Summer 2024 Anthropology UN3751 section 001

Personhood

Call Number 10007
Day & Time
Location
TR 1:00pm-4:10pm
707 Hamilton Hall
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Shishir Bail
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

This seminar seeks to engage with materials that question personhood. Drawing on both fictional and non-fictional accounts, we will be involved with textual and visual documents as well institutional contexts in order to revisit such notion under contemporary capitalism. We will cover topics like rites of passage and life cycle, the role of the nation state and local communities in defining a person, the relation between self and non-self, between the living and the dead. We will likewise address vicarious forms of personhood through the prosthetic, the avatar or the heteronomous. But we will also look into forms of dissipation and/or enhancement of personhood through bodybuilding, guinea-piging and pharmo-toxicities. As a whole, the course will bring to light how the question of personhood cross-culturally relates to language, performativity, religion, technology, law, gender, race, class, care, life and death.

Web Site Vergil
Subterm 05/20-06/28 (A)
Department Summer Session (SUMM)
Enrollment 4 students (25 max) as of 3:06PM Thursday, December 12, 2024
Subject Anthropology
Number UN3751
Section 001
Division Summer Session
Section key 20242ANTH3751W001