General information

Course name	Seminar: 10-76-4-D2/WD2-05 Key Topics in Literature: Anthropology in Film and Fiction
Subtitle
Course number	10-76-4-D2/WD2-05
Semester	SoSe 2025
Current number of participants	16
expected number of participants	35
Home institute	Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Courses type	Seminar in category Teaching
Preliminary discussion	Tuesday, 08.04.2025 16:15 - 17:45, Room: GW1-HS H1010
Next date	Tuesday, 17.06.2025 16:15 - 17:45, Room: GW1-HS H1010
Type/Form
Englischsprachige Veranstaltung	Ja

Lecturers

Anna Auguscik (LB)

Rooms and times

GW1-HS H1010: Tuesday: 16:15 - 17:45, weekly (13x)
GW2 B2900: Tuesday: 16:15 - 17:45, weekly (1x)

Module assignments

Comment/Description

Twentieth-century anthropology, anthropologists and anthropological fieldwork have found a renewed interest in contemporary film and fiction. Such fictional – or fictionalised – representations are engaged in complex constellations of anthropological observation and situate anthropological inquiry in relation to other scientific disciplines as well as evolving cultural concerns. Crucially, the production of anthropological knowledge often seems to coincide with the death or destruction of those investigated. In this seminar, we will explore how specific examples of contemporary film and fiction address the history of the discipline of anthropology, as well as anthropology's distinctive position in knowledge production. We will analyse the representations of such complex constellations of observation and destruction in the context of debates from ‘Western science’ to ‘local knowledge’, from ‘cultural difference’ to ‘epistemic violence’. The course comprises in-presence meetings with group presentations, reading weeks and online research, as well as a planned visit to the Übersee Museum Bremen.
Please, buy and read the following novels:
• Lily King. Euphoria. London: Picador, 2014. [978-1-5290-9265-3]
• Hania Yanagihara. The People in the Trees [2013]. London: Picador, 2018. [978-1-5098-9298-3]
In addition, we will watch and discuss a documentary film about the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land and its aftermath:
- Etched in Bone (2018, dir. Martin Thomas and Béatrice Bijon) [available via vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/etchedinbone]

Registration mode

After enrolment, participants will manually be selected.

Potential participants are given additional information before enroling to the course.

Seminar: 10-76-4-D2/WD2-05 Key Topics in Literature: Anthropology in Film and Fiction - Details