ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL WORLD

N.B. Students cannot attend classes or take exams if they are not officially enrolled in this course. For any information about the SIE English-taught courses for exchange students, please visit this webpage: https://www.unive.it/pag/35228/

At the end of the course, students will have acquired the fundamental knowledge regarding the theoretical reflections and the research trajectories developed by anthropologists on global contemporary phenomena. This course helps students "think anthropologically" by introducing core concepts through engaging case studies. Students will also have acquired practical skills related to the application and applicability of anthropological research in the contemporary world. The issues discussed during the course can provide students with useful insights for the elaboration of aware and responsible research projects.

No special skills are required.

Through an in-depth exploration of the main approaches that have contributed to the definition of what can be called "an anthropology of the contemporary global world", as well as through the presentation of specific research experiences, the course aims to emphasize the absolute necessity of applying an anthropological perspective to observe, understand, and interpret the phenomena of our contemporaneity. The course aims to provide students with a general overview of both the epistemological and methodological debates that have marked cultural anthropology from the 1990s to the present day, and with the multiple and diverse challenges that anthropologists of the contemporary global world must necessarily take up; for this purpose, we will explore the different variations of their complex and ‘stratified’ subjects of study.
In the first part of the course, we will focus on the foundations, the focal areas, and the urgent issues of contemporary cultural anthropology; we will also analyse some of the most significant epistemological debates that have affected anthropological disciplines since the mid-1990s; this includes transformations in the concepts of culture, space, identity, fieldwork, as well as the definition of new politics of difference in the contemporary global world. Emphasis will be placed on the need to go beyond the notion of deterritorialization and instead explore and develop inclusive theories concerning how space is being reterritorialized in the contemporary world.
The following issues will be analysed: circulation, exchange, and value of things in social life, global cultural flows, cultural performances in the global ecumene, postcolonial dynamics, cultural change, production of locality, biocultural heritages and “glocal” development, inequality, urban governmentality, cosmopolitanism, etc. We will also discuss about some possible futures for anthropological analysis.
In the second part of the course, through the presentation of particular research experiences students will have the opportunity to reflect on both the complexity and the extraordinary variety of contemporary anthropological themes, as well as on the richness of approaches and methods of application of anthropological research, focusing also on its implications, namely on the effects produced in the studied contexts.

Appadurai A., The Future as Cultural Fact, New York, Verso, 2013
Lecture notes (provided by the teacher)
One (or two) reading among the following books:
Abu-Lughod L., Dramas of Nationhood, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Herzfeld M., The Body Impolitic, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Sassen S., Globalization and Its Discontents, New York, The New Press, 1998.
Taussig M., My Cocaine Museum, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Tsing A., The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton, Princeton University, 2021

Subjects discussed during the course.

Power Point presentations will be available on Moodle.

The exam will consist of a written test focused on the topics analysed during the course and on the texts included in the course bibliography.

N.B. Regular class attendance is not mandatory. But students who will attend the first 10 lessons will have the possibility to do an oral presentation on one book chosen from a list given by the teacher and will do the written exam on The Future As Cultural Fact, the lecture notes provided by the teacher and on the subjects discussed during the course. Students who will not attend the first 10 lessons will do the written exam on Appadurai’s book, the lecture notes, and two books chosen from the list given by the teacher.

The predominant teaching method will be lectures which will try to engage students and stimulate discussion.

written