Culture Across Space and Time

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module examines the relationship of culture to place, difference and identity. Drawing on key theoretical debates and case studies, culture will be explored in the context of social change and crises, incorporating topics such as:

• the impact of globalisation and transnationalism on everyday life
• the impact of consumption on behaviour and life choices
• the changing relations of multiculturalism, racism and marginalisation
• and the representation of culture in public spaces.

Throughout the module cultural issues will be deciphered through the prism of racial, ethnic, class and gender relations at local and global levels.

Culture and the Everyday

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module explores 'doing culture' in everyday life. If the 'everyday' refers to the mundane, the unremarkable - to the forms of life routinely taken for granted - it is also through the practices of everyday life that we experience who we are, how our lives are invested with meanings and we engage with change. In the modern world (especially in the developed north), it is difficult to think about cultures of everyday life without also considering the media: its contribution to the structuring of daily life; its varied use in daily life; and its discursive construction and engagement with aspects of everyday life. The module introduces critical approaches to everyday life, including those engaging with media, before concentrating on a series of case studies. Topics are likely to be organised around the twin foci of 'embodiment' and 'mobility' and include, for example: getting dressed, meal times, time for love, driving and shopping. You will have the opportunity to reflect on your own experiences and to consider, where appropriate, media in relation to everyday life. In addition to this the module will also provide historical and cross-cultural material and encourage study of other cultures.

Key Concepts in Anthropology

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module provides an overview of the big questions that anthropologists have contributed to and the different theoretical paradigms and concepts that they have developed or adopted. The aim is to provide you with a rapid overview of the discipline. It begins with two weeks examining the concepts of Society and Culture and their varied conceptualisations, followed by weeks that take in turn the key characteristics and assumptions of

• British structural functionalism

• methodological individualism and agency

• French structuralism

• British structuralism

• marxism, ideology and hegemony

• poststructuralism

• discourse and power/knowledge

• poststructuralism

• 'practice' and phenomenology.

Practising Cultural Studies

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to the ways in which cultural studies as a theoretical approach can be used to explore aspects of life in the 'globalised world' of the 21st century. The first weeks are devoted to mapping and debating some of the terms cultural studies draws on. In the second half of the term you will try out cultural studies approaches in cross-cultural contexts through the exploration of three selected areas. These may include a social issue (eg migration or 'culture on the move'), a topic engaging with personal experience (eg 'passionate attachments' whether for people, things or ideas), or a topic engaging with cultural objects (eg focusing on the competition in relation to culture – the Turner prize, Booker or Young Musician of the Year on the one hand, Strictly Come Dancing or Master Chef on the other). You will undertake focused cross-disciplinary study through carefully directed research tasks and reading on these topics. Teaching and learning will involve a mix of lectures, seminars, workshops, screenings, individual and group work. Assessment is by submission of an exercise, essay, and group presentation.

The Anthropological Imagination

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

The module aims to convey a sense of anthropology as an exciting, 'living' subject, alive to the concerns of different communities and
populations living across the globe, and as cutting edge in terms of the research conducted by anthropologists at Sussex as they
actively engage with issues of social, cultural and global transformation. This is accomplished through a module structure which
revolves around 5 core themes considered central to the subject which capture anthropological thinking on the subjects of culture,
identity and representation:

• kinship, self and body
• economy as culture
• religion and politics
• and work on the global-local interface.

The Anthropology of Exchange, Money and Markets

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The purpose of this module is to introduce you to how anthropologists have conceptualised, researched, and generated new understandings of the human activities that comprise economic life. Studying economic life from an anthropological view requires us to rethink such concepts as work and leisure, poverty and wealth, gifts and commodities, money and markets, and the term 'economy' itself. Therefore, economic anthropology enables us to critique some of the universalisms of mainstream economics through which capitalism has become naturalised. Traditionally, economic anthropology has been concerned with systems of exchange, non-industrial economies, and livelihood systems. In addition to covering these topics, we will examine issues of contemporary concern such as class, money, debt, shopping, factories, fair trade, globalisation, bioeconomies, and new strategies and practices of resistance.

