Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World

Anthropology as a field is the study of human beings – past, present, and future. It asks questions about what it means to be human, and whether there are universal aspects to human existence. What do we share and how do we differ? What is "natural" and what is "cultural"? What is the relationship between the past and the present? This course is designed to investigate the ways anthropology, as a discipline, emerged in conjunction with European (and later, American) imperialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the will to know and categorize difference across the world. We will probe the relationships between anthropology and modern race-making by investigating how anthropologists have studied key institutions and systems that structure human life: family and kinship, inequality and hierarchy, race and ethnicity, ritual and symbolic systems, gender and sexuality, reciprocity and exchange, and globalization and social change. The course fundamentally probes how the material and ideological constellations of any given moment shape the questions we ask and the knowledge we produce about human existence.