Courses

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

This course is designed for students in their first-year of the MA program in the Department of Anthropology. In it, we will explore the generative tensions within concepts of ‘the social' that have animated anthropological theory since its earliest days. Combining canonical texts with contemporary ethnography, explore foundational questions about the making and valuing of kinds of humans (and convivial non-humans) and about the production, aggregation, and disaggregation of their collectivities. Ultimately we consider the recent turn to theories of life itself in light of these longstanding questions, and along the way, we will encounter such varied ‘big thinkers' of collective life as Engels, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and Harraway. We will range over a varied territory of ethnographic topics-from intimacy and personhood, to suicide, to nature/culture-each of which richly illustrates the productive problems of personhood, sociality, commensurability, and history for which anthropological theory strives to account.