The Anthropology of Kinship and Relatedness

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

The study of human relatedness and kinship has been central to the history of British social anthropology. This module introduces you to classic and new debates in kinship studies drawing upon material from a wide range of ethnographic contexts to examine the ways in which societies organise and conceptualise human relationships. It is concerned with the transformation of social structures and processes as well as the connections between kin organisations and power in developing and post-industrial societies. The module considers both accepted and more novel ways in thinking about human kinship: how we become related through 'substance', emotion, place and technology, for example. It covers both historical ground as well as the contemporary debates in the study of human relatedness.

Ethnographic Methods

15 credits
Autumn & spring teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to practical, theoretical and ethical issues surrounding ethnographic research in anthropology and the social sciences more generally. Methodological concerns around research design and implementation will be explored through a series of workshops on epistemology, methodology, and ethics.

It introduces you to a range of qualitative research methods, including the research interview, participant-observation and various participatory research methods. The module also introduces you to the analysis of qualitative data and to key issues of writing and representation. It is assessed by a group research project that you conduct by yourself. This project will give you the opportunity to design and conduct an independent piece of ethnographic research around a key anthropological theme, while allowing you to reflect on and apply the theoretical and practical insights gained over the course of the module.

Theory Taste and Trash A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module introduces cultural studies students to theories of good taste and popular culture. It gives a historically-­rooted account of how the study of popular culture came to be established in British higher education, and considers the key theoretical approaches that helped to shape those studies. The module explores the meeting of popular culture and 'the academy', and the intriguing questions it continues to pose concerning hierarchies of taste, questions of value, and definitions of educational worth.

A series of lectures will offer you a historical overview and an introduction to the influence of key writers, theorists and approaches, while the module seminars will encourage you to engage critically with significant texts in the field (from writers such as Hall, Bourdieu and Bakhtin). You will test the interpretive frameworks these texts offer by undertaking some case study analyses of contemporary popular cultural texts and practices (in fields such as television, music, the leisure industries and youth culture).

Anthropology Fieldtrips

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module introduces you to anthropological research in the field through a series of short UK and European based fieldtrips. Each topic is first introduced through a preparatory seminar during which relevant theoretical literature and approaches are discussed. You then meet with tutors at the chosen field-sites in order to conduct your own ethnographic observations and research. Topics may include:

• a consideration of human rights at the International Criminal Courts at the Hague
• a study of urban regeneration and gentrification in East London
• the ethnography of non-place and consumption in a shopping centre.

Culture and Performance

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The module focuses on the anthropological master trope of "culture" and on the political dimensions of representing culture or "cultures". We consider how anthropological understandings of "culture", as well as anthropologists' modes of analysing and representing it in anthropological work, developed over the 20th century, partially in conversation with other disciplines. We also examine how "culture" operates as a key idea in the public domain, used by politicians, community and human rights activists, artists, scientists, museum curators and others in relation to a wide range of issues and debates when distinctions between "ourselves" and "others" are at stake. Finally, we look at some activities within the cultural domain (such as music, dance, theatre, verbal artistry) which have a performative dimension, and consider how anthropologists have approached these activities to address questions about structure and agency, embodiment, experience, art and aesthetics, creativity, power and protest.

Culture, Race and Ethnicity

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the relationship between ideas of culture, race and ethnicity both historically and in contemporary society. You will examine a range of empirical examples that demonstrate how the concepts have been used – sometimes separately, sometimes in interlocking ways – in political projects or movements. There will be particular focus on contructions of 'whiteness'. Examples may include the use of race in 19th-century colonial administration, the politics of ethnicity in postwar London or the rise of the new right in contemporary Europe.

Gender, Space and Culture

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Why is space important to our understanding of communication? How do subjects travel through space in order to construct narratives of identity? How are spaces moralised, sexed and gendered? How do they accrue significance or symbolism?

