Courses

ANTH 30501 Transindividuality    
Instru: Kaushik Rajan, M/W    9:30 am – 12:20 pm
This class will explore conceptions of political community that disrupt and exceed the individual / collective binary. It will think in the first instance with certain genealogies of French philosophy that implicitly or explicitly posit the transindividual: Etienne Balibar's reading of Spinoza; a poststructuralist genealogy of political community from Maurice Blanchot to Jean-Luc Nancy to Jacques Derrida; Gilbert Simondon. These will be juxtaposed to readings of Global Southern instantiations of transindividual ideals as foundational investments in postcolonial imaginings of political community: specifically the use of Ubuntu in post apartheid South African political philosophy, and the importance of fraternity in the philosophy of B.R. Ambedkar. The attempt is to think through the kinds of aporias and possibilities of such relational ideas of the political present, in relation to questions of socioeconomic emancipation and democratic promise.

ANTH 34000 Intro to Chicago Anthropology    
Instructors: Darryl Li/ Alice Yao, M/W    12:30 – 1:50 pm
An introduction to the current faculty of the Department of Anthropology, their intellectual genealogies, and their current work.

ANTH 34101 Development of Social Cultural    
Instructor: Hussein Agrama, Theory-1 (“Systems”), T/TH/F 2:00 – 4:50 pm
Systems 1 is designed to introduce students to the intellectual and historical context of the emergence of anthropology as a professional scholarly discipline. The class asks after the conditions of inquiry - at once conceptual and socio-political - that shaped the discipline in its early formulation, but always with an eye toward our understanding of it today. This will require that we tack back and forth between considering the internal logics of an emergent social theoretical inquiry - what are its views of the world, humanity's relationship to it, and to what extent are we able to grasp and explore it - and the nature of these commitments in light of the rise of industrialized mass societies in 'the West' and, on the other hand, the consolidation of colonialism around the world.

ANTH 35305 Anthropology of Food and Cuisine    
Instructor: Stephan Palmie, T/TH 12:30 – 1:50 pm
Contemporary human foodways are not only highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, but often have long and complicated histories. Anthropologists have long given attention to food. But, until quite recently, they did so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. This course explores several related themes with a view towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food by examining a range of ethnographic and historical case studies and theoretical texts. It takes the format of a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and individual student presentations during the rest of the course.

ANTH 51942 Anthropological Encounters with Technology    
Instructor: Michael Fisch, T/TH 12:30 - 1:50 pm
How has anthropology adapted in recent decades to humanity’s underlying technological condition? How has it recalibrated foundational assumptions in order to engage posthuman claims and speculative machinic philosophies? This seminar explores current anthropological approaches to questions concerning technology in conjunction with recent philosophies of technology. Of central concern will be examining the ways in which latter has informed a reconceptualization of the relationship between culture and technics in opposition to culturalist tropes and technologically determinist accounts of modern society. At the same time, we will examine the limits of ethnographic approaches to technological environments. Our overall aim will be to elaborate a language, analytic, and orientation for cultural encounters with technology, and the relevant insights from philosophies of technology for new ethnographic approaches.

ANTH 57300 Doing Multimodal Discourse Analysis, From Interaction Media Textuality    
Instructor: Constantine Nakassis  W 1:30 – 4:20  pm
This course provides students a discourse analytic background to the ethnographic study of semiotic activity in culture. In addition to exploring the epistemological bases of interactional analysis, the course provides hands-on experience in generating artifactual representations of discursive interaction, widely construed, as well as reviewing various analytic and theoretical approaches to the analysis of such materials. Taking a critical lens to the production and analysis of such materials, the course also questions the limits and possibilities afforded by the “micro” analysis of discursively mediated social interaction. We begin the class with questions of the theoretical implications of transcription and the epistemologies of interactional analysis. Class readings, discussion, and in-class assignments will then take students through practices of noticing and transcribing common to interaction-oriented linguistic anthropology and related fields (e.g., ethnomethodology, conversation analysis). Subsequent weeks expand from these to various aspects of interaction textuality: poetic patterning in interaction, gaze, spatial orientation, and gesture. Later weeks expand such interactional-based analytic techniques to questions of media texts (such as edited, fictional film, graphic novels, etc.) and social media.

