Social Anthropology, MSc and MPQ, 2018-19

TUTORIAL CURRICULUM 2018-19

Core topics and readings

General guidance for tutorials

For each tutorial students should choose ONE of the three possible essay titles provided and submit
their essay by email in advance of the tutorial to their designated tutor for that topic, following the
tutor’s instructions. The essays are not formally marked, but students can expect both oral and
written feedback from their tutor, and also from their fellow tutees. The tutorial is an opportunity to
explore and discuss, with each other and under the guidance of the tutor, the issues brought up in
the essays.

It is expected that all students will read and reflect carefully upon all of the core readings for each
topic. This is considered the bare minimum to have a first idea of the subject. In addition, students
should pay careful attention to the lectures on that topic. Tutorials have been timed so that you
should be writing essays on a given topic shortly after the relevant lecture(s).

Please note that some topics do not correspond one-for-one to a lecture. In other cases there are
whole lecture series (as with kinship, religion, and ethnicity) and therefore some of the lectures will
come after the relevant tutorial. We hope that over the course of the year you will learn how to
connect, synthesize, reflect upon, and analyse what you learn from a variety of sources—lectures,
classes, tutorials, films, seminars, private study, and life—in a holistic way.

In addition to the core readings on specific topics, each tutor will have their own favourite list of
supplementary readings (which will feature much more ethnography than we have been able to
squeeze into the core readings). Students are very strongly advised to read as much as they can
around the topic and to bear in mind that many rich ethnographies will be highly relevant to several
topics at once. Each tutor’s supplementary reading lists will be provided to you in advance and also
uploaded to the website www.sa-isca.org.uk, where you, as students, once you are issued with a
password, will also be able to make comments, suggest readings, and exchange views as well.

Students are reminded that the vacations are the time when, along with planning their dissertation
and doing any assignments necessary, they should dive into the weighty and fascinating
ethnographic monographs that they have not had time to read in the required slow and detailed
manner during term-time.
MICHAELMAS TERM (Topics 1-5)

Tutorial 1: Societies beyond the State

Tutors: Elizabeth Ewart, David Gellner, David Pratten, Mohammad Talib

Social anthropology began as the study of what were in those days thought to be ‘early’ (‘primitive’)
societies. We would now call these peoples non-state societies or ‘societies beyond the state’. Some
have seen these societies as representing utopian ideals of egalitarianism, communism, and/or
affluence (because they have few needs that are relatively easily satisfied). Anthropologists have
been concerned to show how the lack of a state does not mean that they are necessarily chaotic,
unpredictable, or any more violent than other societies; in some ways they may be better off than
so-called advanced societies.

Tutorial essay questions

Does the absence of a state imply anarchy?

How egalitarian are non-state societies?

Is democracy without a state possible?

Core readings

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. & M. Fortes (eds) 1940. African Political Systems, Introduction and ch. by Evans-
Pritchard.

Woodburn, J. 1982. ‘Egalitarian Societies’ Man (N.S.) 17(3): 431–51.

https://doi.org/10.2307/2801707

Scott, J. 2009. The Art of not being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia. Yale Univ.
Press. Chs. 1, 6, conclusion

Overing, J. 2003. ‘In Praise of the Everyday: Trust and the Art of Social Living in an Amazonian
community’ Ethnos, 68:3, 293-316, https://doi.org/10.1080/0014184032000134469

Graeber, D., 2007. ‘There Never Was a West’. The Anarchist library. org.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west.pdf

Serntedakis, G. 2017. ‘”Solidarity” for Strangers: A Case Study of “Solidarity” Initiatives in Lesvos’
Etnofoor vol. 29(2): 83-98, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26296171

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Tutorial 2: Gender and Personhood

Tutors: Thomas Cousins, Olly Owen, Ana Gutierrez, Ina Zharkevich

This tutorial considers the legacy of the rise of feminist anthropology in the 1970s: a critical
approach to the study of gender categories, roles, and relations in society that sees gender as a
social construct, one that lies at the heart of social life and organizes many other roles and activities.
Ortner and Rosaldo, attempting to explain the universal phenomenon of female subordination,
famously argued that the gender binary mapped on to other binaries, such as nature/culture and
domestic/public; they were in turn critiqued by anthropologists who showed that the latter binaries
were themselves culturally variable. More recently, anthropology has moved away from a focus on
such symbolic constructions to study the dynamic and processual ways in which gender and
sexuality are lived, experienced and ‘performed’.

