ANTH 569A: POSTHUMAN ANTHROPOLOGY
TIMINGS
Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30 – 5:20
SMI 111
INSTRUCTOR:
Radhika Govindrajan
Denny Hall 142
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 2:00-3:00 p.m. or by appointment
In recent years, a growing corpus of anthropological scholarship – drawing on insights from science
and technology studies, environmental studies, philosophy, history, political theory, and critical race
and gender studies – has focused on exploring how human worlds and lives are constituted through
relationships with nonhumans, both living and nonliving, and through transactions with the
environment. Much of this scholarship is driven by the recognition that it is no longer possible to
think of agency, subjectivity, and intention as uniquely human qualities, but that these capacities are
unevenly distributed across human and nonhuman bodies and objects. This course will engage with
a few key texts of what has often been glossed as the posthuman turn in the humanities and social
sciences, focusing particularly on the questions and possibilities it has opened up for rethinking
relationships between nature and culture, humans and the environment. Through a close
engagement with some key texts that lay out the promises and pitfalls of the posthuman turn, the
course will address the following questions: What does it mean, in practice, to say that humans are
constituted through relationships with nonhumans? What ethical and political possibilities are
created when we think of the human as always existing in relation to a whole host of other beings,
especially in the age of the Anthropocene? Does this new focus on nonhumans - with its emphasis
on the often binary categories of human and nonhuman - erase racialized and gendered differences
between different humans or does it provide new ways to think about how certain groups have been
animalized and banished from the category of the human throughout history? What are the
particular challenges of doing research in and writing about these complex multispecies worlds? In
addition to critical texts that bring the critical insights of gender, race, and queer studies to the
posthuman turn, we will also read ethnographies of Matsutake mushroom commodity chains; the
interactions between the Runa people of Ecuardors and the critters who share their complex
Amazonian ecosystem; and the challenges of finding kinship and solidarity in the unequal terrain of
the Anthropocene.
REQUIRED TEXTS: (Available at University Bookstore but please feel free to buy copies on
Amazon. It is not essential that you all have the same edition)
1. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward An Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
2. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press.
3. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chluthucene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
All readings (other than the books) will be posted to the Canvas site for the course unless otherwise
specified. Please let the instructor know if any readings are missing. The readings may be subject to
change, in which case the instructor will notify you via Canvas in advance.
CLASSROOM POLICIES
- This course will be run in a seminar format. I expect students to come to class having done
the assigned reading for that day and prepared to discuss it. The instructor will begin each
class by introducing, clarifying and discussing the key scholarly debates on the topic at hand,
following which we will discuss the day’s reading together as a group.
- Every student is expected to arrive on time to every class and to attend class regularly. While
grading is not based directly on attendance, a portion of your grade is reserved for regular classroom
participation and will, therefore, be affected by attendance. If you are sick or have an emergency,
please provide appropriate documentation. If you need to miss or come late to class for any
other reason, please contact me beforehand for my approval and to arrange an alternative
mode of participation. - Please feel free to ask questions and offer your perspective on any topic of discussion. However,
do not make disrespectful or derogatory remarks about or to other students, the professor, or the
topics or peoples we study. We will be discussing a number of sensitive issues over the course of the
semester, and I expect you to be respectful and thoughtful in your comments. Racist, sexist, and/or
homophobic remarks will not be tolerated. Everyone in the classroom has the right to be treated
with courtesy and respect. - Please turn your cellphones off. - Please do not use your computers for anything other than accessing readings or taking notes. - Please adhere to the student code of conduct. - If you have a preferred pronoun, feel free to mention it in or after class. DISABILITY STATEMENT
If you have a disability and anticipate needing special accommodations in this course,
please let me
know as soon as possible (or whenever you become aware of your need),
and I will try to ensure
that your learning needs are appropriately met. All discussions will remain confidential. The
Disability Services Office (https://www.washington.edu/admin/dso) is a great resource for students
with disabilities. ASSIGNMENTS:
*Subject to change*
1. In-class discussion (20%): This course will be run as a seminar. This means that you must come to
class having done the reading and prepared to discuss it. I would suggest that you prepare written
notes on the readings, general questions about them, and critiques of their contents and core
arguments. Bringing these notes to class will help facilitate discussion.
