New RPE Students Visit Pitt rivers

Welcome to Religion, Philosophy and Ethics Induction week. Its been great welcoming our new students to the University and introducing them to our beautiful campus, to the course and to each other. This week as well as the tiresome administration stuff, we have been out and about exploring the religious landscape of Cheltenham from Hindu mandirs to synagogues and mosques. We have also witnessed the terrible phenomenon of Martin and Will, Couse leader and Reader slug it out in an intellectual cage fight as they debated whether religion if of any real worth in terms of social well being, we all had a get together afterwards and spent a bit more time getting to know each other. On Thursday we took the students to the amazing Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford and became immersed in the legacy of the imperial anthropology project. We examined this legacy carefully as well engaged with the bewildering but extraordinary array of artefacts from across the empire and beyond and asked a number of questions in relation to appropriation, re-patriation and the nature of historical anthropology. Its been a really good week and we look forward to getting down to the course over the next few weeks.