Anthropology 347-A: Special Topic in Anthropology: Anthropology of the Body

Prevailing forms of thinking about the body assume that the body is a given. In this course, we will approach the body as a shifting composition of forces and pose as our organizing question the following: What can a body do? We will develop an understanding of the body as the ambivalent ground of both subjugation and emancipatory transformation by tracing the history of different power formations and their investment of the body from a wide range of cultural and historical locations-some more remote, some more familiar. Approaching historical, ethnographic, and philosophical materials concerning cultural inscription, race and colonialism, discipline and labor, machinery and embodiment, sexuality and performativity, affects and bodies without organs, and biocapital among others, we will focus on the manner in which different regimes of power constitute sexually, racially, and culturally specific bodies. We will pose a broader set of questions about power, corporeality, and agency. How can we think of the body, and the capacities it entails, as fully inside power relations without reducing it to a mute effect of power? Inversely, how can we think of resistance as an invention that exceeds the particular modes of subjection?