Anthropology of Place and Things

Head: prof. ASP dra hab. Monika Zawadzka

The anthropology of place and the anthropology of things are relatively new sub-disciplines of cultural anthropology. The classes present selected phenomena of place and city culture and the culture of objects and design culture. They propose to look at the world of space and things in parallel to the world of people – in the traditional way of looking at the old field of cultural anthropology and ethnology called “material culture” of man, and also in the perspective of the postulates of the new philosophical discourse, which is post-humanism. The subject matter of the course focuses on selected research problems, such as: cultural space: the role of architectures and places in today’s culture; public aspects of the life of city users: entertainment, religiousness and politics; the city as a centre of integration and encounter with cultural strangeness; social, ethnic, neighbourhood and home groups and their relations in space; urban subcultures and their spatial aesthetics; contemporary urban rituals; everyday life, celebrating and spending free time in urban space; fashionable, popular and rejected places; fashion for cities and urban style – urbanism as a way of life; the existence of a cult of objects, consumerism of societies and an unprecedented culture of desire and the culture of killing things. The lectures will also cover contemporary cognitive theories of perception and displacement in the perception of the human sensory apparatus and strategies of self-presentation of objects. In practical terms, the course shows one of the ways of creating and understanding stories about things and constructing a contemporary complex place, the urban interior.