Dr Mareike Winchell

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Erasmus Reciprocal Programme of Study, Exchange Programme for Students from University of California, Berkeley, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course is available with permission to General Course students.

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AN200 or AN288 at any time on the same degree programme.

Classically in sociocultural anthropology bodies occupied a default position that could be safely left to the biological or natural sciences. Since the 1980s, however, the combined influence of Foucault, phenomenology, feminism, medical anthropology, and, more recently, critical race studies, the study of disability/ableism, post-humanism, and the environmental humanities have made bodies (the body, embodiment, bodiliness) a topic in new ways. Once the life of the body has been made an issue for anthropology, many other areas of interest are somewhat recast: consciousness, materialism, subjectivity, agency, discipline, ethics, everyday life, practice, the senses, and experience all come into play in new ways. No one course could accommodate even the most important work claiming to elucidate these newly framed topics. This course will offer a review of work that centres the body in relation to power and experience, with the vexed theoretical and empirical question of the senses acting as a unifying theme.

Taking anthropological attention to the body and senses as a point of departure, we will reconsider understandings of the body as universal, natural or ‘normal’, reframing bodies as imperfect effects of history, culture, and power (among other things). At the same time, societal structures of meaning, power and value do not fully determine embodied practices. Bodies also supply openings to a variety of lived, multi-sensory experiences. People encounter, inhabit, and remake the world through their bodies, making the body not simply a concept, metaphor, or theory but also a lived practice that brings together experience, expression, control, imagination, and transformation. What can anthropological analyses of bodies reveal about subjectivity, power, history, and the senses? What do bodies tell us about encounters across species and worlds? How do sensory experiences differ cross-culturally? How to account for the eclipsing of bodily specificity in some variants of post-humanism and materiality studies? When is a body not a body?

Readings will fall into the following broad categories: labour, alienation, and bodily capital; subject, power, and the ‘constructed’ body; colonialism, race, and vision; body as method and ‘turn’; senses, experience, and memory; marginalised senses (touch, sound, smell and taste); affect, belonging, and the social; ethics, bodily cultivation, and disability; materiality, substance, and post-human bodies; sensing the world/elemental bodies in end times. By combining anthropological case studies and cross-disciplinary social theory, the course will speak to debates across various social science and humanities fields. Lectures, core readings, and group-based discussions will address the body and senses in relation to a range of theoretical and applied concerns including: labour and inequality; gender and performance; post/colonialism, race, power; human health and disability; ethnographic writing and analysis; multi-sensory and mixed media methods; aesthetics and the arts; shared emotion and affect theory; post-humanism and material culture; and emergent debates about sensation, the elements, and the planetary.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Essay (1500 words).

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.

• Boddy, Janice. 2007. "Bodies under Colonialism," in Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton University Press.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995. "Structures, Habitus, Practices" in Rethinking the Subject. James Faubion, ed. Taylor and Francis.
• Butler, Judith. 1990. "Bodily Inscriptions/Performative Subversions." In Gender Trouble, pp. 417-422.
• Classen, Constance. 2010. "Foundations for an anthropology of the senses." International Social Science Journal. 
• Csordas, T. 1999. “The Body’s Career in Anthropology.” In Anthropological Theory Today, edited by Henrietta Moore, 172–172.
• De Certeau, Michel. 2021. "Spatial Practices: Walking in the City." In Public Space Reader, Routledge.
• Fanon, Franz. 1965. Medicine and Colonialism. Haakon Chevalier
• Feld, Steven. 1992. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Duke University Press.
• Foucault, Michel. 1972. "Body/Power," in Power/Knowledge. Pantheon, pp. 55-62.
• Ingold, Tim. 2010. "Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing." JRAI 16(1): 121-139.
• Keane, Webb. 2008. "The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion." JRAI 14(1): 110-127.
• Lock, Margaret. 1993. "Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge." Annual Review of Anthropology.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2(1): 70-88.
• Myers, Natasha. 2015. "Conversations on Plant Sensing." NatureCulture. 
• Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. "Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge." JRAI 15(1): 1-18.
• Papadopoulos, Dimitris, María Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers. 2021. "Introduction: Elements: From Cosmology to Episteme and Back." In Reactivating Elements. Duke University Press, pp. 1-17.
• Rabinow, Paul and Nicholas Rose. 2016. "Biopower Today," in BioSocieties 1(2): 195-217.
• Rutherford, Danilyn. 2015. Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World. Duke University Press.
• Seremetakis, C. Nadia. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception And Memory As Material Culture In Modernity. University of Chicago Press.
• Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wacquant, Loïc. 1995. "Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour among Professional Boxers," Body and Society 1(1): 65-93.

Essay (100%, 3000 words).