ANTH 360 - Problems in Cultural Analysis

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

May be repeated for credit if topic has changed.

Topic for 2026/27b: Experimental Ethnography. Experimental ethnography is at the heart of the effort to practice and generate an anthropology that decenters Western ways of knowing. Among other things, this means attending to and using ways of knowing, assumptions about, and perceptions of the world of the communities in which we do research, and employing a variety of representational modes to convey what we come to know. Seminar readings, films, and exercises highlight approaches  to ethnographic fieldwork that draw on embodied, sensory, affective, and psychic modes of apprehension, and that emphasize participatory, collaborative research. The use by anthropologists and communities they work in of art, photography, fiction, poetry, animation, and video, among other modalities, to unsettle canonical ways of knowing model new modes of ethnographic analysis and representation. Throughout the seminar students critically engage experimental and experiential methodologies, epistemologies, and strategies by applying them in individual and collaborative class exercises, and in projects that include, but are not limited to, photo essays, graphic storytelling, non-fictional narrative, fictional, poetic, and dramatic forms. Students may also explore expressive cultural forms – music, dance, food, for example – as representational modes. Through seminar readings, films,  exercises, and projects, we consider how reimagining and reconfiguring the ways we approach ethnographic study and representation challenge and realign entrenched systems of power and knowledge. Colleen Cohen.

One 2-hour period plus outside screenings.

Course Format: CLS