Anthropology of modernity and material culture studies

Pre-requisites: No specific requirements

Course objectives: Acquainting with the central problems of anthropology of modernity, study and critical review of "receipt" of elements of modernity in developing societies, the development of anthropological sensitivity and imagination in the study of global modernity.

Course description: In addition to the classic anthropological approach to the study of modernity, which pays attention to different social contexts of values and practices of modernity (the concept of alternative modernity), and the number of unintended outcomes and implications, of course attention will be paid to the changes and transformations in various aspects of culture and society as preconditions of intense connection that enable global capitalism, in the context of growing world of material abundance.

Learning Outcomes: Understanding and application of major theoretical concepts related to the anthropology of modernity in independent research, analysis and interpretation of various issues in contemporary society.

Literature/Reading:

• Ardžun Apaduraj, Razobručena modernost, XX vek, Beograd, 2008
• Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart, Modernity Through the Prism of the Local, Routledge, London and New York, 1995
• Joel S. Can, Anthropology and Modernity, Current Anthropology, Vol.42, No 5, December 2001
• D.Miller, Modernity - an Ethnographic Approach. Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad, Berg, Oxford, New York, (1994), 1997
• E.Gidens, V.Haton ( prir.), Na ivici, živeti sa globalnim kapitalizmom, Plato, Beograd, 2003
• S.E.Reid i D.Crowley, Modernity and Material Culture in Postwar Eastern Europe, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2000
• Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool, University of Chicago Press, 1998
• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Ildiko Erdei, Antropologija potrošnje, Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd, 2008.
• Ildiko Erdei, Čekajući Ikeu: potrošačka kultura u postsocijalizmu u pre njega, Srpski genealoški centar i Filozofski fakultet u Beogradu, Beograd, 2012.