Undergraduate Course: The Anthropology of the Body: Contemporary Issues (SCAN10084)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The course engages with both established and developing contemporary scholarship and debates concerning anthropological approaches to the body.
The course aims to enrich and supplement broader disciplinary studies across medical and political anthropology, as well as scholarship concerned with material culture.
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| Course description |
Now more than ever the body and its forms have become entangled in and around debates across a swathe of academic scholarship and current affairs issues of broader public concern. From questions around the biological modification and technological transformation of the individual body to moral quandaries around the movement, disappearance, and substantiation of certain kinds of bodies at particular times and places, concern with the body increasingly saturates public debate and activity. Yet, despite its centrality as an object or subject of focus, the body appears ever more unstable and destabilising a presence.
This course links together established scholarship in the anthropology of the body with debates on the issue of the body as it is relevant to broader contemporary issues. The course will touch upon core epistemological debates concerning the body covering, for example, work in the fields of phenomenology, embodiment, and biopolitics. These core issues will be embedded in established and contemporary debates which have surrounded the body as an object and subject constituting and constituted by broader social phenomena. We will discuss, for example, the body in death, the body as a focus of the biomedical gaze; and the body as articulated in contemporary and historical political, economic, and creative movements, including for instance in colonial regimes, as an artefact for museum spaces, and as a commodity marketed for consumption.
Indicative topics:
The Phenomenological Body
In what ways could we argue the mind, emotion, and the body are associated?
How might culture mediate sensory experience?
The Surveilled Body
How is the physical body governed/regulated via surveillance?
What anxieties surround surveillance of the body or the absence of surveillance?
Anatomy (with The University of Edinburgh Anatomy Museum)
How has the anatomical body emerged through a history of dissection, display and art?
To what extent is the body as we know it in medicine a social construction?
The Corpse
How and why does the dead body matter in death?
What do dead bodies do?
Cyborgs: The Future of the Body
How has technology changed the nature of the body and what are the implications for its form and significance?
What form will future bodies take?
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of the main areas of study linked to the anthropology of the body
- Engage critically with the work of scholars concerned with the body (anthropological and sociological), and evaluate their arguments
- Assess competing claims and make informed judgments about complex issues central to contemporary debates around the body
- Demonstrate their ability to present ¿ through empirically grounded and theoretically informed written work -- coherent, balanced arguments concerning the anthropology of the body and the relevance of these arguments to broader contemporary debates in society.
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Reading List
Indicative Readings:
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Chapter 3: Body/power and Chapter 8: The eye of Power
(readings from) Lock, M and J Farquhar. 2007. Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Including: Bynum Walker, Caroline, "Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century" (P.2012-212), and Mauss, Marcel, "Techniques of the Body" (P. 50).
Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff (1992) Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Westview Press. pp. 215-234.
Jackson, M (1983) "Thinking Through the Body: An Essay on Understanding Metaphor" Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 14: 126-149.
Hallam, Elizabeth (2016) Anatomy Museum: death and the body displayed. London: Reaktion Books.
Haynes, Patrice (2014) "Creative Becoming and the Patiency of Matter: Feminism, New Materialism and Theology" Angelika: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19(1): 129-150.
Morley, James. 2001. Inspiration and Expiration: Yoga Practice through Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of the Body. Philosophy East and West 51 (1): 73-82.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
make effective use of oral, written and visual means to negotiate, create and communicate critical understanding;
seek and value open feedback to inform genuine self-awareness;
transfer their knowledge, learning, skills and abilities from one context to another;
use an anthropological approach to understand and act on social, cultural, and political issues surrounding questions of the body and its form and function;
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| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Laura Major
Tel: (0131 6)51 1329
Email: l.major@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr Ewen Miller
Tel: (0131 6)50 3925
Email: Ewen.Miller@ed.ac.uk |
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