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SoSe 23: The Anthropology of Class

Žiga Podgornik-Jakil

Comments

In light of rising global inequality and the perception that identity politics is being hijacked by prestigious Western universities (Táíwò, 2022), it appears that class is returning to the academic mainstream. Anthropology has always had an ambivalent relationship with class, as the discipline has historically focused on non-European and supposedly classless societies (Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Morgan, 1877). However, with the influence of Marxism in the discipline (O'Laughlin, 1975) and later with P. Bourdieu's theories of cultural and other types of capital (Bourdieu 1986; 1990), anthropology has begun to take the concept of class seriously and examine it from a variety of theoretical and analytical angles (Carrier and Kalb, 2014). In this course, students will be introduced to the history of the concept of class within political anthropology, which has primarily brought it together with other traditional anthropological concepts such as kinship, ethnicity, and myth. The course will also link the concept of class to contemporary social theories, including intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2014), entanglement theory (Tsing, 2015), and multi-species theory (Feinberg et al., 2013). The course provides a valuable complement to other disciplines' understanding of class as the objective positioning of individuals in a stratified order by offering methodological tools to examine class through people's actual everyday lives and their entanglements with non-human beings as well as their subjective perceptions of their social positioning. close

Additional appointments

Thu, 2023-04-20 16:00 - 18:00