A New Anthropology Curriculum, Designed for the Future
1 - Anthropological 'Free Thought' or Institutional Practice
This week we will introduce the theory of signification and its role in anthropological thinking. Originally developed by psychoanalysts to understand how people came to associate seemingly unrelated images and ideas, it remains a useful tool for those hoping to interpret the networks of meaning at play in ethnographic sites. By foregrounding this concept, we are then able to compare the tools anthropologists have historically used to understand ‘the field’, and the ways in which new university structures may impact the tools of the future. The tools available to anthropologists have always been constrained and informed by the societies they themselves inhabited, yet most developments more directly entrench dominant political-economic dynamics into anthropological knowledge production.
The required reading examines the role of signification in anthropological thinking and the developing process of entrenching neoliberalism in this. The recommended readings respectively further explain the idea of signification, offer an example of how a cultural entity, in this case Islam, can be signified differently in different contexts, and explore the value of comparative anthropology in problematising our own ontologies.
understanding of ‘the field’? ​
Tutorial Questions
How would you describe anthropological thinking to someone who has never studied the discipline? Â
How does this compare to the processes of signification described in this week’s reading?Â
Does it matter how anthropologists frame 'the field' and where they source these frames from?
How do our theoretical frameworks enable and prevent our
Recommended
Geertz, C 1968, ‘Two countries, two cultures’, in Islam observed: Religious development in Morocco and Indonesia, Yale University Press, New Haven, pp. 1-23.
Taussig, M 2010, ‘Fetishism and dialectical deconstruction’, in The devil and commodity fetishism in South America, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, pp. 3-13.
Žižek, S 2000, ‘The demise of symbolic efficiency’, in The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology, Verso, London, pp. 322-334.
Benjamin Wyatt
As a student interested in economic anthropology and life in multicultural Australia, my honours thesis is examining how the Jewish community in Melbourne is able to sustain and reproduce itself by fostering community involvement. During my time at university I was able to engage with Lacanian theories of signification and its broader utility to the social sciences. I believe that this theory, although not developed by anthropologists, is a good way of explaining the underlying ‘anthropological process’ who’s subject matter and analytical tools have nonetheless evolved over the last century. Tipping the Scales of Knowledge Production seeks to examine this underlying process and situate the impact of evolving university life on it.