SHUM 3465

Anthropology of the Body

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025. The Catalog/Courses of Study 2025-2026 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.

When Offered Fall.

Distribution Category (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

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