Paper 3: Social Anthropology and the Professional Process
(3a) Social anthropology and development
The Division regrets it will be unable to offer this option in the academic year 2011/2012.
The course focuses on development-related themes from a global perspective: development is not only a ‘Third World’ concern. The course covers three central areas:
- Critiques of development policy and practice
- Impacts of social, economic and political transformations
- The contributions and roles of anthropology in development
Specific subjects for study include:
- theoretical bases of development policy;
- political economy of development;
- development policy and practice;
- discursive constructions of notions such as poverty, security, governance;
- development as social enterprise;
- technology and indigenous technical knowledge;
- land use;
- environment and ecology;
- the implications of politicised anthropology and advocacy; and
- discourses of participation and empowerment.
Reading list and syllabus outline for Paper 3a
Previous years’ reading lists are available here.
Exam Questions
Previous years’ exam questions are available here.
(3b) Social anthropology and museums
This paper provides an overview of the history and contemporary roles of museums. It has a strong theoretical orientation and emphasises the importance of collecting and artefact-based analysis as key components of ethnographic research.
Drawing on the internationally renowned collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (artefacts, photographic materials and archives), as well as comparative cross-cultural examples, the paper examines ways in which objects are produced, circulated, interpreted and displayed. A central concern is the relationship between museums and their communities.
The course provides a solid grounding in museological practice, including care and handling of artefacts, documentation, collections management, display and outreach. Students undertake practical work experience for a period of four to six weeks. Typically this requirement is fulfilled by the preparation of annual student exhibitions, although other museum work or an external placement may be arranged in consultation with the course coordinator and the student’s supervisor.
Reading list and syllabus outline for Paper 3b
- Syllabus Outline – (pdf)
- Museum History, Theory and Practice – Michaelmas 2011 – (pdf)
- (Sem) Anthropology and Museums – Lent 2012 – (pdf)
- Thinking Through Things – Lent 2012 – (pdf)
Previous years’ reading lists are available here.
Exam Questions
- Paper 3b exam questions – 1999/2000 – (pdf)
- Paper 3b exam questions – 2005/06 – (pdf)
- Paper 3b exam questions – 2009/10 – (pdf)
(3c) Medical Anthropology
The Division regrets it will be unable to offer this option in the academic year 2011/2012.
For scientific medicine (or biomedicine), ‘the human body’ has traditionally been a key construction at the centre of attention in an understanding of disease and its cure. Whilst the assemblages of biomedicine have been both efficacious and powerful, there have often been mismatches and tensions with other understandings of what constitutes illness and how best it should be treated and by whom. Medical Anthropology has traditionally made it its business to point to some of the mismatches and problems, and this course underlines that these issues arise in a variety of contexts from post-colonial Africa to Europe and North America.
More recently, some biomedical practices have tried to make space for what has been seen as the social or cultural – and anthropology, conversely, has paid new attention to the objects and practices of the natural sciences on which medicine depends. Medical Anthropology has incorporated both of these trends. The course will give an overview of the history of medical anthropology, paying attention to the main approaches and to some of the key themes that have emerged. In the Michaelmas term, this will mean examining affliction or illness, and different definitions of the cause and processes of remedy, in a range of contexts. In the Lent and Easter terms, this is continued but we also see, in a sweep through certain biomedical assumptions, norms, evidence and technologies, that some of the problems they have gathered around themselves have taken ‘ethical’ shape. To biopower and biosociality is added bioethics. We look at a range of issues that include reproductive health and technologies, contested illnesses, depression, death, and the use of human tissue in therapy and research.