Ghosts, Spirits, and Anthro

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

All societies have stories of the supernatural, the afterlife, of haunted places and left-behind spirits. Violence and injustice leaves behind traces, ruins, remains, echoes, which become part of our present. However, we do not always see or hear these remainders, or choose to deny them, in making plans for our futures, individual and collective. Can anthropology offer methodological and conceptual insights by taking ghosts, spirits, and the supernatural seriously? What relationships between the past and the future can anthropology bring to light through ethnographies of the supernatural? This course will address history, memory, and the past and ask what it means to reckon with racial, religious, ethnic, and gendered violence and the collective memory they shape.