ANTH 360 - Problems in Cultural Analysis

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

May be repeated for credit if topic has changed.

Topic for 2021/22a: The Postcolonial and the Indigenous. (Same as INTL 360 ) This course compares two overlapping but different critiques of colonialism and modernity: the postcolonial and the indigenous. In the past two decades we have seen the resurgence of indigeneity, the political and cultural claims of sovereignty by the First Nations. In this resurgence, an entire set of cherished categories of modern life have been out under renewed scrutiny. Ideas of progress, development, nation, land, territory, belonging, human, nature and even those of rights, democracy and citizenship, have been questioned by this expanding wave of indigenous intellectuals and activists. Many of these same categories were also under siege from within an older postcolonial body of critical thinking. Born out of an experience of and (im)possible life-making after the event of colonialism, Caribbean, African and Asian scholars developed a trenchant critique of some the same categories as above. Just like indigenous critique, postcolonialism also forced a rethink of the certitudes of the pos-Enlightenment world. Alternate theories of consciousness, freedom, temporality and race emerged with a great fierceness. In what ways are these two bodies of critical thought similar to each other? What is the nature of their differences?  Why are those differences crucial?  Finally, we ask whether we can imagine new cosmologies of freedom or sovereignty that take into account these entangled histories. Kaushik Ghosh.

Topic for 2021/22b: Political Anthropology. Taking an anthropological position on emotions as culturally and linguistically elaborated in ways that are historically specific, this seminar interrogates the emotional attachments between people, places, and things that make various political, economic, and social formations possible. Readings explore capitalist consumer cultures where advertising and marketing generate emotional attachments between people, commodities, and brands, examine the role of emotion in state-formation and nation-building, as well as focus on state officials, politicians, and social movements that harness emotional attachments to construct coalitions, loyalties, hierarchies, and enmities. Through a succession of case studies on nostalgia, place-attachment, happiness, resentment, hate, hope, contempt, suffering, pain, compassion, grief, disgust, and disregard in locations such as 19th century Southeast Asia, Russia during Perestroika, and indigenous communities in the late 20th century American Southwest, students gain an understanding of the role of emotions in the configuring of relationships between people, things, and places at interpersonal as well as broader national and transnational scales. Louis Römer.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS