Anthropology

Abstract

Anthropology offers a distinctive set of intellectual tools to understand and navigate the complex world of the 21st century. Focused on the intensive study of human diversity across time and space, it is a field that is both eclectic and rigorous. Anthropologists explore topics as varied as human experience, employing methods such as ethnography, linguistic and semiotic analysis, and archaeology. At the undergraduate level, there are courses in all four traditional subfields: sociocultural, linguistics, archaeology, and biological anthropology. Geographical orientations range from South Asia and East Asia to North America, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Current topical strengths of the department include science and technology, medicine, environment, capitalism, material culture, urbanism, migration, indigenous studies, racial inequality, gender and sexuality, language and meaning, media studies, populism, political violence, genomics, heritage, critical global studies, and cross-cultural approaches to law, empire, and religion. Anthropology provides unparalleled training for further graduate study in the social sciences, humanities, and biological studies, and for professional careers in academic teaching and research, business, communications, governmental and non-governmental organizations, law, medicine, museum and arts administration, tech industries, social services, and other fields. For more information, see the Department of Anthropology website (http://anthropology.uchicago.edu). This approaches bodies as points of insight into governance, the varied experiences of being governed, and efforts to evade and reconfigure institutional expressions of authority. First, we will examine bodies as targets of governance, objects to be reformed, regulated, contained, disciplined, educated, incarcerated, treated, trained, and "cared" for. Next, we will consider how bodies accrue power as sites of resistance, refusal, and critique. Certain bodies in certain places elicit discomfort, unsettling familiar divisions such as of private and public space, of developed and backward, of religious and secular, of reason and madness, of citizenship and (often racialized) non-citizenship. Finally, we will ask how bodies and sensory practices figure in ethical projects of crafting exemplary kinds of subjectivity or collectivity. In this way, the course will introduce students to anthropological approaches to embodiment as well as related questions of bio-politics, gender and race, political subjectivity, care and self-making, post/colonialism, sensory politics and the aesthetic. Along the way, students will gain a new appreciation of the political potency of bodies and bodily practices near and far-from Lenin's preserved body to Trump's "small" hands, reproductive labor to sex work, dirty protest to women's marches, indigenous eco-rituals to queer intimacies. in A study of storytelling in non-literate and folk societies, antecedent to the complexities of modern narrativity, itself anchored in and energized by literacy. The main objects of our study will be the vast body of folktales and collateral folklore collected by anthropologists and folklorists in traditional societies. Despite the impact of literacy on modern minds this course argues for the persistence of ancient themes, plots, characters and motifs.. A further argument is made for the foundational role of storytelling in the creation of culture and construction of society argument, in short, humans are, by nature, story-telling creatures whose sapience lies primarily in the capacity to be entertained by, and even live by, fictions The central place of storytelling shown in the humanistic and social sciences: politics, psychoanalysis. Student story-telling and even performance, of brief stories encouraged reflected upon in light of the main arguments of the course. creative acts of wayfinding. We first engage the material, historical, and psychic dimensions of loss and then shift scope to examine how loss affects entire communities, becomes institutionalized, and puts entire worlds into question. By engaging ethnography, history, social theory, as well as literature and popular media, we will develop a constellation of questions and approaches to loss and answer why it how we live through it, and what we find in its wake. structures futures modes field engagement 1) Inventing Ethnographic Approaches to Power and Resistance. Units. This introductory graduate course will examine understandings of power articulated by influential political theorists and ethnographers. We will explore key theoretical concepts, including discipline, governmentality, sovereignty, hegemony, agency, and resistance, as well as their application within textured, intersubjective, and affectively oriented ethnographic texts. Seeing power grounded in tentative and unstable practices, we will focus on the tensions between nation-states, informal networks, and the actions and aspirations of individual subjects. How are attempts to consolidate power articulated in performances, narrative histories, and acts of exclusion and violence? How are competing de facto and de jure powers negotiated in various spaces ranging from the institutional to the intimate? The centrality of both physical violence and the complacency born of the naturalized hegemony of political institutions and economic rationality will arise in our examinations of political mobilization and possibility. This course will give students opportunities to develop conceptual understandings of various modes of power that offer insights into the forces of colonialism, global interconnectivity, and violence that shape the 21st century world. This introductory graduate course examines the nature of power and status through the theoretical lens of performativity. We will engage with notions of performativity, articulated by influential theorists of linguistics, gender, and religion, that demonstrate the abilities of performances to effect change in the world. Thinking with performativity, we will interrogate practices of negotiating power and status in a broad range of social, political, and geographical contexts. How is the power made and unmade through particular acts? How is status, a particular type of power differentiation, created collectively and individually through acts of saying and doing? Such questions will animate our explorations of power and status in recent ethnographies focused on Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Indigenous Media and the Politics of Representation. This undergraduate seminar explores popular representations of Indigenous nations and issues across various we will explore the ways in which itinerant engage with the and how they are perceived in academic and colloquial perspectives. create a and the sedentary particularities? entity nomadic pastoralism, ranchers, gypsies, and even modern families in motorhomes. We will rely historical, and contemporary to engage empirical case studies that will provide the foundation for a complementary theoretical discussion of the peripatetic lifestyle. This course examines the history of Indigenous policies and politics in Latin America from the first encounters with European empires through the 21st Century. Course readings and discussions will consider several key historical moments across the region: European encounters/colonization; the rise of liberalism and capitalist expansion in the 19th century; 20th-century integration policies; and pan-Indigenous and transnational social movements in recent decades. Students will engage with primary and secondary texts that offer interpretations and perspectives both within and across imperial and national boundaries. Description: This course will consider the relationship between development and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will consider the social, political, and economic effects of natural resource extraction, the quest to improve places and peoples, and attendant ecological transformations, from the onset of European colonialism in the fifteenth century, to state- and private-led improvement policies in the twentieth. Some questions we will consider are: How have policies affected the sustainability of land use in the last five centuries? In what ways has the modern impetus for development, beginning in the nineteenth century and reaching its current intensity in the mid-twentieth, shifted ideas and practices of sustainability in both environmental and social terms? And, more broadly, to what extent does the notion of development help us explain the historical relationship between humans and the environment? implications for the social contract in a warming world. Attending to the ways in which race, class and gender inform late industrial life, the seminar will explore (via the environmental humanities and feminist & indigenous STS) concepts such as stewardship, climate justice, environmental racism, intergenerational ethics, more-than-human ontologies, and the Anthropocene (plus alternative frames). forms, and particular of city texts concerned with social theories of the city, do we locate religion? What is a secular space? Are we somehow beyond secularism? This an relationship theoretical these In this we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented World War II. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos and extermination and concentration camps. These sites which-once the locations of genocide-are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preserva