Research

Ecological and Environmental Anthropology

Ecological and environmental anthropology is concerned with the consequences of human interactions with the environment they are embedded in.  

Staff in the department supervising students in this area are Prof Michelle Cocks and Prof Shankar Aswani.

Anthropology of Performance 

This focus of study area and engagement involves looking at how people within society use creative, embodied processes to reflect on, and often critique, the social and political conditions in which they find themselves. A study of performance involves multiple forms of expression within social worlds. It has to do, for example, with ritual and creative spaces of liminality, of time-out-of-time, in which selves are refashioned and new social worlds imagined. It has to do with occupation of public space in the form of street protest or spectacles of state power and terror. In relation to social protest, for example, it has to do with sixteen-year-old Greta Thonberg starting a worldwide strike among schoolchildren in 72 countries against climate change, the occupation of Tahir square in Cairo during the Arab Spring in imagining a more democratic society in Egypt.  It has to do with popular cultural forms, embracing different musical genres, art performances, dance and theatre – many of these genres spilling out of formal performance venues into streets, migrant worker hostels, and other marginal spaces within cityscapes.

Performance has to do with what groups of people seek to refuse, but also to embrace and imagine.

The anthropology department at Rhodes offers an Honours course in the politics of performance and integrates ideas around soundscapes, visual anthropology, orality, the anthropology of the senses and theories of embodiment and ritual into considerations of performance. In addition, the department is to host a Heritage Diploma into which some of these approaches will be integrated.

Staff in the department supervising students in this area are Dr Janet Hayward and Dr Dominique Santos 

Anthropology of Childhood

Staff in the department supervising students in this area are and  

Physical Anthropology

Staff in the department supervising students in this area are Dr Janet Hayward and Prof Shankar Aswani 

Heritage Studies

Staff in the department supervising students in this area are Assoc Prof Michelle Cocks; Prof Shankar Aswani; Dr Janet Hayward ; ; 

Medical Anthropology 

Staff in the department supervising students in this area are and Ms Shabnam Shaik

Last Modified: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 10:53:40 SAST