In the last decade there has been a convergence across many academic disciplines to comprehend spatiality. Social spaces are never empty or static, they are full of the shifting dynamics of power and politics. On this module you will study to what extent gender is articulated in public and private spaces, so that they may be considered to be predominantly feminine, masculine, queer or transgendered. You will also examine how spaces and places are dynamic, unstable and mutable in relation to competing social differences. We will look at a variety of sites of the everyday, from the domestic to the visual, from bodies to landscape and virtual realities using key theoretical concepts such as 'performativity', 'representation' and 'transectionality' to interpret how our culture is thoroughly imbued with gendered and spatialized assumptions.

Topics may include: thinking about gendered journeys such as package holidays or migration; the boundaries and borders of the self; the national and the global; social inclusion and exclusion; and representations of the feminized underclass, or the masculinized professional. We will also consider queer cultural geographies as represented in films; 'freaky bodies' and transexuality online; and the spatial politics of protest on the streets and in the home.

Politics and Power

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module draws on political anthropology and social theory to explore what is for many anthropologists the central concept in the discipline: forms of power. In Western societies the term 'politics' tends to connote a quite narrow range of activities and institutions, typically those focused around parties, government and the state. We shall be using the term 'political' in a much wider sense, and linking it to the operations of power. Power is not a thing, but an aspect of a vast range of relationships from the most local to the global. There can be no neat boundaries around this field of study. Instead our intention is to explore the way the analysis of power has widened and deepened over the last fifty years, and to suggest continuity with economic and cultural processes that you are studying in other modules.

Religion and Ritual

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is concerned with the explanation of religious and ritual phenomena. It explores the key theoretical issues by examining ethnographic material that deals with - among other things - initiation, myth, witchcraft, symbolism and religious experience. There is also some treatment of more 'secular' rituals such as carnival and Christmas. The focus is as much on how people believe as on what they believe; on why they perform rituals as much as what these rituals look like. It explores both classic texts and more recent accounts, to give you a sense of where particular arguments have come from and where they are going.

The Allure of Things

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the circulation of significant objects (material or otherwise) within specific cultural and historical contexts. It analyses the social/cultural/economic relationships which shape and are shaped by the movement of 'things'.  You will gain an understanding of theories of exchange, commoditisation and consumption. These will be set against wider cultural and economic transformations as the result of colonialism, capitalist penetration and globalisation.

Visual Anthropology

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module will familiarise you with theories and applications of visual anthropology. You will have the opportunity to study complex legacies of visual representation in anthropology as well as contemporary, activist visual work. Crossovers between anthropological and other relevant visual epistemologies in the social sciences will be explored. You will also undertake visual research projects.

Anthropology of Fertility, Reproduction and Health

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The module uses social and cultural perspectives to examine academic and policy work in the area of reproduction, sexuality and health. It draws on the insights of medical anthropology, especially in relation to the body, gender and power, to critically reflect on reproduction, sexuality and health issues across the global North and South. A particular concern is with the existence and experience of sexual and reproductive inequalities in diverse social and cultural settings. Contrary to popular belief, reproduction is a process which is as much about men as it is about women, and is studied in the context of, for example, male fertility/infertility, masculinity, fatherhood and male sexual health. The module builds upon the theoretical perspectives introduced in the second year on kinship, procreation, social reproduction, sexuality, personhood, reproductive technologies, human rights and applied anthropology.

Anthropology of the Body

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the body from an anthropological perspective, and considers how different societies and cultures conceptualise and experience the human body. In recent years, anthropologists and other academics have become increasingly interested in the body, including authors such as Foucault and Bourdieu. Some draw upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach with its emphasis on the senses, while others attempted to resolve the tensions between experience and agency. The module asks how the body represents a challenge for anthropological research, and explores recent ethnographic contributions to this field. We consider the body as a site on which social and cultural processes are inscribed, where power relations converge and are articulated, and as a site where agency is performed. Materials are drawn from both non-Western and Western societies.

Class and Popular Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

While constructions of gender, sexuality, 'race' and ethnicity in popular media and culture have been subjected to increasing academic scrutiny in the last decade or so, class has been largely left off the agenda. This module attempts to redress this neglect. It centres on theorisations of class in the cultural sphere, and on a series of debates over the representation of class in a range of examples from popular culture.