2. Leading discussion (30%) – You will be expected to lead a class discussion twice over the course
of the quarter. The discussion will follow the instructor’s introductory remarks and general class
discussion. Please come prepared with at least two or three questions that will stimulate discussion
about the specific reading and its connection to the larger corpus of readings. (The dates for
assignments are embedded in the syllabus below)
3. Response papers (50%) – You will write five 2-3 page (12 size font, double spaced) reading
responses over the course of the quarter. Three of these will respond to the full books we will read
together. I would like you to critically engage the substantive themes raised by the readings. In other
words, please do not provide a summary of the readings, but instead engage with the theoretical,
methodological, and ethical issues they raise in their reflections on the posthuman turn and offer
your own critical reflection on these conversations.
LIST OF READINGS:
Week 1:
28th March: Introduction
Charles Darwin. Origin of Species (Introduction) (Canvas)
30th March:
Cary Wolfe. What is Posthumanism? (Introduction) (Canvas)
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Week 2: The Turns within the Turn
4th April: Multispecies Anthropology
Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Anthropology, Cultural
Anthropology. (Canvas)
7th April: ANT/New Materialisms
Annemarie Mol, “Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions”
Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Material Feminisms (Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality
in Feminist Theory)
Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter (Introduction) (Canvas)
Week 3: Gender, Race and Power
11th April:
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge,
1991, pp. 149-181.
When We Have Never Been Human, What is to be Done? (Interview with Haraway)
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog (Chapter 1)
13thth April: Posthumanism, Queer Studies, and Critical Race Studies
Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human’,
GLQ (Canvas)
Eben Kirksey, Lively Multispecies Communities, Deadly Racial Assemblages, and the Promise of
Justice, South Atlantic Quarterly.
Cristina Visperas, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Jared Sexton, Nothing/More: Black Studies and
Feminist Technoscience (Introduction)
DUE: Response Paper 1 - 14th April 2017 at midnight on Canvas
Week 4: The Ontological Turn
18th April:
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2004, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled
Equivocation,” Tipiti 2 (1): 3-22.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2012, “Immanence and Fear: Stranger events and subjects in
Amazonia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 27-43.
Marisol de la Cadena, 2010, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond
‘politics’,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334-370.
20th April: A Critical Look at the Ontological Turn
Kim Tallbear, Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints (Canvas)
Kim Tallbear, Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms, GLQ
David Graeber. 2015. Radical Alterity is Just Another Way of Saying Reality. HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory, Vol 5, No. 2. (Canvas)
SUGGESTED:
Zoe Todd. An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is just another word for
colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology.
Week 5: What Does the Ontological Turn Mean Ethnographically?
25th April
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (Introduction, Chapters 1, 2 & 3)
27th April
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (Chapters 4, 5, 6, and Epilogue)
DUE: RESPONSE PAPER 2 – 28th April 2017
Week 6: Agency, Ontology, and Power
2nd May
Bruno Latour, Bruno Latour, 2004, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From matters of fact to
matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248.
Bruno Latour, “On selves, forms, and forces" 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 1–6.
4th May:
Karen Barad, "Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practice," in Science Studies Reader
bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in: The Feminist Standpoint Theory
Reader. Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. by Sandra Harding. New York and London: Routledge,
2004: 153-159
Week 7: Love and Capital in Multispecies Worlds
May 9th:
Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World (Prologue, Part I)
May 11th:
Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World (Part II, Part III)
DUE: Response Paper 3 – May 12th at midnight on Canvas
Week 8:
May 16th:
Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World (Part IV and Spore Trail)
May 18th:
Jedediah Purdy, The Mushroom that Explains the World, New Republic. (Canvas)
Timothy Morton, Review of The Mushroom at the End of the World in Somatosphere. (Canvas)
Week 9: The Anthropocene
May 23rd:
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change (Canvas)
Bruno Latour, Anthropology At The Time of the Anthropocene (Canvas)
May 25th:
Lexicon for The Anthropocene Yet Unseen (Introduction, Environing, Flatulence, Nature, Power) https://culanth.org/fieldsights/803-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen
Stacey Alaimo, Exposed (Introduction)
DUE: Response Paper 4 – May 26th at midnight on Canvas
Week 10:
May 30th
Donna Haraway, Making Kin in the Chluthucene
June 1st:
Donna Haraway, Making Kin in the Chluthucene
Ursula K. Le Guin. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Selections)
DUE: Response Paper 5 - June 6th at midnight on Canvas