“Emotion” and “Embodiment” are terms at the heart of a number of contemporary debates within anthropology and other fields about the limits of rationality, and about the role of affect, emotion, and the human senses in shaping psychological, social, and political life. In this class, we will explore some of the key arguments to emerge in these debates, with particular attention to the following: how have different attributes of the human body—its potentialities and capacities, its vulnerabilities and fragility, its strengths and processes of decay—created the conditions for diverse forms of social, religious, and political existence across cultures and history? How are acts of reflection, thought, and perception dependent upon or entwined with such embodied features of human life? What are the implications of an exploration of affects and emotions, not as subjective states but as transpersonal conditions of experience, for our models of politics, ethics, and law? In exploring these issues, we will draw on literature from four primary theoretical tendencies: the history and anthropology of the senses, phenomenology, analyses of discipline and power, and studies in what is called ‘affect theory.’

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