgotten) in anthropology and how those processes continue to inform disciplinary practice and debates today.  Topics covered may include: expeditionary versus individual fieldwork practices; ethnography as a genre; ethnographic particularism and the problem of comparison; origins and the idea of the ‘primitive’; colonialism and colonial situations; race, culture, and relativism; the promise and perils of popular and public anthropology; gender in anthropology and the gender of the anthropologist; classic sites of theorization such as kinship, totemism, and animism.

The second term  focuses on key debates in anthropology from the 1980s to the present. Beginning with the ‘Writing Culture’ critique, we will examine how challenges to ethnographic authority, postcolonial critique, and practice theory reshaped understandings of core concepts (such as culture, society, power) as well as the method of ethnographic fieldwork. New currents emerged, including debates on ontology, post-humanism, and the Anthropocene, while longstanding concerns with agency, values, and ethics have been reconfigured in light of contemporary issues. Topics explored will include: the crisis of representation; practice, habitus, and structure; multispecies ethnography and ecology; affect and emotion, technology and materiality, system and complexity. Throughout, we situate anthropological knowledge production within shifting historical, political, and social contexts.

The precise emphasis and distribution of topics may vary from year to year.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
2 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Essay (1500 words)

Essay (1500 words)

Formative coursework consists of participation in weekly seminars and the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words in each of the Autumn Term and Winter Term.

Students taking AN404 as an optional course will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of each term. These students will receive feedback on their formative essays from the course teacher.

Students on the MSc Social Anthropology programme, for whom AN404 is a core course, will be informed of their formative submission deadline by their academic mentor early in term. These students will receive feedback on their formative essays from their academic mentor. 

Candea, M. (2019) Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method

Chua, L., and N. Mathur, eds (2018) Who are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology.

Deloria, E. C. (2009 [1988]) Waterlily.

Firmin, A. (2002 [1885]) The Equality of the Human Races.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures.

Graeber, D. and D. Wengrow (2020) The Dawn of Everything.

Hurston, Z. N. (1935) Mules and Men.

Kenyatta, J. (1938) Facing Mount Kenya: Tribal Life of the Gikuyu.

Kuper, A. (2005) The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth.

Laidlaw, J. (2013) The Subject of Virtue.

Larson, F. (2021) Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology.

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind.

Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Mead, M. (1935) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.

Moore, H. (2011) Still Life: Hopes, Desires, and Satisfactions.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012) The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity.

Powdermaker, H. (1966) Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist.

Riberio, G. L., and Escobar, A. eds (2006) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power.

Sahlins, M. (2000) Culture in Practice.

Strathern, M. (1987) The Gender of the Gift.

Srinivas, M. N. (1976) The Remembered Village.

Thomas, M. and A. Harris, eds (2018) Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’.

Trouillot, M.-R. (1991) ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’.

Tsing, A. (2015) Mushroom at the End of the World.

Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period