Il(legal) Anthropology

4.0 credits

This course uses anthropological approaches to explore the sociopolitical construction of “the law” in the contemporary world. We will examine how the state’s power and regulatory practices constitute contingent domains of il/legality and how they shape people’s lives. We will also look at a range of illegal activities—including racketeering, piracy, drug trafficking, and political corruption—as well as how certain racialized and gendered bodies are subjected to criminalization. In so doing, we will look critically at the boundary between the illegal and the legal and its assumed alignment with dis/order and the im/moral at local, national, and global scales. We will examine case studies from Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia, the US, and elsewhere.