Learning outcomes
This course, designed for undergraduate students, uses several teaching techniques and classroom activities (lectures, ethnographic interviews, encounters with experts, ethnographic films) to introduce the student to a critical knowledge of key concepts, methods, tools and of the debates that originate within contemporaries theoretical and ethnographic contexts.
The first part of the course will deal with some of the most relevant anthropological themes of study and methodologies, contextualizing them within the history of the discipline and in the light of most recent anthropological debates. In the second half of the course, through the use of ethnographic study cases from Oceania,
we will analyze in greater detail some of these themes (such as the different uses of the past in the present; customary and contemporary political institutions; social networks) .
Readings:
M. Herzfeld, 2006, Antropologia. Pratica e teoria nella cultura e nella società, Firenze, Seid (i capitoli 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,e 10).
A. Barnard, 2002, Storia del pensiero antropologico, Bologna, il Mulino
(pp. 43-54; 85-107; 163-234).
A. Paini, 2007, Il filo e l’aquilone. I confini della differenza in una società kanak della Nuova Caledonia, Torino, Le Nuove Muse.
D. Pilkington, 1996, Rabbit-Proof Fence, trad. it. Barriera per conigli, Varese, Giano Editore (in alternativa S. Morgan, 1987 My Place, trad. it, 1999, La mia Australia, Milano, Bompiani).
