300650 Exploring Anthropology through Ethnographic Texts (MA: Soziologie der Globalen Welt) (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

This is an excellent course for those who would like to undertake in depth reading, and you will find that your academic writing will also improve as a result of detailed reviewing of other people’s writing. For those seeking an academic career, writing book reviews is a vital part of academic writing, and often the entry point into writing for publication. This course is valuable preparation for that, and we will discuss writing for a book review formally for an academic journal in the final session.

Requirements for participation, required level

Publishing a full length book (commonly called an ethnography or ethnographic monograph) is a significant milestone in anthropology. While articles may make the case for specific arguments, a book allows an in-depth exploration of a research project and often showcases ground breaking work with multiple arguments. In view of the importance of publishing a book, academic journals usually have special sections devoted to reviewing new books, and reviewers will take care to examine the arguments made in new ethnographies, considering both the arguments made and the empirical material on which those arguments are based.

We can say then that to explore anthropology and the sort of questions that anthropologists ask, is also to explore ethnographies. We can and should engage with books as a whole, looking at their component parts, how these fit together and what they contribute to scholarship. In this course, we will explore four ethnographies published in the last four years. We will read each in detail, considering what arguments the authors make, what material they use for these, and whether we find these arguments convincing, lacking or both.

This is an MA level course for students across the social sciences. Prior knowledge of anthropology is valuable, but not essential.

Bibliography

While there were many possible ethnographies for this course, the four below have been chosen for their accessibility, and cross cutting themes. They engage with questions of belonging, identity, migration, family, ideas of the future and more. All of them also raise questions about how to do this sort of research.

The four ethnographies on which we will focus during this course (in this order) are:

1. Tanu, Danau (2020) Growing up in transit: the politics of belonging at an international school Oxford: Berghahn Books
2. Constable, Nicole (2022) Passport entanglements: protection, care and precarious migrations London: University of California Press
3. Deng, Grazia Ting (2024) Chinese espresso: contested race and convivial space in contemporary Italy Princeton University Press
4. Whitehouse, Bruce (2024) Enduring polygamy: plural marriage and social change in an African metropolis Rutgers University Press