ANTH 300 - African Technoscience

In the global North, Africans frequently appear as the beneficiaries and consumers of global flows of science and technology or, conversely, science and technology’s misusers and refusers. Rarely do they figure as its authors, producers, or animators. This course interrogates the conditions of possibility for African technoscience. What do the key themes of the anthropology of science-the politics of knowledge production, naturalizations as a site of investigation, the role of the state in shaping scientific infrastructures-look like when viewed from the African continent? What is at stake in claiming a particularly African logic, or in insisting on the rationality of witchcraft? Foregrounding the work of African anthropologists and historians, this course will examine Africans’ participation in and contestation of science as a practice of knowledge production, as a technique of colonial governance, as a site of anticolonial resistance, as a tool of postcolonial nation building, and as a potential instrument of decolonization. Drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, our readings will analyze knowledge production practices such as molecular biology, geology, mathematics, and anthropology while also grappling with how the boundaries of these practices have emerged and the people, objects, and forms of knowledge that exceed those boundaries.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 201 or ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): CRES 390
Notes: This course meets the department’s area requirement and applies to the department’s SETS concentration.
Not offered: 2023-24
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.