Remaking Life and Death

ANTHRO 2738 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course is a critical reading advanced graduate seminar focusing on how defining the boundaries between life and death became a matter of profound political, cultural, and scientific debate. Guided by the concepts of bio- and necropolitics, we will explore the shifting relations between body and person, human and time, and technology and biology while attending to the changing political, biomedical and religious contexts. The course includes readings from a number of anthropological subfields, including medical anthropology, anthropology of science and technology, religion, politics, and the Anthropocene. We will discuss the range of issues, from the classic studies of mortuary rituals to political lives of dead bodies to technoscientific reconfigurations of the human and of life itself, as well as emerging themes, such as multispecies ethnography, resurrection biology or species revivalism, and the ways digital media can extend one’s personhood following death.