This course will provide a graduate level introduction to the anthropology of mind, body, and health. We will address broadly the question of how Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness and the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing. In addition, we will analyze medical practices as cultural systems, as well as the ways in which health, body, and mind are socially and politically constructed and manipulated, bodies are controlled and policed, and definitions of mind and mental processes influence and are influenced by social context. There will be a particular focus on the concepts of embodiment and trauma and their various uses and meanings in specific contexts. We will combine an examination of current theoretical paradigms with ethnographic case material from a number of societies, including Brazil, Japan, the US, and Canada. The goal of this comparative endeavor will be to analyze similarities and differences across understandings of mind and body and systems of healing, and to examine American perspectives, behaviors, and practices critically in order to illuminate the ways in which they are socially embedded and culturally specific. Open to all graduate students. No P/N.
Comp Lit 488-0-20 Study in French Philosophy: Biopolotics
This course addresses the emergence of sexuality as a philosophical theme within a number of currents of French philosophy, focussing on the feminist existentialist phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, the post-Marxist decolonialism of Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism, the genealogical critique of Michel Foucault, and the latter's decolonial revision within the biopolitical analyses of the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez.
The course has three main aims. We will critically compare and appraise the different methodologies, aims, concepts of power, and interpretive politics within these analyses of sexuality and/or the family as contingent formations. We will give attention to several recent publications by the philosophers under consideration that have prompted contemporary revision of established interpretations of these bodies of work. And we will ask how the work of Beauvoir, Fanon, Foucault and Castro-Gómez continues to be resituated today within a number of fields including contemporary critical theory, decolonial theory, critical race studies, and gender and sexualities studies. We will ask: what new concepts have now emerged from these transits and translations of mid twentieth-century theory?
This seminar will investigate how gender shapes politics, and how politics in turn shapes gender, with gender conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, co-constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, indigeneity, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We aim to understand gendered politics and policy from both "top down" and "bottom up" perspectives. What do states do, via institutions of political participation and representation, citizenship rights and policies, and official categorization to shape gender relations? How do gender relations influence the nature of policy, classification systems, and citizenship? How have movements and counter-movements around the transformation of gender developed, and how have gendered divides influenced politics of all sorts? We expand on conventional conceptions of political participation and citizenship rights to include grassroots democratic activism, the creation of alternative visions of democracy, social provision and economic participation, as well as examining formal politics and policies. We will read and discuss scholars drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological traditions, and we engage with analyses of a variety of contexts across the world (the US, other rich capitalist democracies, postcolonial states and beyond), striving to situate states and political mobilization in global contexts. The course draws on gender and sexuality studies, political science, sociology, history, and anthropology to understand gender, power and politics.
This seminar will review the new and most recent research literature on how children and adolescents use and are influenced by digital media, especially the newer interactive technologies of tablets, smartphones, interactive toys and the internet.
Perf St. 515-0-26 Digital Performances in the Era of Virality
Acting as "historians of the present," in this project-based course we will investigate the relationship between performance and digital technology as we track how creators, scholars, and activists have been intervening in contemporary scenes of social unrest. What emerging performance genres—from vaxxies to mental health TikTok videos and from Zoom performances to Instagram livestreams—have taken off during the last two years of social isolation and polarization? What digital aesthetic strategies link personal experience to collective crisis and action? How have artists and activists drawn attention to issues such as anti-Blackness, gender violence, and authoritarianism and their imbrication in the current public health crisis? To address these questions, students will read scholarship on performance and new media, examine digital performances of their choosing, and produce critical essays and/or practice-based research projects that incorporate digital tools. By the end of the course, students will have gained skills to analyze digital performances, to think critically about liveness, embodiment, and mediated performance, and to share their research using a critical digital humanities approach.
Soc 476-0-23 Indigeneity, States and Settler Colonialism
In this seminar, we examine settler colonialism as a political, social, cultural and economic formation, and Indigenous resistance, resilience and resurgence, focusing on the US in historical, comparative and global perspective. Settler colonialism is a distinctive form of social organization, which emerges within a global context of empires and colonial domination of peoples of the Americas, Africa, Oceania and Asia by Europeans and their descendants, in which settlers "come to stay" (Veracini 2010) and seek replacement of indigenous peoples, rather than the extraction and transfer of wealth to the "home" country (Bacon and Norton 2019). It is a constituent part of modernity. As Glenn (2015) has argued: "The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenes, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide. Settlers sought to control space, resources, and people not only by occupying land but also by establishing an exclusionary private property regime and coercive labor systems." We need increased recognition of Indigenous values, worldviews, and lifeways, as much sociological work omits the Indigenous perspective, and consequently sociological explanations are often ill-fitting or insufficient in understanding the "fourth world" of Native nations and their relations with settler societies. Notably, we seek to engage with analyses of inequality, power and difference that reflect the distinctive Indigenous experience within US settler colonialism: "Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples - hundreds of nations - not as a racial or ethnic group…" (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, p.xiii). The readings are multidisciplinary - covering sociology, Native studies, other social sciences and history, and we incorporate the works of diverse Indigenous scholars, philosophers and thought leaders. Topics covered include: indigenous perspectives on time, power and knowledge; key concepts for studying groups; overviews of the literatures on empire and colonialism and the entanglements of social science with settler colonialism; the emergence and co-constitution of modernity, empire, settler colonialism, states and indigeneity; property, dispossession and capitalism; biopolitics, reproduction, sexuality, gender; the US as a settler colonial formation; political contestation over settler colonialism and indigenous rights; native sovereignty, representation, decolonization and Indigenous justice.
