Anthropology
Graduate Seminar
F 12:10-2PM
Generations of anthropologists have seized upon waste as an object to think through issues as wide-ranging as labor divisions, religious devotion, and processes of social classification and value production. In recent years the discipline has renewed attention to this object by way of puzzling through how apparently intensifying global processes of industrialization, consumption, and extraction shape contemporary politics and ecological sensibilities. This seminar charts some of these moves within and beyond our discipline by inviting students to consider how and to what ends societies work through wasted things but also other kinds of durable leftovers. Of particular concern for us will be the production and (re)appropriation of things that defy strict classification as “waste,” that is, as things imagined to be readily and permanently ejected from a social group or order.
Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links.
Please note: The Center does not administer the courses listed and is not responsible for any changes in the content. For more information, please check the course directory or reach out directly to the instructor.
