Situated at the intersection of anthropology, environmental and media studies, this course explores ethnographic approaches to worlds that have become toxic. It considers “toxic landscapes' ' expansively: from the material pollution and contamination of lands to the inner crises experienced individually and collectively in times of ecological crisis. The course will consider the perceptually elusive aspect of poisons—the way such substances trouble corporeal sensation by oscillating between visibility and invisibility, affecting entire lifeworlds after relatively long exposures stretched out over generations. As such, human experience of poisons fluctuates between the denial of their existence and the tacit knowledge they can determine one’s life, or even an entire social world—generating new forms of identities, attachments, and senses of home. Several questions will guide us in this inquiry: what are the material, political, social, imaginary, and psychic effects of poison? How do sensory perceptions determine our understanding of ecological crisis? What is the social and political role of art and anthropology in fostering environmental awareness and re-imagining new futures? As these queries suggest, the course will aim to create frameworks for thinking about aesthetics together with political ecology (in particular through the role of the senses), drawing from anthropology, cinema, visual studies and gender studies—particularly recent theories of the body and “toxic embodiment” brought forward by feminist scholars. Special attention will be paid to speech, text, image, and bodies in the spirit of fostering an intermedial anthropological practice that takes up a phenomenological relation to the sensible world. Through a close reading of texts and other media, we will explore how artists, anthropologists, and environmental activists have offered unique perspectives into the contemporary experience of toxicity, while also formulating forms of healing and repair.
In this course, we traverse theories of society and culture that have shaped the field of sociocultural anthropology—its objects of inquiry, its debates, its methods, and self-critical reassessments. The course begins by tracing a genealogy of primary texts that emphasize the importance of language for understanding “the social” throughout the 20th century. We then consider how theories of language have morphed in time, giving a more prominent place to the body, until reaching the desire in contemporary anthropological theory to overcome the limits of human language altogether. Throughout, we will pay attention to interdisciplinary dialogues and legacies: to the way in which anthropological theory has been shaped by linguistics, sociology, political economy, literary criticism, philosophy—as much as it has also, in turn, influenced these different disciplinary fields. Thematically, we will focus on the concept of the gift, on notions of discourse and power, on the body and its practices, and on the concept of performativity. The course is concerned with the interrelations between anthropological theory and ethnographic practice and experience: for this reason, we will study theoretical texts in tandem with contemporary ethnographic studies, including conversations with guest speakers who will periodically visit the classroom to present their research and discuss the role of theory in their own trajectory as anthropologists.