AT4514 Advanced Theory Lecture 1

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AT4514 Advanced Theory Lecture 1

• If this is the world we live
• Bunting
• Foucault (Slides)
• Strathern and ways of life
• Ten years off your life
• Democracy
• Colonialism and global governance
• How to do anthropology agency and determination

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AT4514- Lecture 1

• Michel Foucault attempted to demonstrate in The
  order of things that the very figure of Man as
  a historically situated discursive invention less
  than two hundred years old, not a millennial fact
  that anthropology simply took up as its object of
  study. Foucault famously concluded his book by
  wondering

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AT4514 Lecture 1

• If those arrangements were to disappear as they
  appeared, if some event of which we can at the
  moment do no more than sense the possibility
  the one can certainly wager that man would be
  erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of
  the sea (1970370) Palson Rabinow 1999.
  Iceland the case of a national human genome
  project. AT

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AT4514 Lecture 1

• What this course is not
• A chronology of theory in anthropology since the
  1960s.
• A comprehensive overview of anthropological
  theory now.

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AT4514 Lecture 1

• What this course attempts to offer
• An insight into the topics anthropologists now
  deal with, and how they deal with them. The
  theoretical ideas, the analytical concepts they
  employ.
• Topics vs. theory.

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AT4514 Lecture 1

• Anthropological theory since the 1960s
• Demise of structuralism
• Rise of interpretation/symbolic anthropology
  interactionism, practice theory
• Crisis of representation end of theory?

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AT4514 Lecture 1

• Situation now
• Engagement of ethnography and critical theory.
• Theory as tool.

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AT4514 Lecture 1

• The organisation of the course
• The assignments
• The readings
• The aim of the course.