AN485      Half Unit
Mind and Society

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course will introduce students to different ways in which anthropologists (and others) have sought to understand the human mind in its social and cultural context. It will survey a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives within psychological anthropology and cognate disciplines, including psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic social theory; phenomenological approaches in anthropology; and other anthropological engagements with the psy disciplines. Students will learn to assess the value and limits of various perspectives on the human mind by placing them in dialogue with ethnographic studies of selected mental phenomena and mediating social practices. Specific topics addressed in any given year will reflect the current research interests of the course teacher, but themes include: mental health and illness; the uncanny; the unconscious and freedom; will, trance and hypnosis; psychedelics; dreams; neuroscience and its discontents; neurodiversity; hallucinations and visions; trauma; healing practices; multisensory ethnography; emotions and affect; Classroom teaching will involve some experiential exercises; perceptions of time.

This course will use Cadmus for submitting assessments. This platform is currently being evaluated by LSE for AI-resilient assessment. For more information, visit Cadmus Assessment Edit Tracking - Guidance for Students.

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

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

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 4 of term.

Lepselter, S. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: poetics, power, captivity, and UFOs in the American uncanny. University of Michigan Press

Langlitz, Nicolas. 2013. Neuropsychedelia: The revival of hallucinogen research since the decade of the brain. Univ of California Press

Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. Univ of California Press.

Abi-Rached, J. and Rose, N. 2022. Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Beatty, A. 2019. Emotional Worlds: Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chodorow, N. 1999. The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.  

Grinker, R. 2007. Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. Philadelphia: Basic Books.

Jenkins, J. 2015. Extraordinary conditions: culture and experience in mental illness. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mageo, J., & Sheriff, R.E. (eds.). 2020. New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming. Routledge.

Hollan, Douglas W. 2022."Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds." Annual Review of Anthropology 51

Desjarlais, Robert, and C. Jason Throop. 2011. "Phenomenological approaches in anthropology." Annual review of anthropology 40

Rutherford, Danilyn. 2016 "Affect theory and the empirical." Annual Review of Anthropology 45

Bear, Laura. 2016. "Time as technique." Annual Review of Anthropology 45

Porcello, T., Meintjes, L., Ochoa, A. M., & Samuels, D. W. 2010. “The reorganization of the sensory world.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 39.

Howes, David. 2019 "Multisensory anthropology." Annual Review of Anthropology 48.

Csordas, Thomas J. 1993.  "Somatic modes of attention." Cultural Anthropology 8(2)

Carsten, Janet, ed. 2008. Ghosts of memory: essays on remembrance and relatedness. John Wiley & Sons.

Santo, Diana Espirito. 2022. Spirited histories: technologies, media, and trauma in paranormal Chile. Taylor & Francis.

Murphy, Keith M., and C. Jason Throop, eds. 2010. Toward an Anthropology of the Will. Stanford University Press.

Exam (100%), duration: 480 Minutes in the January exam period