Professor Charlene Makley
Office: 312 Vollum
Phone: 771-1112, ext. 7461
Sign up for Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 4:40-6:00

Anthropologists have long been interested in humans' dynamic efforts to create multidimensional social worlds amid ongoing contestation. Yet early attempts to account for this cultural politics of world-making were obscured in favor of conveniently static representations of bounded "cultures" or/as "races," and dualistic understandings of sociocultural structures versus individual actions or intentions. This course considers "semiotics," "pragmatics" and "performance" to be methodological rubrics that have grouped together a wide variety of social theorists who have focused instead on the emergent and contested nature of all meanings, persons and places as they are interpreted in everyday and ritualized speech, practice and performance. The course brings linguistic anthropological methodologies into dialogue with critical race theories since the early 20th century to interrogate the possibilities and limits of anthropological world-making in the face of western theorists' complicities with modernist white supremacy. Moving from key foundational texts in the science and philosophy of language, social action and subjectivity to more recent theoretical and ethnographic work, we rethink language and semiotics as social action, the nature of context and interpretive politics, the relationships between formal events or performances and everyday life, and the precarious, often violent creation of selves and others. By directing analytic focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to social life and weaponized or erased in racialized political economic orders, the course challenges students to reconsider some of the central issues in anthropological theory, such as agency, identity, power and resistance. This course applies to the department's Linguistic Anthropology Concentration. Prerequisite Anthropology 211. Conference.

Learning Outcomes

After taking this course, students should be able to:

  • Grasp and understand the central premises of theories of language as social action, semiotics and pragmatics.
  • Grasp the basic premises and history of critical race theory in the United States,
  • Understand the nature, history and stakes of anthropological debates about the relationships among "language," "race," and "performance,"
  • Apply critical race and linguistic anthropological theories and methods to their own writing and media projects.
  • Understand basic methodologies and ethics for ethnographic research in the dynamics of race, language, and performance.
  • Plan and implement a semester-long ethnographic project.
  • Work collaboratively in peer review.

Distribution Requirements:
This course can be used to fulfill one of your Group II "History and Social Science" distribution requirements. It accomplishes the following learning outcomes for the group:

  • Evaluate data and/or sources
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.