181 - 190 of 337 results for: Anthropology

Science and technology are important cultural products that often dramatically reorganize various aspects of human life. In this course we will explore how recent innovations in the life sciences and biomedicine may reconfigure crucial elements of social institutions, lend new structures to identity politics, and often change the way we interact with and conceive of nature. We will examine these issues in various global settings to explore how everyday politics shape politics of life in different locales.

This seminar explores how biological, political and social conditions transform and conjoin experiences of living and dying in the world today. Engaging contemporary ethnographies and social theory, we will examine how life and death, the natural and the social, the individual and the collective, are braided together in ways that challenge conclusions about what constitutes care, community, health, rights, and violence, among other issues. We will also reflect on whether and how the braiding together of these domains leaves room for the recognition of their singularity. Thus, an abiding question for this seminar is the relation of history to the present. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

At the intersections of urbanism and environmental studies, political ecology, postcolonial theory and the new materialism, new fields are in formation. This seminar explores scholarship that connects cities with countrysides rough questions of resources and infrastructures. We will consider questions id inequality access and community as well as unexpected urban ecologies

Advanced graduate seminar focused on the archaeology of colonial and postcolonial contexts, both prehistoric and historic. Emphasis on intersections between archaeological research and subaltern, postcolonial, and transnational feminist/queer theory. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

At a time where war is everywhere - as real, protracted conflicts in several parts of the world but also as rhetorical hyperbole of declaring war on various social and political problems - the question of enmity becomes a central concern. An enemy is a figure, or a category, whose very existence poses an existential threat to the self or the community. While anthropology abounds with debates on difference, distance, othering, intimacy and violence, less attention has been paid to the figure and function of the enemy and the social intensities that enmity enables and perpetuates. Mobilizing political theory, historical texts and multiple ethnographic examples the seminar will explore many kinds of enmity: dynamic political enmities; quotidian and durable social enmities; ethno-racial enmities; hierarchical vs. horizontal enmities; performative, ritual and ludic enmities, and more.

This advanced graduate seminar reflects on archaeological research on violence in relation to readings in philosophy, political anthropology, cultural studies, and gender and ethnic studies. While some forensic approaches are discussed, the emphasis is more on structural and collective violence and the role of violence in the formation of the archaeological record.

How do we encounter and read each other in public and private spaces? How are these very spaces historically constituted around such distinctions and manners of reading? What do these questions look like in dense heterogeneous cities with differentiated class, caste and ethnic communities? How might we consider the differentiation between private and public in different ethnographic contexts? What kinds of sociality might emerge from these kinds of encounters? This course will explore these questions through social theory and ethnographies. There are two major sets of concepts that will be explored and interrogated. The first is that deriving from the essays of the Georg Simmel such as 'The Face' and 'The Stranger' which explore the new forms of sociality enabled by seemingly anonymous city life, which in turn have been interpreted very differently by Zygmunt Bauman and James Siegel to understand the place of continually excluded outsiders and the high stakes of reading each other. The other is the strand of work on the emergence of the public sphere such as the work of Jurgen Habermas, Richard Sennet, Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser etc. While much of the social theory on the public, the stranger and civility emerge from studies of Euro-American mas politics and city spaces, in this course we will move some of these discussion into considering these questions in the global south and the kinds of sociality (including their historicity) that make up the dense fabric of ordinary life. How does this work out in contexts where we take into account intense social differentiation by class, race, and communitarian divisions? This could be asked of the historical and social context addressed in these theories as well as from the postcolonial world. The course will attempt to understand whether such theorizations can indeed be re-rooted and re-imagined or whether ethnographic and historical difference re-route them instead. In doing so we will also bring theories of the private and the intimate to bear on questions of the public and the stranger. Pre-Requisite by Instructor Consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student.

Agency is commonplace and commonsensical in the humanities and social sciences. We use it to highlight the intention behind particular actions, and especially to mark the efficacy of actions of resistance to power and the overcoming of structure; actions we understand as those of self-making and historical change. Yet, for more than twenty years we have known that agency is not what it seems. Its key aspects presume what it ostensibly negates: autonomy presumes dependence, choice presumes necessity. Agency obscures questions of suffering and passion, and it often pictures the world from a standpoint appearing adjacent to that of the (liberal) individual. Most recently, there has been extensive discussion of distributed agency and that of non-humans. What are we to make of this widespread agency-talk? This course invites students to an experimental exploration of the genealogies of agency, what it arose in response to, what effects it has had and how the concept is today transformed. We will read archaeological, ethnographic and philosophical texts to ask: what does agency have to do with action and intention, with reason and emotion, with will and drive, with need and desire, with self-knowledge and discipline. What kinds of agents are we prepared to recognize; what (patients) does this blind us to? We will consider the tragic, ludic and comedic aspects of action. We will come to ask: Across the contests of the twentieth century what was agency good for? What is it good for now? This class will involve significant preparation and in-class writing exercises.

This course engages attempts to remake social science research as more "just." We will explore Indigenous, Marxian, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of the dilemmas of representation, the place (geographic, disciplinary) of theory, and who (if anyone!) we are accountable to as university-based researchers. Drawing on these critiques, scholars have experimented with diverse approaches to research, including participatory action research, community peer review, community mapping, collaborative fieldwork and writing, and forensic fact-making and advocacy. We will also track how insurgent scholarship and methodological experimentation are captured and institutionalized by the university.