3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Reality is a key concept we often think with more than we think about. And yet reality is not a self-evident thing. This seminar explores a central paradox in the concept of reality: as a totality—an ‘everything’—nonetheless produced and maintained from a partial and situated practice of making. The course begins with historical examinations of reality-making and -undoing then proceeds to approaches from anthropological theory and ethnography. It looks critically at the role of scientific knowledge, technological development, and capitalist and socialist ideological regimes in making realities in their own image. The course puts forth the case that anthropology is uniquely situated to understand how systems of knowledge come into being and stabilize a social order while investigating the inherent contestability and fragility of those systems.