You will consider both strategies of 'othering' groups such as the working class and underclass, and also representations of the 'invisible', taken for granted norm of middle-class identity. Topics covered may include: emotions and class - shame, hate, and envy; news, television reality shows and television drama; and embodiment, education, aspiration and respectability.

Comedy and Cultural Belonging

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Comedy is, above all, a cultural form that invites its audiences to feel that they belong – to a social community, a class, a locality, a nation, a subculture, a gender, a sexual identity, an ethnic group, a community of interest, or a complex intersection of several of these. This module explores the relationship between comedy and belonging by considering a number of conceptual fields, such as: theories of the comedic; questions of identity formation; notions of representation and stereotyping; structures of power and resistance; the sexual politics of jokes; concepts of carnival and excess; the idea of a 'national sense of humour'; the use of comic strategies by 'minority' groups; the complexities of camp; and the role of class in cultural consumption. The initial focus would be on 20th-century British popular comedy, and the comic texts and practitioners studied might include Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh, Victoria Wood, the music hall tradition, the Ealing comedies, the Carry On films, Morecambe and Wise, The League of Gentlemen and The Royle Family.

Conflict, Violence and Peace: Critical perspectives

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

In recent years, there has been increased focus on conflict, violence and peace-building in the media, popular literature and aid programmes raising important questions about how these processes are understood and represented and what implications this has for the local and international response and in turn the transformation of conflict and violence. This module will offer critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to the study of conflict, violence and peace drawing on both anthropology and development studies.

Conflict, Violence and Peace: Critical perspectives

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

In recent years, there has been increased focus on conflict, violence and peace-building in the media, popular literature and aid programmes raising important questions about how these processes are understood and represented and what implications this has for the local and international response and in turn the transformation of conflict and violence. This module will offer critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to the study of conflict, violence and peace drawing on both anthropology and development studies.

Consuming Passions

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module explores consumption practices within specific cultural and historical contexts. It introduces you to processes through which objects are made sense of and appropriated by people in their everyday life. At the same time, the module explores consumption as a basic human activity through which people engage and understand their position in the world. It will locate historical and culture-specific consumption practices within wider processes of identity creation and social differentiation. Finally, consumption will be discussed in the context of the development of consumer cultures and globalisation.

Contemporary Social Theory

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module provides a critical assessment of the some of the most prominent sociological theorists in the late 20th century. This period can be described as post-classical in the sense that the various schools of classical sociological theory associated with Marx, Weber, Durkheim and their later followers gave way to a range of new approaches such as those linked to post-structuralism, such as Foucault - as well as to new interpretations of the classical approaches, such as social constructionism, western Marxism and critical theory. The central aim of the module is to show how contemporary thinkers have understood the major transformations in modern society (ie from industrial to post-industrial society, globalisation, new social movements such as feminism, environmental movements, identity politics). This will involve a consideration of some of the most important debates in sociological theory, such as the debates about modernity versus postmodernity, structure versus agency as well as the influence of psychoanalytic social theory emanating from feminist theory and from post-structuralism.

The weekly topics include: social constructionism; Foucault and govementality; Habermas and critical theory; recognition theory (Honneth); marxism after postmodernism; Bourdieu and recent French sociology; poststructuralism and psychoanalysis: Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze; Bauman's postmodern ethics; network theory: Latour and Castells; theories of modernity; cosmopolitanism and social theory; culture and social theory (performativity, Alexander).

Cultures of Colonialism

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module introduces you to the colonial practices, discourses and cultures across the nineteenth century British Empire and their legacies. It examines the British metropole and its colonies within a single analytical framework, tracking the exchange of people, ideas and objects along the networks that connected them. Initially you will cover the main approaches to the study of British colonialism, including traditional imperial history and postcolonialism. The latter part of the module investigates cultural, social and political impacts of British colonialism at specific sites across the empire, including India, North America and New Zealand.

