The Anthropology and Theory of Enclosure
ANTH 321
Spring 2023 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
AFAM 321, AMST 251 |
This course surveys the anthropology of a form--at once spatial and epistemological--that we will call enclosure. In this course, the historical process of enclosure--the process of expropriation by which common land and common wealth was privatized (literally hedged or fenced) and formerly "free" persons were brought into disciplinary institutions--will guide us conceptually and anthropologically. Aligned with domination and restriction, enclosure discloses much of interest to anthropologists: personhood, ownership, cartography, settler-colonialism, force, dispossession, difference. In order to manage the scale of our investigation, our primary ethnographic and historical examples will be drawn from the Black Atlantic and the Unites States. We will look to the production of actual spaces to study enclosure: the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, the factory, the ghetto, the household of the monogamous family, the prison. Such a list does not propose a historical sequence. We will however attend to social and anthropological forms that are overlapping, messy, and persist over time. We will ask questions about: the structures and logics of captivity, partition, separation, and possession; subjectivity and scarcity; and the ethnographic representation of enclosure and its disciplines. But we will also ask after possibility and the otherwise: attending to imaginative social possibilities of dis-enclosure, unbounding, openness. Is there a way to think and practice dis-enclosure that might bring us from a dying, privatized world to a more inhabitable, common, and liberated Earth? |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS ANTH |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
Major Readings:
excerpts from: Saltwater Slavery, S. Smallwood; A Map to the Door of No Return, D. Brand; Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, S. Mintz; Discipline and Punish, Foucault; Ghetto: Invention of a Place, History of an Idea, M. Duneier; Black Metropolis, Drake & Cayton; Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels; Color Line & Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire, E. Esch; Economies of Abandonment, Povinelli; Black in White Space, E. Anderson; In the Wake, Sharpe; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, S. Hartman; Blackpentecostal Breath: Aesthetics of Possibility, A. Crawley; Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Federici.
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Examinations and Assignments:
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Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
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| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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