Course Details in 2023/24 Session

Module Title	LC Writing Worlds: Ethnography as Craft
School	History and Cultures
Department	African Studies & Anthropology
Module Code	09 37968
Module Lead	Juliet Gilbert and Marco di Nunzio
Level	Certificate Level
Credits	20
Semester	Semester 2
Pre-requisites
Co-requisites
Restrictions	None
Exclusions
Description	This module is built around full-length ethnographic monographs. Students are required to read the books in full over the course of the module. Lectures and seminars help to situate and contextualise the texts in relation, for example, to the identity and career of the anthropologists who wrote them; the development of the discipline of anthropology over time; the various scholarly debates with which they engage; and their reception (contemporary and subsequent). Strong emphasis is placed on the craft of ethnographic writing. Students examine ethnographic writing as a genre and consider different ways in which descriptive and analytical writing are woven together to build an argument. This requires thinking carefully about the nature of ethnographic evidence, the methodological underpinnings of anthropological research, the authors’ positionality and related ethical considerations, and the ways in which other forms of evidence are drawn upon to support ethnographic observation. Students engage with broad anthropological concerns, such as the relationship between the particular and the general, and the ethics and politics of representation, through close engagement with the texts.
Learning Outcomes	By the end of the module students should be able to: Identify key features of ethnographic writing Explain how analysis and description, or theory and ethnography, are brought together in specific anthropological texts Describe the argument made by an anthropological author Situate an ethnographic text in its wider scholarly context
Assessment	37968-01 : 1000 word written assignment - Essay 1 : Coursework (30%) 37968-02 : 2000 word written assignment - Essay 2 : Coursework (70%)
Assessment Methods & Exceptions	Assessment: 1 x 1000 word written assignment (30%)
Other
Reading List