Courses / Module

As a discipline, anthropology seeks to render the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Anthropologists turn ethnographic encounters with ‘foreign’ or ‘strange’ beliefs and practices into occasions for creating fresh knowledge about social and cultural life, creating a deep understanding of human diversity. Continuing the comprehensive first-year introduction to anthropology, this module covers a range of topics in which the problem of cultural difference comes into especially sharp focus.
These include: moral and epistemological relativism, religion and cosmology, ideas about nature, gender and kinship, affliction and healing, and the culturally-adorned body. To deepen student understanding of the challenge of cultural difference, the module focuses on two topics as case studies in cross-cultural interpretation: the veil and witchcraft.
In the first half the module, we will consider cloth and clothing, fashion and faith through the medium of the hijab. As an object of material and visual culture, the headscarf is frequently co-opted as a vehicle for multiple social and cultural agendas. It is both personally intimate and outwardly expressive. Often, the hijab - this single piece of cloth - acts as a lighting rod for emotive stereotypes regarding race, religion, gender and geopolitical forces. As such it carries a transformational quality as much as a representative one.
In the second half of the module, we look at diverse contemporary and historical cases of witchcraft phenomena, including a famous Irish case, in order to explore themes of social inequality, scapegoating, human rights, and violence. By engaging putatively ‘exotic’ beliefs, anthropology provokes us to question our own ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about the world.