ANTH 57900 Advanced Reading Seminar: Archaeology, History, Time
Instru: Sarah Newman, FRI 3:30 – 6:20 pm
This advanced reading seminar explores ideas about archaeology, history, and time, and how they relate to one another in theory and practice. We will cover a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to): memory and forgetting; intersections of temporality and materiality; and time, history, and archaeology beyond the human.

ANTH 63701  Capitalism and the State    
Instructor: John Kelly, T/TH    9:30 – 10:50 am
What can historical ethnography teach us, about the origins of capitalism, sovereignty and corporations, and the past and future of planning? This course will examine transformative events: the advent and the abolition of British empire slavery. Whaling and its consequences. The “7 Years War” in India and America. The Mongol conquests. Also, twentieth century (c20) stock market crashes. The late c20 rise of global cities. China’s c21 “Belt and Road Project.” Cognizance of global warming. We will use transformative events to track the emergent assemblage of state and capitalist institutions, including money, markets and taxation, banks and stock markets, accounting and budgets. Like Weber, we will seek causal patterns in between determinism and serendipity. Following Veblen, we will focus on corporations and “New Deals.”
 

ANTH 30000  Anthropological Theory         
Instructor: Stephan Palmie
M/W/F: 1:30 – 2:20 pm

Since its inception as an academically institutionalized discipline, anthropology has always addressed the relation between a self-consciously modernizing “West” and its various and changing “others.” Yet it has not always done so with sufficient critical attention to its own concepts and categories – a fact that has led, since at least the 1980s, to considerable debate about the nature of the anthropological enterprise and its epistemological foundations. This course provides a brief critical introduction to the history of anthropological thought over the course of the discipline’s “long” twentieth century, from the 1880s to the present. Although it centers on the North American and British traditions, we will review important strains of French and, to a lesser extent, German social theory in chronicling the emergence and transformation of “modern” anthropology as an empirically based, but theoretically informed practice of knowledge production about human sociality and culture.

ANTH 32700  Sovereignty, Coloniality, Indigeneity 
Instructor: Teresa Montoya
TUE: 12:30 – 3:20 pm

This graduate seminar engages the political theories of sovereignty that inform contemporary Indigenous governance and social mobilization today. Beginning with a historical exploration of the moral, intellectual, and legal trajectories of fundamental concepts such as property, citizenship, territory, and nationhood, we will then explore the varied geographic and colonial contexts in which they have been contested by Indigenous polities. While we will draw heavily upon Indigenous ethnographic literature, we will also read texts from the interdisciplinary fields of history, geography, and cultural studies. In so doing, we analyze the productive tension these concepts might hold for theorizing an anthropology of settler colonialism and Indigeneity.

ANTH 33312  Datasets          
Instructor: Alice Yao
WED: 10:30 am – 1:20 pm

This course is a follow up to Datasets and offers hands-on opportunities to tackle various aspects of your work, ranging from structuring your methods chapter to refining and analyzing categories of archaeological materials, counts, and spatial , including GIS datasets. Some key areas to be addressed include: Identifying the most relevant evidence and appropriate levels of detail needed to answer your research questions. Visualizing your data effectively, whether through maps, tables, charts, or other means. Troubleshooting technical challenges with your analysis. Students are encouraged to use their own datasets for course material.

ANTH 34304   Talking with Animals            
Instructor: Summerson Carr
WED: 9:30 am – 11:50 am

All over the world, children have long learned the lessons of what it means to be human from what other animals tell them. In addition to ventriloquizing non-human animals to socialize human ones, projects for facilitating cross-species communication abound. These projects not only reveal how humans imagine their relations with other animals, but also how we conceive of the possibilities and limits of different sign systems. And while many focus on whether and to what degree non-human animals can apprehend linguistic signs, others suggest that animals are effective communicators precisely because they lack language, raising fascinating questions about ideologies of (im)mediation on the one hand, and multi-modality on the other. As we learn how Peruvian kids talk with llamas and American cowboys whisper to wild horses, and explore what spiders say and how apes read the human keepers who teach them to sign, this class explores how distinctions are drawn between human and non-human animals, as well as attempts to cross those divides through communicative forms and technologies.

