2007 Handbooks

This unit offers an anthropological approach to symbolic representation. It links the formal study of signs and their meaning (semiotics) to the cultural logic of affect and sensation (phenomenology). Rather than assuming that media such as television, film, the Internet are simply 'visual' representations - or that the more generic code of language is only oral or written - this course explores how these media operate through registers of sensation that are at once both bodily and cultural. The classic theorists of the sign, Saussure, Peirce, Levi-Strauss and Derrida will be considered, along with phenomenological theorists Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. More recent feminist and postcolonial interventions that find meaning to be not only culturally specific, but mediated by gender, class, 'race' and other determinative factors, are also considered. This course provides crucial theoretical background for all upper level anthropology and is recommended for students wishing to undertake Visual Anthropology. It will be of special interests to students of media, cultural studies, philosophy and creative arts in demonstrating the limits to, and possibilities for, intercultural communication in global and transnational contexts.