Required books can be borrowed from the University Library (provide the item is held). Some books are available in E-book format. Books can be purchased from the local bookstore Akademika Blindern or ordered from online booksellers, such as amazon.co.uk.
Compendium has to be purchased from “Kopiutsalget”, the department on the lower floor of Akademika bookstore. Valid student ID and semester card must be presented upon the purchase. If “Kopiutsalget” has sold out of a compendium, please contact the department as early as possible in the semester in order that more may be obtained.
Many of the online articles require that you use a computer within the university network. If outside the university network, open your web browser and go to UiO Network services
Seminar 1: Visual Anthropology: Ethnography, Standards, Experimentation
Teacher: Arnd Schneider
About the course
This course will introduce to some of the most exciting theoretical discussions in contemporary anthropology, which have to do with the status of images (moving & still // film/video & photography) as a source of knowledge, research tool, and mode of representation. Rather than being mere illustrations (such as photos in the majority of anthropological literature), or indices of things, people or events (such as in mainstream documentary film), images are here understood as producing themselves knowledge, theory and argument.
Such a renewed theoretical focus on and with images is required not only to understand our increasingly mediatized global world, but also the image use in radically different societies, and indeed by anthropologists themselves.
We will have lectures, discussions based on readings, and student presentations. In the presentations students are invited to present their own photos or film-clips from fieldwork (or, alternatively, other examples from film/video & photography), and discuss them in light of the literature.
The course will be useful not only for analysis of and with the visual in our global world, but also for students wanting to think through ‘visually’ their fieldwork notes when writing their MA thesis.
Syllabus
Book
@ Schneider, Arnd / Pasqualino, Caterina (eds.) 2014. Experimental Film and Anthropology co-edited with Caterina Pasqualino, London: Bloomsbury.205 pp. 205 pages
Compendium
Durington, Matthew / Ruby, Jay 2011. Ethnographic Film. Made to be Seen: Histories of Visual Anthropology. Eds. Jay Ruby /Marcus Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp.190 -208. 18 pages.
Edwards, Elizabeth. Tracing Photography. Made to be Seen: Histories of Visual Anthropology. Eds. Jay Ruby /Marcus Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp.159 -190. 31 pages.
Grimshaw, Anna 2001. The innocent eye: Flaherty, Malinowski, and the romantic quest. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology (ch. 3). Anna Grimshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.pp.44-68. 24 pages.
Grimshaw, Anna 2001.Cinema and anthropology in the postwar world. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology (ch. 5). Anna Grimshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.pp. 71- 89. 18 pages.
Hoskins, Janet 1993. “Why we Cried to See Him Again”: Indonesian Villagers’ Responses to the Filmic Disruption of Time. Anthropological Film and Video in the 1990s. Ed. Jack R. Rollwagen. Brockport, N.Y.: The Institute. pp. 77 – 103. 26 pages.
Kapferer, Bruce 2013. Montage and Time: Deleuze, Cinema, and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite. Transcultural Montage. Eds. Christian Suhr / Rane Willerslev. Oxford: Berghahn. pp. 20 -39. 19 pages.
Krings, Martin 2013. Karishika with Kiswahili Flavor: A Nollywood Film Retold by a Tanzanian Video Narrator. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Eds. Matthias Krings / Onookome Okome. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pp. 306 -326. 20 pages.
Schneider, Arnd 2011. Unfinished Dialogues: Notes towards an Alternative History of Art and Anthropology. Made to be Seen: Histories of Visual Anthropology. Eds. Jay Ruby /Marcus Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press pp. 108-135. 27 pages.
Schneider, Arnd. 2011. Expanded Visions: Rethinking Anthropological Research and Representation trough Experimental Film”, Redrawing Anthropology: Matererials, Movements, Lines, ed. Tim Ingold, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. pp. 177 – 194. 17 pages.
Schneider, Arnd 2006.Setting up Roots: On the Set of a Cinema Movie in a Mapuche Reservation. Appropriation as Practice:Art and Identity in Argentina. Arnd Schneider. New York: Palgrave.pp . 111 -131. 20 pages.
