Required books are purchased at Akademika bookstore or ordered from online booksellers, such as amazon.co.uk. Required books are also available at the University Library (provided the item is held).
Articles in Readers / Compendia can be purchased at the “Kopiutsalget” on the lower floor of Akademika bookstore. Valid student ID and semester card must be presented on purchasing compendia. If “Kopiutsalget” has sold out, 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 https://vpn.uio.no
Seminar: Dependency, welfare and work across the world
Teacher: Keir Cecil James Martin
Across the world the idea of ‘dependency’ is used to characterise particular populations as being backward, idle or in need of intervention. But what does it mean to be ‘dependent’ or to characterise others as being ‘dependent’. Far from being a taken for granted state of existence, what anthropological analysis demonstrates is that the kinds of relations that are characterised as ‘dependency’ vary greatly across cultural and political contexts and the effects of such characterisations are equally variable. In a wide variety of ethnographic contexts, understanding how particular relations and populations come to be described as dependent is central to understanding the rapidly changing political climate that we face today. In this workshop we explore how characterisations of dependency affect the nature of welfare and work for example in different contexts and ask what anthropological research can add to our understanding of this pressing social question.
Syllabus
Required books
@ Ferguson, J. 2015. Give a man a fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution. Duke University Press. 280 pages.
@ Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Duke. 211 pages.
Compendium
Narotzky, S and Smith, G. 2006. From Insecurity to Dependency. Chapter 4 in Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain. University of California Press. Pp.75-97.
Skeggs, B. 2004. The political rhetorics of class. Chapter 5 in Class, Self, Culture. Routledge. Pp.79-96
Strathern, M. 1999. New Economic Forms. Chapter 5 in Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. The Athlone Press. Pp. 89-116.
Articles and Book Chapters
Ferguson, J. 2013. Declarations of Dependence. Labour, personhood and dependence. JRAI. 19. 223-243 (19 pages)
Martin, K. 2008. Your own buai you must buy: the ideology of possessive individualism in Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Forum. 17(3):285-298 (13 pages).
Meth, C. 2004. Ideology and social policy: ‘handouts’ and the spectre of ‘dependency’. Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa. 36:1-30
Morgen, S and Maskovsky, J. 2003. The Anthropology of Welfare ‘Reform’: New Perspectives on US Urban Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era. Annual Review of Anthropology. 32:315-338.
Langer, S and H?ylund, S. 2011. An Anthropology of Welfare: Journeying towards the Good Life. Anthropology in Action. 18(3):1-9 Send pdf.
Young, M, Dench, K and Devron, G. 2006. Managing Diversity. Chapter 11 in The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict. Profile Books. Pp. 205-223. .
Sharma, A. 2007. Engendering Neoliberal Governance: Welfare, Empowerment and State Formation. Chapter 2 in Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in Neoliberal India. University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 30-61
Total: 699 pages.
Seminar: Visual Anthropology: Ethnography, Standards, Experimentation
Teacher: Arnd Schneider
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
Required book
@ Schneider, Arnd / Pasqualino, Caterina (eds.) 2014. Experimental Film and Anthropology co-edited with Caterina Pasqualino, London: Bloomsbury.205 pp. 205 pages
Articles in Readers (kompendium)
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 texts
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. FRONTER
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: Latin American Decolonial Thinking
Teacher: Monica Amador-Jimenez
Among the social science disciplines, anthropology is the one which particularly has been forged alongside colonial encounters. Developing over the time, the discipline has critically transformed its perception of socio-cultural phenomena, and some of its initial research questions and emphases have changed. Partly as a result of struggles for colonial independence and the social movements’ fight for civil, ethnic and women’s rights, anthropology has problematized its own involvement, questioning how applications of concepts contribute towards creating worlds and possibilities, but also represent the projections of the anthropologist’s world over others. This course will give the students an introduction to recent developments of critical Decolonial thinking. This current of thought has its origins in Latin America and the Caribbean -but versions of decoloniality are flourishing also in Africa and Asia, as well as in Europe. Decolonial approaches claim that that coloniality and modernity are not two different or sequential historical social process, but rather are two sides of the same coin, and this point of departure will change the analysis.
The course will familiarize the students with the genealogies of Latin American decoloniality, present the research agenda of its theorists and identify elements of dialogue and difference that decoloniality has with postcoloniality. It will offer an understanding of how current socio-cultural problems seen from a decolonial perspective could provide them with new insights in anthropological analysis, in Latin America and beyond.
Course Requirements
Class Discussion and Attendance
Class Presentation assigned
Syllabus
Required Book
@ Walter D. Mignolo: Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press, series Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History, 2012. Paperback: 416, sider.
Readings
Class 1. Geneology of Latin American Decoloniality
Escobar, Arturo (2007) “Worlds and Knowledge otherwise. The Latin American Modernity-Coloniality research program”. Cultural Studies Volume 21, 2007 - Issue 2-3: Globalization and the De-Colonial Option.
Mignolo, Walter (2012) Introduction, Chapter 1, 2 and 3. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History). Princeton University Press.
Dussel, Enrique and Fornazzari Alessandro. (2002) World-System and "Trans"-Modernity. Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 221-244. Duke University Press.
Class 2. Postcoloniality – Decoloniality, dialogues and differences.
Said, Edward (2003) Introduction of Orientalism, Penguin modern classics, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz (1986) Introduction of Black Skins, White Masks, Pluto Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Introduction and Chapter 4. Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press. antropologas. org
Grosfoguel, Ramon (2007) “The Epistemic decolonial turn", Cultural Studies Vol. 21 , Iss. 2-3, 2007
Gurminder K Bhambra (2014) “Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues”, Postcolonial Studies, 17:2, 115-121. tandfonline.com
Class 3. Geopolitics of Knowledge Production
Grasfoguel, Ramon (2011) Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. Journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1). scholarship.org
Harding, Sandra (2016) Latin American Decolonial Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge, Alliances and Tensions. Science, Technology & Human Values, Volume: 41 issue: 6, page(s): 1063-1087. SAGE Journals.
Walsh, Catherine (2015) Decolonial pedagogies walking and asking. Notes to Paulo Freire from AbyaYala. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 34:1, 9-21. tandfonline.com
De Soussa Santos, Boaventura (2009) A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society, SAGE Vol. 26(7–8): 103–125.
Benjaminsen, Tor A., Hugo Reinert, Espen Sjaastad & Mikkel Nils Sara (2015) Misreading the Arctic landscape: A political ecology of reindeer, carrying capacities, and overstocking in Finnmark, Norway. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 69 , Iss. 4,2015. tandfonline.com
De Soussa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South and the future. Free Access
Class 4. Decoloniality and Feminism
Anzaldua, Gloria (1987). Borderlands/ La Frontera. Free access
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia (2012) “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization” The South Atlantic Quarterly 111:1, Winter. dukejournals.org
Lugones, Maria (2010) “Towards a decolonial feminism”. Hypatia, 25: 742–759. onlinelibrary.Wiley.com
Oyerenke, Oyewumi. (1997) The invention of the Woman. Chapter 2 (Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Oyo-Yorùbá. University of Minnesota Press (Optional)
Suggested video: If you speak Spanish please check-in YouTube: the Islamic Feminism by Sirin Adlbi Sibai: “The Jail of Feminism” Decolonial Islamic Feminism: youtube.com