History of Anthropological Theory Extended

This course surveys the variety of approaches to the description and analysis of social life in social/cultural anthropology through seminars and the close examination of selected texts. It does so by tracing the development of anthropological theory through the twentieth century, and with reference to its intellectual origins. The course begins by locating anthropology in its contemporary post-colonial context with an examination of critical perspectives on the history of the discipline, and explores the challenge of reading the past from the perspective of the present. It then moves from a consideration of the emergence of 'society' and 'the social' as objects of study, outlines and assesses key aspects of functionalist, structural-functionalist, and structuralist approaches, explores the influence of Marxism and practice theory, examines key aspects of interpretive and symbolic anthropology, and ends with an examination of the implications of globalisation and the post-representational turn for the doing and writing of ethnography.