ANTHR 3470

Ethics, Animals and Nonhumans

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

The specter of the nonhuman continues to haunt anthropology and the humanities alike.  Across these fields, however, recent scholarship has demonstrated how objects and beings classified as nonhuman grow to become deracinated or devalued, notwithstanding material evidence of their integral conduct.  But to what extent is an actual ethics of the nonhuman possible?  This course will examine scholarly and aesthetic works that probe the means and ends by which nonhumans participate in ethical practices.  We will explore ontological interconnections between gods, saints, the dead, inhuman specters, documents, money, animals, forests, indigenous anima, affective architecture, and technological assemblages. Working both within and against Western ethical systems, we will discover how genealogies of the good and the just always conscript nonhumans, and ought therefore to consider their interests or the manifold conditions of their co-presence.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (CA-AS)

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