Tutorial essay questions

To what extent are gender and sexuality culturally constructed?

‘Gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power’ (Joan Scott). Discuss.

Is the subordination of women a universal phenomenon?

Core readings

Ortner, S. 1974. ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ in M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds)
Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford Univ. Press. Reprinted in Ortner, 1996. Making Gender. An
earlier (almost identical) version is available online in Feminist Studies 1(2) (1972): 5-31. See also the
retrospective essay, also in Making Gender: ‘So is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’

Strathern, M. 1980. ‘No Nature, no Culture: The Hagen Case’ in C. MacCormack and M. Strathern
(eds) Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society.
London: Zed Books.

Meigs, A.1990. ‘Multiple Gender Ideologies and Statuses’ in Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions
in the Anthropology of Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Busby, C. 1997. ‘Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Body in
South India and Melanesia’ JRAI 3(2): 261–78.

Astuti, R. 1998. ‘”It’s a boy! It’s a girl!” Reflections on Sex and Gender in Madagascar and Beyond’ in
M. Lambek and A. Strathern (eds) Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and
Melanesia. Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 29–52.

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Tutorial 3: History and Memory

Tutors: David Gellner, David Pratten, Ramon Sarró, Mohammad Talib

Whether, how far, and in what ways, social anthropologists should focus on and try to reconstruct
the histories of the peoples they study has been a bone of contention from the outset. Early British
social anthropology defined itself by means of its rejection of speculative history. It insisted on
studying societies synchronically. Evans-Pritchard was an early dissenter from this view. Thereafter,
anthropologists have increasingly been interested in studying the different ways the past is
remembered, embodied, and conceptualized, both in order to understand the role of the past in the
present and in order to understand the past itself in new and innovative ways.

Tutorial essay questions

Is there a meaningful distinction to be drawn between myth and history?

Are some groups within a society more likely to ‘possess’ history than others, and if so, why?

Is oral history a form of history?

Core readings

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1962 ‘Anthropology and History’ in his Essays in Social Anthropology. London:
Faber and Faber (Chapter 3).

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. ‘Introduction: History and Anthropology’ in his Structural Anthropology. New
York: Basic Books.

Bloch, M. 1977 ‘The Past and the Past in the Present’ Man (N.S.) 12(2): 278–92; republished in Bloch
1989 Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology. Athlone.

Appadurai, A. 1981. ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’ Man 16(2): 201-19.

Connerton, P. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Wirtz, K. 2016. ‘The Living, the Dead and the Immanent: Dialogue across Chronotopes’ HAU 6(1):
343–69.

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Tutorial 4: Gifts and Exchange

Tutors: Ana Gutierrez, Olly Owen, Mohammad Talib, Ina Zharkevich

Marcel Mauss made a foundational intervention with his long essay on The Gift, originally published
in 1923-4. In it he attempted to trace how modern ideas that contrast the supposedly free gift to
supposedly disinterested commercial exchanges evolved from the very different, much more
entangled ideas of earlier times. Ever since, anthropologists have been arguing about what exactly
Mauss meant, whether his ideas apply in a range of ethnographic contexts, and just how it is that
exchanges manage to produce society.

Tutorial essay questions

Do gifts and commodities produce different types of exchange relations?

What makes the recipients of gifts reciprocate?

Is the expression ‘free gift’ a misnomer?

