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 2018/19a: Affective States. 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 19^th century Southeast Asia, Russia during Perestroika, and indigenous communities in the late 20^th 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.

Topics for 2018/19b: Decolonizing Rituals. Focusing on political rituals of the mid-twentieth century decolonization era, this course examines the power of symbols in shaping world history. While referring to classic works on ritual, the course draws its theoretical questions from scholarship on ritual and agency (with special attention to the anthropology of new rituals) and from scholarship on decolonization and the nation-state. Following a section on colonial rituals, the course considers six kinds of decolonizing rituals: anti-colonial rituals, independence and national rituals, end of empire rituals, rituals of global governance, rituals of NGOs and rituals of US power. The course thus also includes study of specific histories of colonialism and postcoloniality, particularly in the Americas, South Asia, Southern Africa and the Pacific. It comparatively considers transformations in the former British empire generally, and also considers rituals (from the Olympics to the UN) of global scope. Additionally, students may address areas and decolonizing ritual histories of special interest to them through research papers and group class presentations. Martha Kaplan.

Topic for 2018/19b:  Futures: culture, media, and the speculative imagination.  Imaginations of the future saturate our experiences of the present. From the looming crisis of climate change, to the speculations and innovations of finance capital, to utopian/dystopian visions in popular culture, a multitude of practices and discourses of the future condition our day-to-day lives. This course explores how diverse cultural, political, and media environments produce conceptions of the future. How do people make, dispute, and live with futures? And how do these future-making practices shape present political struggles, cultural practices, and mass media? To explore these questions, this course combines theoretical, ethnographic, and historical materials with an examination of speculative fiction, film, and art. First, we trace how anthropologists and other social scientists have conceptualized “the future” as an object of study, particularly in relation to modernity, risk, and aspiration. Secondly, we examine a multiplicity of futures and ways of thinking time, in readings that take us to financial markets, religious communities, and research laboratories, as well as to science fiction, Afro-futurism, virtual worlds, and beyond. Xiaobo Yuan.

Prerequisite(s): Previous coursework in Anthropology or International Studies, or permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.