ANTHRO 354: Cultural Techniques
Building on the concept of 'cultural techniques,' or 'Kulturtechniken,' that has been developing in recent German media studies, this advanced graduate seminar considers a wide range of culturally specific modes of elementary techniques, from cutting, connecting, to reading, writing, and counting, to cooking, sewing, irrigating, and so on, as ethnographic analytics. The seminar explores the epistemic shift in ethnographic methods and analysis from the symbolic sense of meaning-making to the material condition for such meaning-making. Prerequisite by instructor consent
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Inoue, M. (PI)
ANTHRO 365A: Emancipation: Theories and Experiences
Concepts of emancipation have been treated in a wide variety of historical, political, regional and social perspectives. In the US, emancipation and post emancipation societies are primarily understood around histories of enslavement. In the class, while taking inspiration and also covering work on enslavement and emancipation, we will endeavor to discuss theories, ideas and experiences that have been understood as potentially emancipatory from a globally and historically wide-ranging set of ideas. Issues of race, caste, class and gender are axiomatic themes within the class.Emancipation has frequently been understood as an emancipation from oppression and an impetus towards a form of freedom or new order. While theoretically this is formally understood and discussed, often with historical examples that use experiences to illustrate failures or successes, in this class we will try to understand the texture of practices as the primary means by which ideas about emancipation circulate, i
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Concepts of emancipation have been treated in a wide variety of historical, political, regional and social perspectives. In the US, emancipation and post emancipation societies are primarily understood around histories of enslavement. In the class, while taking inspiration and also covering work on enslavement and emancipation, we will endeavor to discuss theories, ideas and experiences that have been understood as potentially emancipatory from a globally and historically wide-ranging set of ideas. Issues of race, caste, class and gender are axiomatic themes within the class.Emancipation has frequently been understood as an emancipation from oppression and an impetus towards a form of freedom or new order. While theoretically this is formally understood and discussed, often with historical examples that use experiences to illustrate failures or successes, in this class we will try to understand the texture of practices as the primary means by which ideas about emancipation circulate, imagined, are discussed, are disappointed and so on. We will try and see what an anthropological and historically textured discussion can bring to theoretical discussions of emancipation. We will examine theoretical, historical, sociological and anthropological writings on emancipation, freedom, enslavement and servitude, political mobilization and revolution. Fundamentally this course tries to get students to think globally about multiple and different systems of persisting and enduring oppression and inequality through an emphasis on political thought, political imaginations and concrete political organizations and movements. Prerequisite: consent of instructor
Last offered: Autumn 2023
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 366: Material Semiotics
This seminar will focus on the emerging body of literature on the materiality of the production, circulation, and mediation of paperwork as constituitive of modern forms of governance. We will discuss specific genres of paperworks - notes, memos, files, documents, as well as archives and other mnemonic technologies - both as cultural practices and reflexive objects, and examine how they produce modern social epistemologies of accountability, evidence, the fact, and truth in the fields of law, business, and public administration, as well as in civil society generally. Readings will include works by Max Weber, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Cornelia Vismann, Ann Stoler, and others. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 367: The Anthropology of Science: Global Politics and Laboratory Life
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2023
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 371: Living and Dying in the Contemporary World
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Garcia, A. (PI)
ANTHRO 372: Urban Ecologies
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
Last offered: Autumn 2024
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 374: Archaeology of Colonialism/Postcolonialisms
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2024
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 378: What is Enmity?
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
Instructors:
Hansen, T. (PI)
ANTHRO 381: Archaeology of Violence
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.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ANTHRO 387: Strangers and Intimates: Exploring Public Life
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
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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.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5