Core readings

Mauss, M. 2016. The Gift, expanded ed., tr. J. Guyer. HAU books. Otherwise, the W.D. Halls 1990 tr.
Is better than the old 1954 tr. by I. Cunnison (though that is worth looking at for the introduction by
Evans-Pritchard). For those who read French, the best version is edited by F. Weber (2007).

Parry, J. 1986. ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift"’ Man (N.S.) 31(3): 453-73.

Weiner, A. 1985. ‘Inalienable Wealth’ American Ethnologist 12: 210-227.

Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in
Melanesia. University of California Press. Chapters 6 and 7.

Gregory C.A. 2016. ‘Exchange’, Ch. 10 of J.G. Carrier & D.B. Gewertz (eds) The Handbook of
Sociocultural Anthropology. Bloomsbury.

Daniels, I. 2009. ‘The “Social Death” of Unused Gifts’ Journal of Material Culture 14: 385-408.

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Tutorial 5: Nature, Environment, and Landscape

Tutors: Thomas Cousins, Ramon Sarró, Ina Zharkevich

While some old models of ethnography may have assumed that the environment is the natural
space where human activity takes place, more sophisticated accounts have argued that every human
activity feeds back upon the environment in which it takes place. Even the ‘wildest’, ‘untouched’, or
‘pristine’ landscape is the outcome of human action and imagination. Furthermore, comparative
approaches suggest that not everyone perceives the environment in the same way; and indeed, that
different people think about concepts like environment, landscape and nature in very different
ways; and further, that persons come into relations with others by means of, and with, non-human
actors, including animals, plants, things, places, landscapes. Divisions between nature/culture,
domestic/wild, human/animal are not universally shared and give rise to very different practices of
composing persons, citizens, or objects. The concept of nature is highly contested and the stakes of
agreeing on a way to perceive and act on ‘the environment’ appear very urgent in contemporary
debates about the Anthropocene. In this tutorial we will discuss the entanglement between
landscape, environment, and human action and imagination. By examining diverse concepts of
nature, ecology, others, can we build a more rigorous and robust understanding of the world(s) in
which we live?

Tutorial essay questions

To what extent are environment and landscape cultural constructs?

Environmentalism is an attempt to re-enchant the world. Discuss.

Why should anthropologists pay attention to indigenous people's views and practices in relation to
their environment?

Core readings

Descola, P. 2002. ‘Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society’ in Adam Kuper (ed.) Conceptualizing
Society. London: Routledge, chapter 5.

Fairhead, J. and M. Leach 1995. ‘False Forest History and Complicit Analysis: Rethinking Some
Western African Environmental Narratives’ World Development 23(6): 1023–35.

Büscher, B. 2016. ‘”Rhino Poaching Is Out of Control!” Violence, Race and the Politics of Hysteria in
Online Conservation’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 48(5): 979–98.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16630988

Cronon, W. 1995. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ in W. Cronon
(ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 69–
90.

Agrawal, A. 2005. ‘Environmentality: Community, Intimate Government, and the Making of

Environmental Subjects in Kumaon India’ Current Anthropology 46(2): 161–90.

Kopnina, H. 2017. ‘Beyond Multispecies Ethnography: Engaging with Violence and Animal Rights in
Anthropology’ Critique of Anthropology 37(3): 333–57.

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HILARY TERM (Topics 6-8)

Tutorial 6: Kinship

Tutors: Thomas Cousins, Elizabeth Ewart, Ana Gutierrez, Ina Zharkevich

Kinship theory is closely linked to the development of social anthropology as a discipline. As befits a
topic that is so central, so multi-faceted, and with a complex history, there are eight lectures in
Hilary Term on Kinship and Social Reproduction. The tutorial aims to give students an overview of
earlier and more recent developments in the study of kinship, and to explore the extent to which
kinship is or should remain central to the discipline today.

Tutorial essay questions

Should we be rethinking kinship theory in light of gender fluidity and critiques of heteronormative
social relations?

Why has kinship been so central to theoretical developments in social anthropology?

Kinship and politics are distinct but related concerns. Discuss.

