Courses

Tracing relationality is a central component of doing and writing anthropology. What relates to what and how? Of the near infinite possibilities, what story is told? To foreground certain connections is necessarily to downplay others. The tracing is inherently political.

To describe something is also to model it. From rhizomes to cyborgs, colliding social forms to articulated modes of production: relationality has been modeled in vastly different ways.

This course will explore some of the ways in which anthropologists have brought nuance and sensitivity to the modeling of social relations. Each week will pair ‘theory’ with examples of its use in ethnographic works. We will cover a wide breadth of topics, leading to discussion of some benefits and drawbacks of various models while engaging current debates in the discipline. Should ethnography animate theory, or is theory arrived at through ethnographic description? Attending to this question and others, this course aims to equip students with additional tools with which to consider their own ethnographic writing.