College of Social Sciences and International Studies
Representation of Animals Through Religion
Module ANTM106 for 2018/9
Module ANTM106 for 2018/9
- Overview
- Aims and Learning Outcomes
- Module Content
- Indicative Reading List
- Assessment
Postgraduate Module Descriptor
ANTM106: Representation of Animals Through Religion
This module descriptor refers to the 2018/9 academic year.
Module Aims
The module aims are:
- To enable the student to engage with the range of human, animal, and environmental encounters according to the religious, mystical, and supernatural contexts that continue to have significance in the contemporary world.
- To critically evaluate the position of religiously-constructed human-animal encounters in diverse sociocultural schemes globally and how this frames cultural constructions and the ethical treatment of either specific animal species, or non-human animals generally.
- To consider how contemporary representations of animals through religious doctrine and ceremony can inform wider theoretical/philosophical debates such as locally-contextualised constructions of ecology and conservation, approaches to ethics and animal welfare, and of non-human animal entities as participants in the wider religious and political landscapes.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to: | |
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Module-Specific Skills | 1. develop an understanding of the diversity of human interactions with animals in the context of religious practices (ceremony, worship, deification) and of religious moral discourse (gift or sacrifice, animal welfare); 2. identify and evaluate representations of animals in religion through art or religious technology, oral narratives, doctrinal and textual sources, and ceremonial activities; 3. demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of how the social construction of animals through religion enhances anthropological approaches and methodologies that examine the participation of other-than-human beings in the human social, religious, and political landscape; |
Discipline-Specific Skills | 4. demonstrate a clear understanding of the historical development of theoretical approaches to the representations of animals within the social sciences; 5. demonstrate the ability to critically assess key theoretical debates from anthropology and cognate disciplines surrounding human interactions with animals in the contexts of religious moral discourses; 6. demonstrate a critical awareness of significance of historical and contemporary socio-cultural influences of particular representatives of other-than-human beings for social scientific theory; |
Personal and Key Skills | 7. identify a research problem and conduct independent research to test the research problem; 8. clearly and concisely convey complicated ideas to academic and non-academic audiences; and 9. prepare for writing papers suitable for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal. |