Core Readings

First read:

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1969 (1949). Chs 2 and 5, ‘The Problem of Incest’ and ‘The Principle of Reciprocity’ in
Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1950. ‘Introduction’ to African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. OUP.

Schneider, D 1972 ‘What is kinship all about?’ in P. Reining (ed.) Kinship Studies in the Morgan
Centennial Year. Washington D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington

Then read:

Carsten, J. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge Univ. Press. Esp. Chs 3 (Gender, Bodies, and Kinship) and 4
(The Person).

Sahlins, M. 2011. ‘What Kinship is (part one)’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1): 2–
19.

Borneman, J. 2010. ‘Caring and Being Cared for: Displacing Marriage, Kinship, Gender and Sexuality’
International Social Science Journal 49(154): 573–84.

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Tutorial 7: Religion and Ritual

Tutors: Inge Daniels, David Pratten, Mohammad Talib, Ina Zharkevich

Questions about religion have been central to anthropology from the beginning: Where does it come
from? Does it work the same in all societies? Are there fundamental ‘needs’ that religion fulfils
everywhere? Is religion always about belief or ‘faith’ as Protestant-influenced traditions presume, or
is it actually more about ritual solidarity and/or interaction with the unseen world? What about
rituals of rebellion? With their studies of multiple societies around the world, and their emphasis on
the vernacular practices of world religions, anthropologists have made a major contribution to the
study of ritual.

Tutorial essay questions

Is there a necessary connection between religion and ritual?

Is there anything wrong with using the word ‘faith’ as a synonym for religion?

What are ritual’s effects, and how are they achieved?

Core readings

Geertz, C. 1973. ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in his Interpretation of Cultures (originally in M.

Banton (ed.) Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (ASA 3), Tavistock, 1966)

Turner, V. 1969. Chapter 3: ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in his The Ritual Process: Structure and
Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Press.

Southwold, M. 1978. ‘Buddhism and the Definition of Religion’ Man (N.S.) 13: 362–79.

Asad, T. 1993. ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’ in his Genealogies of

Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.

Bell, C. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. OUP, Chapters 2 and 3.

Keane, W. 2013. ‘On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of
Transduction’ JRAI 19: 1–17.

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Tutorial 8: Modes of Thought

Tutors: Inge Daniels, Elizabeth Ewart, Olly Owen, Ramon Sarró

Debates about ‘modes of thought’ go back to the earliest days of anthropology when they were
often combined with evolutionary thinking. Some anthropologists, such as Lévy-Bruhl, tried to argue
that so-called primitive thinking is characterized by emotion, mysticism, and intuition rather than
reason and logic as in Western scientific thinking. Others, such as Malinowski, delighted in depicting
his informants as rational maximizers, even if what they were aiming at was not the kind of
accumulation characteristic of the capitalist market. Whether it is possible to characterize a uniquely
‘Western’ or rational mode of thought, and how all other modes might relate to it, remain
controversial questions. Likewise, anthropologists remain divided over whether all human cognition
is fundamentally the same, or rather whether there is radical difference in the ways that the
members of different societies perceive the world (or indeed whether we can even speak of a single
world).

Tutorial essay questions

“Witches, as the Azande imagine them, clearly cannot exist” (E.E. Evans-Pritchard). Discuss.

Does anthropology have a valid method for accessing other people’s worlds and if so, what is it?

‘From an anthropological point of view, science is just one more perspective onto reality’. Discuss.

Core readings

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937 Magic Witchcraft and Oracles among the Azande. Ch. 7.

Either Winch P. 1964. ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ American Philosophical Quarterly 1(4):
307-24; or R. Horton 1967. ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’ Africa 37(2): 155-87;
republished as Ch. 7 in his Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. CUP.

Jackson, M. 1989. ‘The Man who Could Turn himself into an Elephant’ in his Paths Towards a
Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Indiana Univ. Press.

