ANTH 351 - Language and Expressive Culture

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This seminar provides the advanced student with an intensive investigation of theoretical and practical problems in specific areas of research that relate language and linguistics to expressive activity. Although emphasizing linguistic modes of analysis and argumentation, the course is situated at the intersection of important intellectual crosscurrents in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that focus on how culture is produced and projected through not only verbal, but also musical, material, kinaesthetic, and dramatic arts. Each topic culminates in independent research projects.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2014/15a: Language, Medicine, and Healing. This class examines the ways in which language mediates medical institutions and practices, with a special emphasis on healing. In the first third of the class, we consider the role that language has played in the historical emergence of Western biomedical practice, and focus on its characteristic textual/graphic routines and modes of classifying persons and disease, a practice we will understand as a form of governing persons and populations. In the second third of the class, we consider the varieties of language-mediated interaction understood across cultures as healing practices, such as psychotherapeutic discourse, Yucatec Mayan and Central American shamanism, herbalist practices in the Andes, and doctor/patient interactions. In the last third of the class, we consider some cases that reveal the ironies and political consequences of healing interventions into the subjectivities of vulnerable persons and populations. Students write a research paper and present their work in class. Mr. Smith.

Prerequisite: ANTH 150 , ANTH 250 or permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.