TAI-E3104 ”Situated Urban”
Experimental Visual Anthropology
”Anthropology of Money”
First of all sorry for those who looked this up and thought it would somehow directly be about urban space or something – it’s not. This is a course of (experimental) visual anthropology, and I even have prepared the topic for the course.
Like all my teaching this is a very simple course. I (or my collaborator or a visitor) do some lecturing on anthropology and on the chosen topic. You do some readings and a lot of discussions, and then an anthropological research project, individually or in groups, depending how many students there are. And present your findings.
I’m doing this together with Eetu Viren, we’ve collaborated often and I like it and I’ve found students like it too. Eetu is an activist, a thinker, and recently did his doctoral thesis in sociology, titled “Money and Labor-power”. So maybe you can guess where the topic comes from. But collaboration with Eetu on the topic of money will mean that
1. We start on “money” – because, while money is “a most everyday phenomenon” it is also fundamentally an abstraction, and you cannot understand money through simply studying the meanings and practices connected with it. First you need to get a grip on the concept.
2. Then go on to discuss what anthropology is, what visual anthropology is and what experimentation would mean in the context of anthropological research.
3. We’ve also thought that we would like to see students engaged in sc. “collaborative research”, research done in collaboration with whomever you’d wish to study. We’ll have some possible collaborators to suggest.
4. And for the projects you draft a plan, do the research, make a report (we’ll discuss the format, for of course you can try your hand at experimental and visual with that too) and present it.
5. The course runs through January and February on Thursday afternoons, 9.1. – 13.2. with lectures, readings and drafting of plans, then there’s a break for the research projects, and finally presentations of results and discussion on Monday 6.4.
