| Kommentar |
This module introduces students to anthropological approaches to material and visual culture.
Focusing on the relationships between people and ‘things’, the course explores how different peoples have shaped their lives through material and visual culture, from using bodies to transform materials from the environment into objects; incorporating objects into domestic life and home-making; remembering the past through things in museums and heritage sites; consuming and displaying objects, transforming selves in life-cycle rituals such as weddings and funerals; or creating powerful things like 'magic' or 'art'.
Students will become familiar with key theoretical and ethnographic texts in material culture. They will consider how humans depend on things, how things endure to help to tie society together through time as well as how destroying things links to destroying people. Things like dress and architecture are our second skin, but as we depend on and care for them, material culture might become entrapping. Some things might be unruly, fall apart and get difficult to manage.
The ethnographic readings and short practical exercises will help students develop critical understandings of how past peoples have interacted with the material world, what do these interactions tell us about society today and how material culture approaches help us imagining environmentally and socially sustainable futures.
The course will be taught on Zoom in a workshop and presentation format. Depending on the pandemic conditions, the module might include occasional excursions or in-person meetings. The seminar will be in English as will be the required texts. However, students are welcome to speak German in class as well as submit their MAPs in German. Lecture slides and notes will be available to course participants.
Students are encouraged to contact the lecturer about additional learning needs and accessibility arrangements: Magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.de
|
| Literatur |
Appadurai, A. (1988). The social life of things. CUP.
Bernstein, R. (2009). Dances with things: Material culture and the performance of race. Social Text, 27(4), 67-94.
Ingold, T. (2002). The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
Lemonnier, P. (2016). Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Routledge.
Miller, D. (2008). The comfort of things. Polity.
Tarlo, E. (2016). Entanglement: the secret lives of hair. Simon and Schuster.
Tilley, C., Keane, W., Küchler, S., Rowlands, M., & Spyer, P. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook of material culture. Sage.
|
