Joseph Masco

21408//42200. Practice of Anthropology: Interpreting the Potlatch: History, Narrative, and the Ethnographic Object. This seminar explores the 100 plus years of ethnographic writing about Northwest Coast gift exchange. It examines the ethnographic archive of texts devoted to "the potlatch" as a means of 1) examining the intellectual history of anthropology as a scientifit project and 2) discussing ethnographic narrative, meaning, and form. Key texts in the ethnographic literature on the potlatch will be paired with key statements from various theoretical schools within anthropology and narrative theory.

22100//32300. The Anthropology of Science (=HIPS 21301). Reading key works in the philosophy of science as well as ethnographic studies of scientific practices and objects, this course provides an introduction to contemporary science studies. We will interrogate how technoscientific “facts” are produced, and discuss the transformations in social order produced by new scientific knowledge. Potential themes include the human genome project, biodiversity, and the digital revolution.

22400/34900. Big Science and the Birth of the National Security State (= HIPS 21200). This course examines the mutual creation of big science and the American national security state during the Manhattan Project. It presents the atomic bomb project as the center of a new orchestration of scientific, industrial, military, and political institutions in everyday American life. Exploring the linkages between military technoscience, nation-building, concepts of security and international order, this class interrogates one of the foundational structures in the modern world system.

54800. Uncanny Modernities. This seminar examines the concept of the "uncanny" as an ethnographic topic. Pursuing the linkages between perception, trauma, and historical memory, this course asks if the modern state form necessarily produces the uncanny as a social effect. The seminar will explore this theme through works of Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Banjamin, and Foucault, as well as recent ethnographies that privilege the uncanny in their social analysis. J. Masco.

52700. Anthropology of Security. One of the foundational concepts of international order is the notion of security. Though this category is rarely defined in practice, it is the basis for war and peace, for the internal management of populations within states, as well as a rhetorical structure that is increasingly used to mobilize resources (economic, military, and ideological). This seminar interrogates the concept of security through the theoretical literature informing state concepts of security, through ethnographic studies of insecurity, and particularly, through an analysis of U.S. power in the post-Cold War period.

51001-02-03. Science Studies. This seminar engages recent ethnographic work in the anthropology of science. Focusing on the role of science and technology in creating new articulations of governmentality, security, and the concept of the human, this seminar will interrogate key themes in the evolution of an ethnographically based science studies. Taught in three parts over three consecutive years, the seminar will focus on 1) the technology of military security and war; 2) the (re)definition of the human in the biological sciences; and 3) the social consequences of the digital revolution.

51001. Science Studies-I: Military Science and War. The anthropology of science has tended to downplay the relationship between military concerns and modern science. Yet, the Cold War provided much of the motivation as well as many of the foundational structures for American science in the 20th Century. In this course, we will examine the evolution of U.S. military science, and interrogate the technological foundations of American power since World War II.

51002. Science Studies II: Reinventing the Body. This seminar examines how new forms of scientific knowledge are changing definitions of the human body. Reading ethnographic studies of the human genome project, modes of imagining the human body, and conceptualizations of disease, this course will chart the development of the medical gaze, as well as interrogate the social effects of new biological knowledge. J. Masco.

51003. Science Studies III: The Information Age. This seminar explores the socio-cultural effects of the digital revolution in information technologies. Interrogating the technoscientific as well as socio-cultural logics behind new virtual media, we will discuss how new forms of subjectivity (collective and individualized), new forms of governmentality, and new political commitments are being produced via information technologies and supercomputing.

55400. Utopia. Some claim that utopian thought was a casualty of the late twentieth century, and that we now live in a post-utopian age. This seminar calls this claim into question by exploring the various ways in which utopianism (and its dark twin, dystopianism) continue to structure our lives. We will ask what utopianism implies as social critique, as imaginary practice, and as political-cultural ideology. Departing from a series of classic utopian texts, we move into detailed engagements with Marxist utopias, modernist architectural utopias, anti-colonial utopias, totalitarian utopias, consumerist utopias and technological and/or virtual utopias. (with William Mazzarella).