240521 SE MM3 Thinking with Things: Anthropological Approaches to Material Culture (2023W)

This course examines anthropological approaches for the study of the material world. From nineteenth century comparative method to contemporary studies of mass consumption, scholars have looked to material culture for anthropological insights. Focusing specifically on objects held in ethnographic museums but setting this in the wider field of material anthropology studies, the course asks: how we learn from and with things?

The course will provide an overview of the theoretical transformations in the field over the past decades discussing notions such as object biographies, agency, sensory engagement with materials, and ontologies of museum objects. Through specific ethnographic case studies, we will further explore wider topics of temporality, memory, and power and the ways in which they can be studied and understood through focus on material culture, past and present. In museum and object-led sessions, students will be invited to visually inspect, carefully handle and to explore the life stories of things in relation to wider anthropological themes. Students will also choose, research, and present on an element of the material world.

At the end of the course students will be able to critically evaluate different approaches to material culture and appreciate material, symbolic, and agentive features of things. Students will gain experience in handling and analysis material culture, develop skills in interdisciplinary thinking and extend and deepen their existing anthropological knowledge through focus on material culture.