Anthropology 225 - Moving Culture: Anthropological Perspectives on the Body and Human Movement

(Offered as ANTH_ 225 and THDA-229) To live is to experience and interact through a body that is perpetually in motion. This course explores the diversity of ways we experience, study, use, treat, and think about the dynamic human body, and why attention to embodied existence and movement matters. We will investigate the complexity of what people are doing when they dance, enter a room, play a sport, take a yoga class, or make a gesture. We will interrogate how culture and social norms shape how people perceive and navigate the world, and how people use their bodies to act and communicate. Students will learn about anthropological and multi-disciplinary approaches to the body, embodiment, and human movement (including phenomenology, somatics, kinesthetics, kinesics, semasiology and dynamic embodiment, and biopolitics). These theories will become tools to think critically about embodied practices (skilled and mundane) as central to and informed by social, cultural, and political contexts. Readings will include scholarship on a range of embodied engagements, including artistic, expressive, spiritual, labor, wellness, and athletic practices. Topics also include anthropological perspectives on the body and identity, agency, disability, the senses, emotion, language, power, hierarchies of value, race, gender, sexuality, and nation. Students will also be introduced to ethnographic methods (e.g., description, film, photography, and movement notation systems) that allow scholars to investigate human movement and embodied experience.

Limited to 25 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Lecturer Cox.

How to handle overenrollment: Priority will be given to Anthropology & Sociology and Theatre & Dance majors.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Readings, written work, embodied learning activities, discussion, qualitative research methods, presentation.