Instructor: Charles Hirschkind
Time: Tu, Th 3:30 pm - 4:59 pm
Units: 4
Course Number: 33641
Requirements Course Fulfills
Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth
The two terms addressed are at the heart of a number of contemporary debates within anthropology and other fields about the limits of rationality and the role of affect, emotion, and the human senses in shaping our social and political life. In this class, we will explore some of the key arguments to emerge in these debates, with particular attention to the following: how have different attributes of the human body—its potentialities and capacities, its vulnerabilities and fragility, its strengths and processes of decay—created the conditions for diverse forms of social, religious, and political existence across cultures and history? How are acts of reflection, thought, and perception dependent upon or entwined with such embodied features of human life?