Department of University of

ANT476H1F Body, Self and Sociality Fall 2014

Professor Janice Boddy AP 124 Office: AP 232 M 2:00-5:00 pm Office Hours: M 12-1:30, alternate Ts 1:30-3:30 Email: [email protected]

Description

We frequently take our bodies for granted as ‘natural’ and self-evident. But are they? The human body is at once a given of social and cultural life and a continuously created and contested entity. In this advanced undergraduate seminar we shake up our received understandings and examine ‘the body’ as a historically and culturally contingent category, the material site and means of practice, and a foundation point for identity and self-fashioning. We consider the relevance of cultural meanings to biomedical practices and imaginings of kinship, the centrality of the body to consumer techno-society, and the body’s role as a locus of experience, political inscription, and struggle. Readings examine and challenge the ostensible distinctions between ‘body’ and ‘mind’, and apparent limits of the body as a bounded, singular entity. Students will be exposed to several anthropological approaches to the human body as a social and cultural construct, and to topics of contemporary interest such as body modification and organ transplantation as well as classical ethnographic themes.

Format

Lectures, films, student presentations and group discussions grounded in weekly readings about bodies in specific social, cultural and historical contexts.

Objectives

In addition to having improved their written and oral expression and critical thinking skills, at the end of this course students can expect to: • Be knowledgeable about anthropological approaches to the body and embodiment and be able to evaluate their uses and pitfalls, • Have developed a knowing and respectful appreciation of people’s practices and ways of inhabiting their bodies, • Be able to critically assess practices, modes of control, and concepts of the body in light of current political, economic, social and technological conditions.

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Workload and Assignments

This course meets three hours per week; however, for every classroom hour students can expect to spend 3-4 hours reading and thinking through the weekly assigned articles in advance. In some weeks more time will be needed to write a response paper or prepare for your seminar presentation. Please take this into consideration when deciding whether this course is right for you.

All assignments must be completed on time. Without a valid university approved excuse, late assignments will be penalized 5% per day late.

• Three short (2-3 page) response papers, on the required readings for a particular week, 10% each ………………………………… 30%

• In-class presentation of issues raised in the readings for one week, along with discussion points posted to Blackboard in advance of class ……………… 15%

• Final take-home essay exam (12-15 pages) ………………………………………… 40%

• Participation …………………………………………………………………. 15%

Participation means:

• Attending class having read and being prepared to discuss the readings. A seminar is a co- operative venture and each student’s willingness to join the debate is vital to its success. This course requires a steady pace of reading and thinking. Students are expected to make every effort to attend classes; more than one unexcused absence will result in a 1.5 point deduction from your participation mark. Students will sign in each week, so your absence will be noted; please inform me in advance when extraordinary circumstances occur.

• Leading one discussion (alone or with teammates): a 20 minute (approx.) presentation of issues raised in one or more assigned readings for the week and preparing discussion points as a stimulus to debate.

• Checking Blackboard regularly for course updates and fellow students’ posted discussion points.

• Keeping up to date with your readings and response papers. Note that a response paper is not a summary of readings but your exploration of one or more issues that the readings address. A good strategy would be to query a key issue or idea that contributes to our goals in the course – something that could be further developed in class discussion.

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• Being respectful of other students by refraining from eating in class (except during breaks), and turning off your cell phones, tabs, and computers (for most weeks, bring a pad and pencil for keeping notes) unless you have obtained permission from the instructor.

Due Dates

Response papers are due in hard copy no later than the start of class on the dates below:

RP 1 --- October 6 or earlier RP 2 --- November 10 or earlier RP 3 --- December 1 or earlier

Note: Response papers submitted earlier than their final due dates will be returned as soon as possible, normally by the following class.

Take home exam --- December 8, details to come.

NB. All students are expected to be familiar with the University’s Code of Behaviour on Academic Matters, available at http://www.governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/policies/behaveac.htm.

The following statement is required by the University to be posted along with notification of use of Turnitin.com: “Normally, students will be required to submit their course essays to Turnitin.com for a review of textual similarity and detection of possible plagiarism. In doing so, students will allow their essays to be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database, where they will be used solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism. The terms that apply to the University’s use of the Turnitin.com service are described on the Turnitin.com web site.”

Required Readings

Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life (Body, Commodity, Text), Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar, eds., Duke University Press, 2007, available at the U of T bookstore. A copy has been placed on reserve in Robarts for this course. All other readings will be available in the library on reserve, or for download as pdfs or permanent web links from the Blackboard site for this course.

Schedule

The following schedule of readings and discussions may be subject to modification. Please be sure to check the Blackboard site frequently for any messages, though any changes (i.e. any shift from required to recommended readings) will also be dicussed in class. 4

1. Sept. 8 Introduction to the course, beginning the division of labour

2. Sept. 15 Overview. Social bodies and representational logic, the Durkheimians: where bodies and social categories (such as kin groups, nations) are seen as entities that can ‘stand for’ or represent each other; how the body’s physical boundaries provide cultural expressions for moral boundaries and social identity (and vice versa); boundary transgression and bodily integrity. The mind-body conundrum.

