Anthropology of Space and Place

The increased interest of anthropology in space has emerged in the 1990s. There a diverse traditions of approaching space and place in anthropology. Space is often viewed in relation to the body, its organization and its symbols as ordered by culture (e.g., 'ours'-'theirs', public-private, sacred-profane). For others, it is above all representations of cultural landscapes as well as physical and environmental factors and their meanings for the humans. Given the today's global interconnections and the resulting geography of the 'compressed world', anthropologists also deal with diverse modalities of power and control over territories. The course articulates two theoretical and epistemological traditions: 1) the phenomenological tradition, which proceeds from the actor as embedded in the 'outer' world; 2) the materialist (also Marxian) tradition proceeding from 'objective structures' and relations of social power impacting subjective conceptions of the world. The tutorial is focused on the critical discussion of selected relevant ethnographies. Fieldwork exercise is organized as a group project assignment consisting of diverse tasks. A typical assignment: studying the construction of a landscape as a national symbol.