Courses

ANTH 20015 Anthropology at Chicago: Tradition, Discipline, Department                
Instru: Nikki Grigg                                                       
M/W/F 12:30 pm – 1:20 pm

For nearly a century, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago has been home to ethnographers, linguists, archaeologists, and biological anthropologists who have shaped the field of anthropology. This course explores those intellectual traditions, with an emphasis on faculty members' current scholarship: archival and historical silences, notions of kinship, language-in-use, ideas of waste (ancient to nuclear), science and technology studies, and more. Class meetings will focus on discussions with current faculty around their research, while assignments will incorporate faculty and departmental archives held at the Regenstein Library, artifact collections at the Field Museum, and oral histories collected from members of the department. Intended for those interested in anthropology and/or the history of the social sciences, this course encourages students to get to know faculty members and scholarship that are part the Department, and provides an opportunity to learn more about the people and traditions that have shaped anthropological research at UChicago.

ANTH 20423  Conspiracy/Theory                                                   
Instru: Joseph Masco
T/TH  11:00 am – 12:20 pm

Conspiracy theorists typically view what might be regarded as disparate happenings as connected, products of an intentional force whose interests are ultimately served by and organized through another's victimization, exploitation, or ruin. Conspiracy/Theory considers the intersection of conspiracy and theory, focusing on the imbrication of complex systems across politics, economics, militarism, and technology in the present. Exploring the conditions for knowing in a world where there is often too much information but not of the right kind to judge evidence, ascertain the nature of truth claims, or resolve issues of agency and intent, one goal is to examine how and when intuition, experience, and judgement become marked as either conspiratorial or theoretical. Understanding the elective affinities between conspiracy and theory while appreciating the seductions of each, this project engages the theoretical in conspiracy and the conspiratorial in critical theory, grappling as well with the ways in which suspicion, opacity, networks, misinformation, uncertainty and mass mediation function today. 

ANTH 21201 Chicago Blues                                                            
Instru: Michael Dietler
T/TH   3:30 pm – 4:50 pm

This course is an anthropological and historical exploration of one of the most original and influential American musical genres in its social and cultural context. We examine transformations in the cultural meaning of the blues and its place within broader American cultural currents, the social and economic situation of blues musicians, and the political economy of blues within the wider music industry.

ANTH 22132  Science/Fiction/Theory                                             Instru: Hussein Ali Agrama              

Science fiction has enjoyed an extraordinary and still growing resurgence in popularity over the last two decades - through literature, film, video games, and even universities, where it is the subject of ever more courses being taught. Why has science fiction become so popular? Does it express the anxieties of a way of life that can't be sustained, is in decline, and might soon end, in the face of intractable war, lurching financial crises, recurrent pandemics and unchecked climate change? Does it speak to the senses of radical hope and irreparable despair about the future that seem to characterize our time? If so, then science fiction today is grappling with traditionally theological themes: fate and finitude, immortality and the nature of divinity, the place of the human within a cosmic scale, and the possibilities for redemption and messianic rupture. This course will explore these themes by pairing sci-fi literature and film with readings in philosophy and social theory. Throughout, we will ask how science fiction's propensity toward the theological allows it to grapple with the unique forms of hope and despair in our time, and in times past.

ANTH 23023  Economic Anthropology                                          
Instru Michael Dietler
T/TH  11:00 am – 12:20 pm

This course explores the distinctive ways that anthropologists have developed to study economic systems, processes, and behavior of the present and past. It emphasizes the importance of qualitative and historical research methods and an understanding of "the economy" not as an autonomous domain of action governed by natural laws or a universal "human nature". Rather, economic behavior is revealed as something that is deeply embedded in specific social institutions, structured by cultural constructions of value and morality, and contested according to factional ideologies. Lectures and discussions will trace the development of anthropological theory about the economy and treat different aspects of economic phenomena, including production, labor, consumption, value, trade and markets, money, the capitalist world system, and globalization. Examples of anthropological analysis will range from ancient archaeological cases to peasant societies and modern consumerism and financial markets, including the global financial collapse of 2008.

ANTH 23101 Introduction to Latin American Civilization I      
Instru: Sarah Newman
M/W 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm     

Autumn Quarter examines the origins of native civilizations in Latin America, with a focus on the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the major pre-Columbian civilizations (the Maya, the Inca, and the Aztecs); the causes and consequences of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests; and the establishment of colonial societies and economies in the 16th century.                                            

ANTH  24001 Colonizations I                                                          Instru: Stephan Palmie
T/TH  11:30 am – 12:20 pm

This quarter examines the making of the Atlantic world in the aftermath of European colonial expansion. Focusing on the Caribbean, North and South America, and western Africa, we cover the dynamics of invasion, representation of otherness, enslavement, colonial economies and societies, as well as resistance and revolution.                                                                                                 

ANTH 24003  Colonizations III                                                       
Instru: Teresa Montoya
T/TH  12:30 pm – 1:50 pm

The third quarter of the Colonizatoins sequence considers the processes and consequences of decolonization both in newly independent nations and former colonial powers. Through an engagement with postcolonial studies, we explore the problematics of freedom and sovereignty; anti-colonial movements, thinking and struggles; nation-making and nationalism; and the enduring legacies of colonialism.

ANTH  24111 Visual Anthropology and the Photographic Image 
Instru: Teresa Montoya
TH 2:00 pm – 3:20 pm

This seminar explores photography as a medium of anthropological inquiry, cultural representation, and political imagination. Through close reading of photographic theory and history of image-making practices, students will analyze and produce photography as a research method. Particular attention is given to engaging critically with archival images as well as Indigenous and environmental visual representation. The course will culminate in the creation of a photographic/ethnographic essay project.

ANTH 25305 Anthropology of Food and Cuisine                         
Instru: Stephan Palmie
T/TH   12:30 pm – 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 26330 Making the Maya World                                         
Instru: Sarah Newman
T   2:00 pm – 4:50 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  26509 Bakhtin, Life and Meaning                                      
Instru: John Kelly
T/TH  9:30 am – 10:50 am

Mikhail Bakhtin is unique among social theorists. He provokes fury from some partisans of redemption by struggle, and for others enables life-changing political consciousness. This course explores his linguistics, political theory, theology, ethics, and philosophy of the human condition. His dialogics are vital to study of decolonization, and much else. He negates Saussure’s semiotics more fundamentally than Derrida, and builds history and politics into Sapir, Whorf culture theory. Bakhtin challenges theories of order, progress, and knowledge, and theories of power, struggle and revolution. He opens a third possibility, a social theory of life, death, and renewal. Making death comedy not tragedy Bakhtin revalorizes life and real meaning. With Gandhi he is one of the last social theorists to reject modernism and embrace faith in God – with a vastly different view of truth and consciousness. Bakhtin was dramatically discovered in the West in late twentieth century, a half-century after the Stalinists decimated his school. He offers a surprising new road out of Kant, dialogical not dialectical (Hegel, Marx) not historical realist (Weber) not centered by culture, libido or will to power. We will read key texts by Bakhtin and school in contrast with others. We consider dialogues with antagonists and intimates, with God, with other species, and smart machines, dialogics of feminism in the Global South, and of migration, global warming, war, peace and democracy. partisans of redemption by struggle, and enables life-changing political consciousness in others.         

ANTH 29910  BA Seminar I                                                            
Instru: Kaushik Rajan
W 3:00 pm – 5:50 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.