BBP 1-49, 69-82. (Introductions, plus articles by Engels (1882), Hertz (1909), Granet (1933), Victor Turner (1967)

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 114-128.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy & Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body”, Quarterly 1(1): 6-41, 1987

3. Sept. 22 Universal and particular. Alternative images and imaginings of ‘the’ body: participatory logic, metaphor and metonymy; the body’s intimate relation to its social and physical context.

Broch-Due, Vigdis, “Making meaning out of matter: perceptions of sex, gender and bodies among the Turkana” in Carved Flesh, Cast Selves: Gendered Symbols and Social Practices. V. Broch-Due, T. Bleieg, I. Rudie, eds., Providence RI: Berg 1993, pp. 53-82.

Bamford, Sandra,“To eat for another: taboo and the elicitation of bodily form among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea” in Bodies and Persons. M. Lambek and A. Strathern, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 158-171.

Gell, Alfred, “Closure and multiplication: an essay on Polynesian cosmology and ritual, “ in A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. M Lambek, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 290-305.

Terence Turner, “The Social Skin,” BBP pp.83-103.

4. Sept. 29 Practicing bodies: habit and habitus; engaging the world through the culturally conditioned sensorium; the co-ordinates of human life.

BBP pp. 50-68, 130-132, 133-149, articles by Mauss, Benjamin.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E., “Time and Space”, BBP pp. 193-201.

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Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, London: Polity, 1990, pp. 52-79.

Young, Iris, “Throwing like a Girl”, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 141-59.

Howes, David, “Introduction: To summon all the senses” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience, D. Howes, ed., Toronto: Press, 1991, pp. 3-21.

5. Oct. 6 First response paper is due in class, no later than 2:00 pm.

Film to be shown in class: Anybody’s Son Will Do (NFB) and discussion

6. Oct. 13 Thanksgiving Holiday

7. Oct. 20 From practice and phenomenology to discursive bodies, biopower, history.

BBP pp 133-149, article by Merleau-Ponty

Csordas, Thomas, “ Cultural Phenomonology: Agency, Sexual Difference, and Illness”, A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 139-156 (a good segue from Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty to Foucault)

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, NY: Random House, 1978, pp. 81-114.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, NY: Random House, 1979, pp. 135-169.

8. Oct. 27 What then is biopower??

Rose, Nikolas, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 41-76.

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, Atiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship,” Global Assembalages, A. Ong & S. J. Collier, eds., Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 124-144.

Anagnost, Anne, “A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and Rationality of the State in Post-Mao China,” Conceiving the New World Order, F. Ginsburg & R. Rapp, eds., Berkeley: Press, 1995, pp. 22-41.

Hacking, Ian, “Making Up People,” BBP pp. 150-163.

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9. Nov. 3 Identity, practice and embodiment, normalization. Possibly a film.

Laqueur, Thomas, “Of Language and the Flesh”, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 1- 24.

Kahn, Susan, “Eggs and Wombs: the Origins of Jewishness” Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel, 2000, pp. 112-139.

Martin, Emily, “The Egg and the Sperm,” in BBP pp. 417-427.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne, “Of Gender and Genitals: The Use and Abuse of the Modern Intersexual,” Sexing the Body, New York: Basic Books, 2000, pp. 45-77.

Ramberg, Lucinda, “Troubling Kinship: Sacred Marriage and Gender Configuration in South India,” American Ethnologist 40(4): 661-675, 2013.

10. Nov. 10 Second Response paper is due no later than 2:00 pm today

Race, colonization, bodily reform

Fassin, Didier, “Racialization: How To Do Races with Bodies”, A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, Oxford: Wiley-Blackeell, 2011, pp. 419-434.

Arnold, David, “Smallpox: the body of the goddess,” Ch. 3 in his Colonizing the Body: State medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 116-158.

Bordo, Susan, “Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture” in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, R. Lancaster and M. Di Leonardo, eds., NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 335-358.

Boddy, Janice, “Remembering Amal” BBP pp. 315-329

11. Nov. 17 Fall Break

12. Nov. 24 Questions/topics for the take-home final essasy to be cirulated

Bodies under stress: violence, domination, the politics of aesthics

Malkki, Liisa, “The Uses of History,” Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugess in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 105-152. 7

Aretxaga, Begonia, “Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence” Ethos 23(2): 123-148, 1995.

Domurat Dreger, Alice, “Jarring Bodies: Thoughts on the Display of Unusual Anatomies,” in BBP pp 475-485.

Boddy, Janice, “Normality and Aberrancy of Female Genital Cutting: Shifting Cutlural Paradigms.” Keynote address, University of Zurich, The Surgical Reconstruction of Sex, June 2013.

Notorn, Kevin et al. 1996 “Ken and Barbie at Life Size,” Sex Roles 34 (3/4): 287-294.

12. Dec. 1 Third response paper is due no later than 2:00 pm today

Capitalism, commodification, body parts, cell lines

BBP pp 489-530, 567-583 (articles by E.P. Thompson, Aiwah Ong, and Margaret Lock)

Cohen, Lawrence, “Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception”, Global Assembalages, A. Ong & S. J. Collier, eds., GlobaOxford: Blackwell, pp. 79-90.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, “The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’ Organs,” Global Assembalages, A. Ong & S. J. Collier, eds., GlobaOxford: Blackwell, pp. 145-167.

(Unfortunately we won’t have a ‘make-up Monday’ as I am in a panel at the AAA meetings on Dec. 3.)