Contemporary Anthropological Theory

optional courses

Classes will analyze the current trends in anthropological theory from the late 1990s to the Second decade of the Twenty-First Century.

The course aims to familiarize the students with some of the most important anthropological approaches developed in the last twenty-five years. The first unit focuses on the immediate consequences after the writing culture critique of the 1980s in American Anthropology. It describes the development of phenomenological and existential anthropologies and subsequent experiments in ethnographic writing. The second Unit analyzes the politics of the paradigm of World Anthropologies proposed by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, where the students will learn about the relationship between center and periphery in the production of anthropological knowledge. The third Unit focuses on the theme of Globalization and mobility. Here the students will study the conceptual complexity of Globalization and the development of a New Mobilities Paradigm in anthropology, focusing on the issues of migration and tourism. The fourth Unit addresses three different types of “anthropologies of ontologies”; a French approach criticizing the concept of Nature, a Brazilian proposal based on Amerindian perspectivism, and a third theme where an ontological turn is proposed in detail. A fifth and last Unit delves into the problem of climate change and the way anthropologists and other scientists approach the current climate catastrophe.

Adams, Kathleen. 2018. “Leisure in the ‘Land of the Walking Dead’: Western Mortuary Tourism, the Internet, and Zombie Pop Culture in Toraja, Indonesia. Pp. 97-121, in Adam Kaul and Jonathan Skinner. Leisure and Death: An Anthropology Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying. Louisville: University Press of Colorado.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

Csordas, Thomas. 2002. Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Danowski Déborah, and Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2017. The Ends of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Descola, Philippe. 1996. “Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice”, in Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson (eds.) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge. Pp. 82-102.

Eriksen, Thomas H. 2015. “Divided by a Shared Destiny: An Anthropologist’s Notes from an Overheated World,” in Thomas H. Eriksen, Christina Garsten, and Shalini RAnderia (eds). Anthropology Now and Next: Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pp. 11-29.

Friedman, Jonathan. 2003. Globalization, the State and Violence. New York and London: Altamira Press.

Hannerz, Ulf. 2001. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kind in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Holbraad, Martin, and Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, Michael. 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo. 2006. “World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology”, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26 (4), 363-386.

Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo, and Escobar Arturo (eds.). 2006. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations Within Systems of Power. Oxford and New York: Berg.

MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cap. 5. Staged Authenticity. Pp. 91-109.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2021. Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2022. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Sheller, Mimi, and Urry, John. 2006. “The New mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning A. 38 (2): 207-226.

Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. “Introduction: A Return to the Senses”, pp. 3-14.

Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relation: An Anthropological Account. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 2020. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago: Hau Books.

After the course, the students will identify the major trends in anthropological theory. They will be able to identify the main approaches developed in the United States and the Global South. They will assess and compare different types of anthropologies globally. Methodologically the students will be able to create strategies to connect local and global issues and critically analyze the stance of current affairs like climate change, the refugee crisis, war, social conflict, and the dilemmas of alterity description.

A final essay about one of the course topics, with a value of 60%.

Participation in class and exposition of a relevant theme: 40%

Attendance is mandatory.