Anthropology 340 - SEM: TOPICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Topics course. In recent years, "the body" has emerged as a vital site of social theory and anthropological analysis. Scholars have raised questions about how bodies are produced as socially meaningful, how bodies become sites for the inculcation of ethical and political identities, and how processes of embodiment break down the divide between the body as natural and the body as socially constituted. This course considers how the body is invoked, addressed and reshaped in processes of religious movements, political mobilizations, performances of gendered identity, biomedicine and economic markets. It reviews various approaches to the study of the body- as an object, as a vehicle and as a "read" product of analysis - and asks how these shed light upon issues of embodiment, agency and personhood.

Topic: The Body. Instructor Permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores