ANTH V3886 - Signs and Wonders

Institution:

Columbia University in the City of New York

Subject:

Description:

This course explores the dynamic interplay between "signs" - as evidence, knowledge, meaning, rationality - and "wonder(s)" - as passion, affect, sensation, but also as object, phenomenon, catalyst, and event - across a plurality of sites and registers: medieval theology, early modern science, the colonial encounter; skepticism, mysticism, demonology, and fascism; psychoanalysis, art, poetry, film; digitality, virtuality, and special effects; Enlightenment Europe, Evangelical America, postcolonial Africa, and beyond. What does wonder look like at the interface of madness, terror, and the sublime? What is this passion, this pathos, that can lead both to tireless critical inquiry and to unquestioning, indeed totalitarian, discipleship? How do signs and wonders become political technologies? At the outer reaches of knowability, how have marvels, wonders, miracles, and monstrosities been constructed, sensed, mastered, and mass-mediatized in different times and places? And finally, if, as Socrates believed, philosophy begins in wonder, can we say the same for anthropology? What exactly is the sensation - the awe, curiosity, fascination, even horror - of anthropology's encounter with its worlds? Along with ethnographic and historical texts, readings will include Lévi-Strauss, Viveiros de Castro, Ingold, Lingis, Daston and Park, Greenblatt, Rubenstein, Benjamin, Freud, Tarde, Deleuze, and Canetti.

Credits:

4.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.columbia.edu

Phone Number:

(212) 854-1754

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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