Contemporary Issues in Cultural Anthropology

3 units

A familiar topic of the modern age, the threatening prospect of a world-wide catastrophe ahead, has become a large and elaborate discussion of the true nature of the contemporary world. Many works have, using various arguments, pointed to the potential collapse of the world as we know it. This course seeks to identify, as best we can, the empirical dangers to the world as it is but also critically examine the arguments that describe the world condition. Our project requires that we confront a fundamental conceptual issue in the study of the human condition: how to distinguish the reality of the world as it is from the rhetorical devices by which it is conceptually grasped.