Online articles
Banks, Marcus. 2001. Chapter 2 "Encountering the Visual" and Chapter 5 "Making Images", in Marcus Banks: Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage, pp. 13 -48 (35 pages) and pp. 111-137 (26 pages). sagepub
Larkin, Brian 2002. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Eds. Faye Ginsburg / Lila Abu-Lughod/Brian Larkin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 319 -336. 17 pages. CANVAS
MacDougall, David. 1997. The Visual in Anthropology. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. Eds. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 276 – 295. 19 pages. CSCs.res.in
MacDougall, David. 1998. Beyond Observational Cinema. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 125 – 139. 14 pages. alexanderstreet.com
Marcus, George 1995. The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage”, Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereux /Roger Hillman, Berkeley: University of California Press.pp. 35 – 55. 20 pages. lib.umich.edu
Pandian, Anand 2011. Reel time: Ethnography and the historical ontology of the cinematic image. Screen 52(2) 193 – 214. 21 pages. oxfordjournals.org
Suhr, Christian / Willerslev, Rane. 2012. “Can Film Show the Invisible? The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking,” Current Anthropology, 53 (3), 2012, pp. 282–301. 19 pages. jstor.org
Seminar 2: Entanglements: Humans and nonhumans in contemporary anthropology
Teacher: Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme
About the course
While animals and materials have always played a role in anthropology, anthropologists have currently began thinking anew about how humans and nonhumans interrelate. In this course, we explore some of the emerging perspectives on humans and nonhumans relations with a particular attention to the political dimensions of these relations. We will look at how anthropologists address entanglements of humans and nonhumans, and we will discuss how these insights invite us to think differently about central themes in anthropology such as for instance subjects, power, ethics and agency. We will read both theoretical contributions and ethnographies that in various ways challenge us to think critically about what being human actually entails and about how to address the politics inherent in human-nonhuman entanglements.
The course will be given in English if there is at least one non-Norwegian speaker in the group. Otherwise, the language will be Norwegian.
Syllabus
Books
@ Anand, Nikhil (2017), Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai, Durham: Duke University Press. (312 pages). E-book UiB Library
@ Nading, Alex M. (2014), Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement, Berkeley: University of California Press. (288 pages). E-book UiB Library soon available
Online articles
Appel, Hannah, Anand, Nikhil and Gupta, Akhil (2015), “The infrastructure toolbox”, Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, September 24. Pick one of the posts in the series.
Appel, Hannah, Anand, Nikhil and Gupta, Akhil (2018): “Introduction: Temporality, Politics and the Promise of Infrastructure”, in The Promise of Infrastructure, N. Anand, A. Gupta and H. Appel (eds.), Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-38.
Barad, Karen (2003), “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3), 801-831.
Blanchette, Alex (2015), “Herding species: Biosecurity, posthuman labor, and the American industrial pig”, Cultural Anthropology 30(4): 640-669.
Bocci, Paolo (2017), “Tangles of care: Killing goats to save tortoises on the Galápagos islands”, Cultural Anthropology 32(3): 424-449.
Candea, Matei (2010), “I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat: Engagement and detachment in human- animal relations”, American Ethnologist 37(2): 241-258. jstor.org
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (2010), “Introducing the New Materialisms”, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, D. Coole and S. Frost (eds.), Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-43. E-book UiO Library
Haraway, Donna (2008), “When species meet: Introductions”, in When Species Meet, Donna Haraway, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3-44. E-book UiO Library
Hodder, Ian (2016), “Human-thing entanglement: a long-term view”, Chapter 2 in Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement, Ian Hodder, pp.13-25. (Open Access).
Ingold, Tim (2007), “Materials against materiality”, Archeological Dialogues 14(1): 1-16. oria
Kirksey, S. Eben and Helmreich, Stefan (2010), “The emergence of multispecies ethnography”, Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545-576. oria
Larkin, Brian (2013), “The politics and poetics of infrastructure”, Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-343.
Murphy, Michelle (2017), “Alterlife and decolonial chemical relations”, Cultural Anthropology 32(4):494-503.
Paxson, Heather and Helmreich, Stefan (2014), “The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas”, Social Studies of Science 44(2): 165-193. jstor.org
Pétursdóttir, ?óra and Olsen, Bj?rnar (2017), “Theory adrift: The matter of archeological theorizing”, Journal of Social Archeology 18(1): 97-117. oria
Roberts, Elizabeth F. S. (2017), “What gets inside: Violent entanglements and toxic boundaries in Mexico City”, Cultural Anthropology 32(4): 592-619.
Shapiro, Nicholas (2015), “Attuning to the chemosphere: Domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime”, Cultural Anthropology 30(3): 368-393.
