ANT468H5

Anthropology of Troubled Times

Rising sea levels, unnatural disasters, global displacements, energy shortages, poverty, racism, mediated mass-surveillance, conspiracies, populism, pandemics – all provide unsettling markers of our times. As chroniclers and theorists of the contemporary, anthropologists have been keen to diagnose and engage the moment. Their efforts have yielded dividends: key insights into some of today’s most pressing problems, as well as new analytic tools with which to capture them. This fourth-year seminar will enable students to survey a range of pressing contemporary concerns and to explore some of the ways anthropologists and cognate scholars are engaging with them. Because anthropology is part of the world it seeks to understand, the seminar will also consider anthropology’s own grounds of knowledge, dwelling on some of the epistemological, ethical and political conundrums the discipline’s real-world entanglements entail. This concern takes us beyond “troubled times,” inviting reflection on that curious Western project we call “anthropology.”