Current Themes in the Anthropology of Latin America

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

The aim of this module is to provide a framework for understanding current anthropological issues in the Latin American region, as well as how Latin American anthropology (both anthropology on Latin America and anthropology by Latin Americans) has contributed to the development of the wider anthropological discipline. Some of the themes covered will engage with anthropological understandings of indigeneity, race, gender, colonialism, nation states and environmentalism. The module will be mostly focused on the Amazonian and Andean regions but will also link to other parts of Latin America. Each week will be centred on ethnographic pieces that offer interesting reflections for contemporary issues as well as anthropological theory.

Environmental Anthropology

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module considers the cross-cultural study of relations between people and their environment. Like the focus of many environmental movements, much recent work in ecological anthropology has been crisis-driven. Whilst covering this literature, the focus of this module will be broader, taking a wider perspective, including the context in which the research itself is being done. Current work on the human dimensions of deforestation, or global climate change, for example, can be informed and strengthened by an understanding of the century-old intellectual lineage of the underlying issues.

The module will therefore cover the evolution of environmental anthropology, using ethnographic exemplars that relate to contemporary environmental issues, whilst at the same time probing debates such as:

• the Nature-Culture trap, and beyond

• Ecology and Social Organisation

• the Politics of Natural Resources and the Environment (including environmental anthropological contributions to mining, resource conflict etc.)

• knowing (and the limits to knowing) and researching the environment

Landscape, Nature and Representation

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module focuses upon the representation of landscapes and nature, and considers the ways in which representations are sites through which ideas, visions and imaginations are set to work. You will assess the production and impact of such representations, critically analysing a range of textual sources from a variety of origins which claim to represent landscape and natures. This will incorporate art, literature, music, the media and cartography.

Medicine and Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Drawing from ethnographic and cross-cultural research, the module will explore the relationships between medicine, culture, and society. After an introduction to some of the classical social anthropological approaches to affliction and healing, we will read a series of medical anthropology ethnographies selected for their different theoretical and analytical approaches to understanding medicine and culture. We will consider interpretative, symbolic, psychoanalytic, 'ethnopsychiatric', and cultural phenomenological approaches for understanding such phenomena as sorcery, possession, exorcism, shamanism, and charismatic healing. We conclude by examining recent approaches to medicine that can be characterised as cultural criticism.

Music, Media and Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the relationship between music and media of all kinds, and questions the ideological structures underpinning the consumption of music in western society. The module focuses on the relationship between musical production and media technologies (the microphone, phonograph, radio and film), the changing role and place of music in society - understood through an analysis of media technologies, the meaning and nature of music and media reception in society, and the political economy of the music industry.

Race, Ethnicity and Identity

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module focuses on theories of race, ethnicity and identity. It applies diverse theoretical approaches to race, ethnicity and identity to historical and contemporary ethnographic contexts. As well as examining the way in which racial and ethnic identities have been constructed across time and space, the module interrogates these constructions with specific reference to:

• the development of anthropology

• slavery and colonialialism

• scientific racism

• postcolonial political regimes

• postcolonial feminism

• conflict and genocide

• identity-based mass violence

• diaspora, transnationalism and the Black Atlantic

• contemporary understandings of race and racism in its myriad forms

• multicultural lives and hybridity.

The Anthropology of Africa

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module introduces you to contemporary anthropological approaches in culture and society in Africa. The guiding thread is an exploration of the relationship between macro and micro levels of analysis in understanding of African society through a selection of thematic lenses (economy, politics, religion, health, gender, conflict, power etc.).

Transnationalism and Identity

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module explores the complex and multiple effects of transnational migration on everyday geographies of home, identification and belonging. The focus will be on the diverse ways in which social and cultural identities are performed in a mobile context. Particular attention will be given to the spatialisation of such identities at a variety of scales (e.g. body, home, community) and the relations between them. Theoretical and empirical research drawn upon in the module will reflect the heterogeneity within and across diasporic groups in terms of class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. You will learn that migrant identities are contingent on historical and geographical context and will situate discussions of the negotiation of belonging within debates on postcolonialism, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.