Bloch, M. 1998. ‘Domain-specificity, living kinds and symbolism’, Ch. 4 in his How We Think They
Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. New York: Routledge.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2011. ‘Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes and Other
Truths’ Common Knowledge 17(1): 128-45.

Lima, T. 1999. ‘The Two and its Many: Reflections on Perspectivism in a Tupi Cosmology’ Ethnos 64:
107–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1999.9981592

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TRINITY TERM (Topics 9-10)

Tutorial 9: Ethnicity and Nationalism

Tutors: Ana Gutierrez, Olly Owen, Mohammad Talib, Ina Zharkevich

It was not until the 1960s and 70s that social anthropology began to make a major contribution to
discussions of ethnicity and nationalism. Barth introduced the idea that it was the maintenance of
boundaries that was key, not the ‘cultural stuff’ that the boundaries contained, a powerful anti-
essentialist move that has been very influential. The rise of indigeneity movements (and the
recognition of indigeneity by the UN) has made relations between minority groups, nation-states,
and global bodies still more complex. Meanwhile, globalization and migration have ensured that the
levels of ethnic mixing (in cities like London, Paris, or New York) have reached new heights.

Tutorial essay questions

Are feelings of ethnic or national attachment in any way natural?

Is indigeneity just a special case of ethnicity?

Nationalism emerged in response to colonialism, while ethnicity is a product of globalisation.

Discuss.

Core readings

Barth, F. 1969. ‘Introduction’ and ‘Pathan Identity and its Maintenance’, in Fredrik Barth (ed.), Ethnic
Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Anderson, B. 1991 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (2nd ed.). London & NY: Verso. Chapters 1–5.

Zenkar, O. 2011. ‘Autochthony, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Nationalism: Time-honouring and State-
oriented Modes of Rooting Individual-Territory-Group Triads in a Globalizing World’ Critique of
Anthropology 31(1): 63-81.

Geschiere, P. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochtony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and
Europe. University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1 and 7.

Vertovec, S. 2007 ‘Super-diversity and its Implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 1024–54.

Glick Schiller, N., A. Caglar, & T.C. Guldbrandsen 2006. ‘Beyond the Ethnic Lens: Locality, Globality,
and Born-again Incorporation’ American Ethnologist 33(4): 612-33.

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Tutorial 10: Anthropology, Colonialism, Postcolonialism

Tutors: Thomas Cousins, David Pratten, Ramon Sarró, Mohammad Talib

Anthropological knowledge has been the subject of critique from a number of directions. Some of
the major themes of those critiques include the methods used to generate knowledge of ‘others’,
the key concepts used to understand culture and society, the situated perspectives of those doing
the observing and writing, and the political contexts in which anthropologists have conducted their
work. Is anthropology the daughter of colonialism?

Tutorial essay questions

To what extent has anthropology managed to free itself from its colonial origins?

Anthropological knowledge is merely the stuff of voyeurism and fantasy. Discuss.

‘The other’ and ‘the otherwise’ are two sides of the same coin. Discuss.

Core readings

Asad, T. (ed.) 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press. Introduction and
chapters by Asad (‘Two European Images of Non-European Rule’) and Wendy James (‘The
Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist’).

Mafeje, Archie 2001. Anthropology in Post-Independence Africa: End of an Era and the Problem of
Self-redefinition. Nairobi: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Clifford, J., and G. E. Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Introduction, Afterword, and one of the
following chapters: 3 (Crapanzano), 4 (Rosaldo), 8 (Marcus), or 10 (Rabinow).

Fassin, D. 2014. ‘True Life, Real Lives: Revisiting the Boundaries between Ethnography and Fiction’
American Ethnologist 41(1): 40–55.

Comaroff, J. and J.L Comaroff 2012. ‘Theory from the South: Or, How Euro- America Is Evolving
Toward Africa.’ Anthropological Forum 22 (2): 113–31. doi:10.1080/00664677.2012.694169.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. ‘The Governance of the Prior’ Interventions 3(1): 13–30.
doi:10.1080/1369801X.2011.545575.

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