Intensity

1 Course Unit

This course examines the manner in which humans encounter the continuous and gradable features of phenomena in social life - sensory qualities of objects, people's aspirations and affect, pitch movement during voiced talk, monsoons and sea breezes, biological growth and environmental degradation, migratory flows in transnational settings - and attempt to evaluate or convert them into discrete dimensions of social life. We examine how intensities and gradients are managed in everyday life as well as in institutional settings - through government policies, scientific protocols, surveillance regimes, infrastructural agendas - and we survey the ways in which everyday and institutional practices reflect and shape each other in societies across the world. In particular, we explore the question of what an anthropology of intensity might look like, and how it may reconfigure approaches to the ethnographic study of human affairs. 1 Course Unit