Anthropology 206: Anthropology and Europe

Europe exists as a category under constant negotiation and renegotiation. This course asks what the region of Europe has meant to the field of anthropology and how ethnography has both sustained and contested ideas of Europe as cultured, rational, a group of nations, and democratic. How is European geography lived, constructed and contested by a multitude of actors, institutions, and ideologies? Where has ethnography stood on matters of the far-right and notions of blood, roots, and soil. The course examines recent ethnographic debates within ethnographies that question the status of Europe as a category with an essential meaning.  Course draws examples from the politics of memory and forgetting, migration, ethnic conflict and war, and the metamorphosis of post-socialist societies in Eastern Europe, and the cultural politics of European integration within the European Union.