ANTH 37201   Language in Culture 1           
Instructor: Costas Nakassis
TU/TH: 9:30 am – 10:50 am

This graduate seminar engages the political theories of sovereignty that inform contemporary Indigenous governance and social mobilization today. Beginning with a historical exploration of the moral, intellectual, and legal trajectories of fundamental concepts such as property, citizenship, territory, and nationhood, we will then explore the varied geographic and colonial contexts in which they have been contested by Indigenous polities. While we will draw heavily upon Indigenous ethnographic literature, we will also read texts from the interdisciplinary fields of history, geography, and cultural studies. In so doing, we analyze the productive tension these concepts might hold for theorizing an anthropology of settler colonialism and Indigeneity.

ANTH 40100  The Inka and Aztec States      
Instructor: Alan Kolata
T/TH:  9:30 am – 10:50 am

This course is an intensive examination of the origins, structure, and meaning of two native states of the ancient Americas: the Inca and the Aztec. Lectures and discussions are framed around an examination of theories of state genesis, function, and transformation, with special reference to the economic, institutional, symbolic, and religious bases of indigenous state development. This course is broadly comparative in perspective and considers the structural significance of institutional features that are either common to or unique expressions of these two Native American states. Finally, we consider the causes and consequences of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and the continuing impact of the European colonial order that was imposed on and to which the Native populations adapted with different degrees of success over the course of the 16th century.

ANTH 40101  Proseminar in Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity: Core Works            
Instructor: Ryan Jobson
TUE: 3:30 – 6:20 pm

This graduate proseminar serves as an introduction to the concepts and categories that orient the study of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. This includes repertoires of Black and Indigenous worldmaking alongside histories of plantation slavery, settler colonialism, and their afterlives in the Americas; circuits of racialized labor in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; and the construction of race and Indigeneity as categories of scientific and occult origins. Students will consult the works of Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Audra Simpson, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Tallbear, Audre Lorde, and Frantz Fanon, among others.

ANTH 41200  Anthropology of History        
Instructor: Stephan Palmie
WED: 10:30 am – 1:20 pm

Anthropologists have long been concerned with the temporal dimension of human culture and sociality, but, until fairly recently (and with significant exceptions), have rarely gone beyond processual modeling. This has dramatically changed. Anthropologists have played a prominent role in the so-called “historic turn in the social sciences”, acknowledging and theorizing the historical subjectivities and historical agency of the ethnographic “other”, but also problematizing the historicity of the ethnographic endeavor itself. The last decades have not only seen a proliferation of empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated historical ethnographies, but also a decisive move towards ethnographies of the historical imagination. Taking its point of departure from a concise introduction to the genealogy of the trope of “historicity” in anthropological discourse, this course aims to explore the possibilities of an anthropology of historical consciousness, discourse and praxis – i.e. the ways in which human groups select, represent, give meaning to, and strategically manipulate constructions of the past. In this, our discussion will not just focus on non-western forms of historical knowledge, but include the analysis of western disciplined historiography as a culturally and historically specific form of promulgating conceptions of the past and its relation to the present.

ANTH 41202  Back to Life: Reading Reich after Foucault   
Instructor: William Mazzarella
WED: 2:30 – 5:20 pm

When Michel Foucault delivered his scathing critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, he had Wilhelm Reich in mind. After Foucault, Reich’s vitalist critique of sexual repression and its relation to authoritarian politics has often been dismissed as naïvely ‘liberationist,’ and based on an untenable positive vital ontology. 

But does this need to be an either/or? Is it possible that the rejection of the repressive hypothesis is itself a kind of repression? In this seminar, we reconsider the work of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), reading it alongside some of his inspirations, fellow travelers, critics, and successors. Reich was a pioneering sexologist, a member of Freud’s inner circle in the 1920s and of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s, an unrelenting critic of the libidinal grounds of the patriarchal family and fascism, and, finally, a bio-scientist and therapist in the field of cosmic ‘orgone energy.’

It is commonplace nowadays to credit Reich’s early work in psychoanalysis and to dismiss his later orgonomic pursuits as – to put it gently – speculative. The aim of this class is to hold open a space for a generously critical engagement with this most idiosyncratic, creative, and exasperating 20th century thinker. In the midst of our climate crisis, our neo-authoritarian politics, and our raging gender backlash, what might we learn from letting Reich take us, at least for a while, back to life?

