ANTH 411 - The Politics of World Making: Semiotics, Pragmatics, Performance

Anthropologists have long been interested in humans’ dynamic efforts to create multidimensional social worlds amid ongoing contestation. Yet early attempts to account for this cultural politics of world making were obscured in favor of conveniently static representations of bounded “cultures” or/as “races,” and dualistic understandings of sociocultural structures versus individual actions or intentions. This course considers “semiotics,” “pragmatics” and “performance” to be methodological rubrics that have grouped together a wide variety of social theorists who have focused instead on the emergent and contested nature of all meanings, persons and places as they are interpreted in everyday and ritualized speech, practice and performance. The course brings linguistic anthropological methodologies into dialogue with critical race theories since the early twentieth century to interrogate the possibilities and limits of anthropological world making in the face of Western theorists’ complicities with modernist white supremacy. Moving from key foundational texts in the science and philosophy of language, social action, and subjectivity to more recent theoretical and ethnographic work, we rethink language and semiotics as social action, the nature of context and interpretive politics, the relationships between formal events or performances and everyday life, and the precarious, often violent creation of selves and others. By directing analytic focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to social life and weaponized or erased in racialized political economic orders, the course challenges students to reconsider some of the central issues in anthropological theory, such as agency, identity, power and resistance.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies to the department’s linguistic anthropology concentration.
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.