Seminar 3: Signs in Performance: The Study of Language and Semiotics in Ritual and Political Contexts
Teacher: Matt Tomlinson
Anthropological understandings of how language and signs work—their use in performance, their effects, and related ideologies— have gained depth and nuance in recent decades. Rather than settle debates with clear-cut answers, however, studies of language and signs have often prompted new questions. This course is an overview of some of the approaches taken and questions raised in the anthropological study of language, signs, and performance, especially within ritual and political contexts.
The course is organized in four thematic sections: dialogue; performance; translation and semiotic ideologies; and narrative.
Syllabus
Readings part one: Dialogue
The course begins with a consideration of dialogue and “dialogism” as well as their under-studied counterparts, monologue and monologism. To what extent is speech crafted in response to the words of the past and the responses one expects in the future? How do speakers present their own words as products of different voices—as consensual common opinions or, conversely, as singular unchallengable truths?
Bakhtin, M.M. The Problem of Speech Genres. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. [42 pages].
Keane, Webb. 1999. Voice. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1): 271-273. [3 pages]. jstor.org
Howell, Signe. 1994. Singing to the Spirits and Praying to the Ancestors: A Comparative Study of Chewong and Lio Invocations. L’Homme 34(132): 15-34. [18 pages]. jstor.org
Kulick, Don. 1993. Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender in Domestic Arguments in a New Guinea Village. Cultural Anthropology 8(4): 510-541. [31 pages]. jstor.org
Rumsey, Alan. 2017. Monologue and Dialogism in Highland New Guinea Verbal Art. In The Monologic Imagination, eds. Matt Tomlinson and Julian Millie, pp. 59-79. New York: Oxford University Press. [20 pages]. E-book UiO Library
Readings part two: Performance
The second part focuses on performance. What counts as “performance” in the first place, and what respective roles do speakers and audiences take in shaping performance? What is the relationship between performance and “performativity”? What real-world effects do performances have in such areas as politics, religion, and education?
Geertz, Clifford. 1972. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Daedalus 101(1): 1-37. [37 pages]. jstor.org
Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality. American Ethnologist 12(4): 707-724. [17 pages]. jstor.org
Barth, Fredrik. 1990. The Guru and the Conjurer: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Man (n.s.) 25(4): 640-653. [13 pages]. jstor.org
Kaell, Hillary. 2016. Can Pilgrimage Fail?: Intent, Efficacy, and Evangelical Trips to the Holy Land. Journal of Contemporary Religion 31(3): 393-408. [15 pages]. oria
Readings part three: Translation and semiotic ideologies
The third section of the course focuses on “metalanguage” (language about language), translation, and semiotic ideologies (expectations of how signs and symbols “work” in the world). How do the expectations people have about signs (and language more generally) affect the ways we think about subjectivity, responsibility, and larger existential questions?
Handman, Courtney. 2010. Events of Translation: Intertextuality and Christian Ethnotheologies of Change among Guhu-Samane, Papua New Guinea. American Anthropologist 112(4): 576-588. [12 pages]. oria
Kolshus, Thorgeir. 2016. Mana on the Move: Why Empirical Anchorage Trumps Philosophical Drift. In New Mana: Transformations in a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures, eds. Matt Tomlinson and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, pp. 155-182. Canberra: ANU Press. [27 pages]. oria
Robbins, Joel. 2001. God Is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language, and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society. American Anthropologist 103(4): 901-912. [11 pages]. jstor.org
Tomlinson, Matt. 2012. God Speaking to God: Translation and Unintelligibility at a Fijian Pentecostal Crusade. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 23(3): 274-289. [15 pages]. oria
Readings part four: Narrative
In the fourth and final section, the discussion turns to narrative. To give the theme coherence, we will focus on narratives of life and death. What role might narratives play in mediating experience and representation? What are the different political and religious purposes to which stories about life and death are put?
Kolshus, Thorgeir, and Even Hovdhaugen. 2010. Reassessing the Death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson. Journal of Pacific History 45(3): 331-355. [24 pages]. oria
Kalvig, Anne. 2017. The Rise of Contemporary Spiritualism: Concepts and Controversies in Talking to the Dead, chapter 3 (“Communication with the Dead Today”) and chapter 4 (“Spiritualist Messages and the Appeal to Women”). Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge. [34 pages). E-book UiO Library
Ortner, Sherry B. 1997. Thick Resistance: Death and the Cultural Construction of Agency in Himalayan Mountaineering. Representations 59: 135-162. [27 pages]. jstor.org