Anthropological Imagination

This course invites you to explore how anthropology examines concrete human practices, while employing imagination to question common-sense assumptions and the categories we use to understand the world.

The course introduces the modes of questioning, analysing, contextualising and comparing that anthropologists use to craft better understandings of the world in which we live. Combining ethnographic observation with creative inquiry, anthropologists – as the old saying goes – seek to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, showing how knowledge is situated and open-ended. Through case studies on security, loneliness, masking, and the Afro-Atlantic, this course offers several entry points into linking everyday practices to broader social and political contexts – ultimately transforming how you perceive and engage with the world.

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