2006 Handbooks

How might we think about the relationships between built forms, culture, and individual subjectivity? What makes a city socialist, Islamic or modern and how do modernising movements revitalise or condemn 'traditional' spatial arrangements and designs? This course introduces students to the anthropology of the modern by analysing how the organisation of space, architectural forms, and modernist urban planning are connected to particular political projects such as nationalism, colonialism, socialism etc. It explores how we might understand the varied and competing ways of being modern, the effects and unintended consequences of self-conscious modernising projects of different nation-states and elites, and thus the possibility of divergent and alternative modernities. Students will consider a variety of anthropological perspectives that seek to explain the amazing diversity and surprising similarity of urban cultures and their built environments, as well as ways that the organisation, forms and use of urban space both symbolise and generate culture, power and identity.