Various topics covering current research theory, method; issues of social and cultural concern; culture change, conflict, and adaptation. May combine more than one subdiscipline of Anthropology.

This is a class about human and non-human animals. It reflects on the intimate, productive, ethical and destructive terms by which people and animals encounter each other. We live with animals, we eat them, we love them, we wear them. As humans have domesticated animals, so animals have domesticated us. Human culture recognizes its forms of communication, selfhood, power relations, forms of work and exchanges as including animals. Animals engage in productive roles alongside humans - they hunt, work the fields, pull sledges, carry loads, entertain, go to war, guide, protect, and attack. They are are beloved companions and members of our families. They are fearsome creatures that terrorize and kill us. We surround ourselves with the idea of the animal. We will consider questions such as: Why are the vast majority of stuffed toys animals and what does this tell us about childhood? What kind of companion is an AI dog? What is the difference between a human mind and a non-human mind? What primal fear is activated by sharks (remember jaws)? How do we think of ethics, animal sentience and meat eating? From snakes as symbols of dangerous female desire; the cow as the totem animal of Hindu fascism; buffaloes and the god of death; shape shifting humans and the violence of colonialism; wolf children and ‘nature versus nurture'; capitalism and the industrial farming of animal being; to co-habitation and the mass extinction of species that humans have wrought on the earth - we define ourselves in and through our relations with animals. In this class we will consider the myriad ways in which the human-animal is entangled with the non-human self.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills