ANT 2440 - From Savages to Cyborgs (3)

When Offered: Spring; Alternate years
GEN ED: Social Science Designation; Integrative Learning Experience (Theme: “Imagination, Innovation, and Meaning”)
This course is about monsters, and how monstrosity blends together realms that should be kept separate - such as nature/culture, human/animal, male/female, material/immaterial, and self/other. The very beginnings of anthropology can be traced to the impetus for discovery of otherness, in an unyielding attempt to find, know and subdue others. Despite the Enlightenment project to classify and thus distance the perceived threat of the “savage-primitive”, the figure of the monster shape shifts. People who are cast as less than human - savages, gang members, criminals, terrorists, post-human cyborgs, people with AIDS - embody the nexus of debates about causality and cure. In this course, we pursue the monster as it is imagined and emerges through the medium of film - from early ethnographic films of the 20th century, documentary films on outcast figures, and popular film.