Anthropology 210: Bring Out Your Dead: Anthropology of Death and Dying

Drawing from philosophy, history, literature, film, and various sub-disciplines of anthropology, this course will develop a robust theoretical framework for an anthropology of dead and dying bodies centered on the political, cultural, and scientific problematizations of the boundary between life and death. The course will introduce students to a substantial corpus of anthropological research on death-that-is-life of chronic disease and end-of-life care; biotechnologies and the ethics of remaking life and death; temporalities of death and dying; the necropolitical critique of the social abandonment and killing of racialized, ethnicized, and gendered Others; the management of human remains and relics; the corpse’s centrality to the shifting terrain of evidence and the implications of forensics for witnessing of trauma, violence, and loss; and spaces of death and dying as key sites of political mobilization and imaginaries of emancipation. May be taken for credit toward the Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies major or minor.