Stephan Palmié

22205/31700. Slavery and Unfree Labor. Contrary to widespread popular conceptions, American chattel slavery is only one of many historically known and ethnographically documented forms of unfreedom and exploitation. This course offers a concise overview of institutions of dependency, servitude, and coerced labor in Europe and Africa, from Roman times to the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, and compares their further development (or decline) in the context of the emergence of New World plantation economies based on racial slavery. We will discuss the role of several forms of unfreedom and coerced labor in the making of what we, today, recognize as the "modern world", and reflect on the manner in which ideologies and practices associated with the idea of a free labor market supercede, or merely mask, relations of exploitation and restricted choice. In addition, we will discuss some of the thorny issues raised by what is sometimes called “neo-slavery”, and touch upon the troubling possibilities for the commodification of human body functions and body parts (such as surrogacy or organ trade) opened up by new biomedical technologies.

25300. Anthropology of Food and Cuisine. 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 up until quite recently, they have done so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. Food has figured prominently in theories of gift exchange, religious sacrifice, classificatory systems, the analysis of social structure and symbolic systems, but also political economy, cultural ecology, and applied work in famine-modeling, food security, and medical anthropology. More recently, food and eating have become the focus of an anthropology of the body, and have come to figure in attempts to theorize sensuality and the politics of pleasure and suffering. This course will explore several such 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.

41200. Anthropology of History. 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.

42500. Anthropology of the Afro-Atlantic World. Although originally pioneered, more than three generations ago, by scholars and critics such as C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, or Walter Rodney, conceptions of an “Atlantic World” have only recently come to prominence in Anthropology. In the past decade, however, students of Africa and the Americas have increasingly begun to phrase their inquiries in terms transcending entrenched geographical divisions of labor within the social sciences, aiming to include Africa, the Americas, and, to a certain extent, Europe into a single analytic field. Parts of this course will be devoted to a concise introduction to some of the major theoretical positions within, and controversies surrounding the new “Atlantic” anthropology of Africa and its New World diasporas. After this, we will examine a number of recent monographs and/or major articles exemplifying the promises and pitfalls of theoretical conceptions and methodological procedures that attempt to go beyond mere transregional comparison or linear historical narratives about “African influences”, and aim at analytically situating specific ethnographic or historical scenarios within integrated perspectives on an "Afro-Atlantic World".

54400. Paradoxes of Race. Notionally grounded in nature, race has a history. We know that racializing discourses and practices are distinctly modern phenomena, intellectually postdating, rather than informing enlightenment ideas about the biological origins of human variation, yet simultaneously growing out of the practical exigencies of the establishment of European domination in colonial scenarios. The historical “artificiality” and ethnographic variability of contemporary projections of embodied racial otherness notwithstanding, ideologies of “race” inform not just patterns of everyday sociality and conflict, but become enshrined in legal and scientific (e.g. medical) policies often explicitly geared towards anti-racist goals. This course examines racializing ideas and practices in several historical and contemporary social and cultural contexts not only with a view towards establishing a genealogy of conceptions of racial difference, but in order to develop a perspective on how to disrupt the social routinization and effectiveness of race as both a discriminatory technos, and a template for self-making.

54410. Hybridity. Ever since the late 1980s when James Clifford discovered that the "pure products" had "gone crazy", and Ulf Hannerz alerted us to the fact that the "world" was "in creolization", notions of "hybridity" and "hybridization" (and their various conceptual relatives such as mestizaje, creolization, syncretism, and so forth) have enjoyed increasing currency in our discipline. Often seen as the results of globalization-induced and medially accelerated Hyperdiffusionism, "hybrids", it seems, are the ubiquitous sign of a postmodern denouement of both "cultures" as "we knew them" (once, when we were "modern"), and the antidote to older anthropological reifications. How ironic then that while the "hybrid" obviously gestures toward what Marilyn Strathern has called "post-plural" conceptions of culture, the languages that are supposed to make it analytically visible often hearken back to the vocabularies of regimes of "breeding" ("hybrid" or "creole"), religious orthodoxies ("syncretism"), systems of racial exclusion and domination ("mestizaje"), or other institutional mechanisms and practices that reproduce and police categorical boundaries - often in order to stabilize particular distributions of power and privilege. This experimental course aims less to scrutinize the analytical utility of the conceptual language these terms appear to put at our disposal, than to probe into the epistemological conditions and taxonomic politics that make "the hybrid" thinkable in the first place, and seemingly "good to think" at the current moment. The central question it poses is: how do we know that something is "hybrid" (or not)? After a very brief initial survey of contemporary "hybridology" and the forms of analysis it seeks to supercede, we will take our departure from Bruno Latour's suggestion that "hybrids" are the inevitable products of practices of categorical "purification". In line with this, we will examine the politics of classificatory discernment, recognition, and naturalization that are productive of both the "purities" and the "hybrids" that appear to stand out, and even ostensibly militate, against them. After a foray into taxonomics and "natural kind" philosophy, we will discuss an array of case studies concerning the maintenance of classificatory infrastructures and categorical boundaries in regard to species, sex, language, race, and distinctions between humans and animals, nature and society, persons and things, and life and death. My hunch is that we might conclude that contemporary "hybridity"-talk is epistemologically problematic and politically troubling because far from destabilizing normalized categorical schemes, it necessarily reinforces precisely those distinctions that make "hybrid anomalies" visible in the first place. However, I remain entirely open to be convinced of the merits of hybridity (or rather: conceptualizations of it that I have, so far, failed to take into account).