ANTH 42001  Modes of Inquiry I: Ethnographic Innovations          
Instructor: Kathryn Takabvirwa
WED: 9:30 am – 12:20 pm 

This course provides a critical introduction to the methods of anthropology, paying special attention to topic formation, deployment of theoretical resources, techniques of engagement in "fields," and the politics and ethics of fieldwork and ethnographic knowledge production. Our approach will combine readings in critical anthropology relevant to methodological practice with workshop-style demonstrations of particular techniques for gathering and analyzing field material. The limits and powers of ethnography (broadly construed) will be explored through exploratory engagement with students' ongoing projects and a few examples of anthropological writing. This course is intended to help students develop the tools needed to develop their own research objects and strategies while reflecting critically on anthropology as a practice.

ANTH 43006  The Nervous System  
Instructor: Joseph Masco
TUE:  11:00 am – 1:50 pm

How do states of emergency come to be shared and felt? What are the circuits of perception, attention, and sensory experience that produce a collective anxiety and fear? How is the biological nervous system in part a psychosocial mechanism, linking the individual to the collective via feelings, affects, anticipations? This seminar explores writers (across critical theory, ethnography, and history) that directly engage public agitation about collective conditions. It will explore how mass mediation and the ongoing revolution in information technologies extend and amplify older systems of psychosocial mobilization and recruitment, creating new circuits of attentional capture.

ANTH 51721  Power in the Streets: The Political Thought of C.L.R James 
Instructor: Ryan Jobson
WED: 1:30 – 4:20 pm

Born in Trinidad in 1901, C.L.R. James was the preeminent radical intellectual of the 20th Century. This course will trace the political thought of C.L.R. James over more than a half-century, from the publication of his short story “La Divina Pastora” in 1927 to the speeches and writing of his final years before his death in 1989. Over his lifetime, James’s political thought developed in accordance with his application of Marxist theory to his engagement with working people in Trinidad, London, Detroit, and elsewhere.In 1982, an octogenarian James paused to reflect on “where [his] Marxism ha[d] arrived at after events in Poland and Ghana.” This course will accordingly survey his writings and speeches in his roles as novelist, sports journalist, historian, editor, organizer, and orator. Through texts such as Minty Alley, The Black Jacobins, A History of Pan-African Revolt, Facing Reality, Party Politics in the West Indies, and Beyond a Boundary, this course will engage the organic conditions of working-class revolt and spontaneous insurgency that surrounded his signature writings

ANTH 52200  Proposal Writing Seminar      
Instructor: Susan Gal
WED: 2:00 – 4:50 pm

This is a required course for (primarily third-year) Anthropology graduate students who are preparing field work grant applications and dissertation proposals during the current academic year.  The course is taken pass/fail and provides each student the opportunity to present a pre-circulated draft research proposal for discussion and critique. The course focuses on preparation and discussion of students' draft proposals.

ANTH 56500  The Archaeology of Colonialism       
Instructor: Michael Dietler
FRI:  1:30 – 4:20 pm

This seminar is a comparative exploration of archaeological approaches to colonial encounters. It employs temporally and geographically diverse case studies from the archaeological and historical literature situated within a critical discussion of colonial and postcolonial theory. The course seeks to evaluate the potential contribution of archaeology both in providing a unique window of access to precapitalist forms of colonial interaction and imperial domination and in augmenting historical studies of the expansion of the European world-system. Methodological strategies, problems, and limitations are also explored.

ANTH 58600  Advanced Readings in the Social Theory of the City 
Instructor:  Alan Kolata
TH: 12:30 – 3:20 pm

This graduate seminar explores various historical, sociological and anthropological theories of cities. The course analyzes major theoretical frameworks concerned with urban forms, institutions, economic structures and phenomenological experiences of urban life as well as particular instances of city development from early modern to contemporary periods. We conclude with a reflection on the future and fate of cities. The seminar will consist of weekly orienting lectures, followed by class discussion of selected texts and themes concerned with social theories of the city. Class participants will present their research projects in the final session of the course.