What is a crowd, and what does being in a crowd do -- for you and to you in relation to others? To power? To “the state”? These are among the questions animating late 19 th and early 20 th century crowd theory – including work by Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud. Crowds and crowd theory have both been recharged during the last decade in particular ways. Events ranging from the Arab spring to Black Lives Matter; from the covid-19 pandemic (airborne, continuing, but largely declared by many governments to be over) to the surge of right-wing extremisms and authoritarianisms, have directed renewed attention to competing understandings of the politics, transmissions, and potencies of crowds. This seminar tracks several intersecting histories and vectors of thought about crowds in social theory and anthropology. We start with a consideration of crowds (or better yet, crowd theory itself) as an “illiberal” or “anti-liberal” formation, given their close association with contagion: the “emotional contagion” that dissolves the boundaries of the liberal individual, or the transit of (mis)information and the spread of infectious diseases, or the notion of a crowd as a conduit of violence – a mob, in this sense. Our readings will explore several clusters of work on crowds as political and other-formations, which will likely put interesting pressure on each other: 1) late 19 th century crowd theory and its reverberations in the 20 th century trajectories of mass culture and mass media; 2) anthropological theorizations of crowd and collective formations in South Asia and South America; and 3) critical work on the intensifying, current concatenation of “viral contagion” – of political atmospheres, virus, information, and otherwise -- via social media. Throughout, we will also be attuned to work on the hope, power, and pleasure that crowds can bring.

Repeat Rules