Bodies and Bodiliness

3.0 credits · Graduate

In this graduate level course, we will take the body and bodiliness as spaces of ethnographic engagement and questioning. Discussion, text and other materials in this class will invite students to consider the ways that the body (as an epistemological and ontological object) is transformed through a variety of scientific, economic and political projects. Because meditations on the body have rested -- implicitly or explicitly -- on theoretical and methodological approaches to experience, students will find themselves exploring histories of bodily senses, appetites, and capacities. Ultimately, our inquiry into contests over and reflections on the body and bodiliness aim to open up broader anthropological questions about knowledge, authority, agency, sovereignties, and material life.