University

“Because of its universal multiplicity and predisposition to vary its material and abstracted forms, water often confounds any attempt at fixity. Water’s significance for the sustenance of life makes its symbolic meaning multiple. But its material form is also multiple, destabilizing any schematic rendering of what a water body is. For one, water’s defining trait is its tendency toward the formless, its obsession with gravity, its material inclination to change. The French modernist poet Francis Ponge describes this condition by saying that “water collapses all time, constantly sacrifices all form, tends only to humble itself, flattens itself onto the ground” (Ponge and Brombert 1972: 50). Alternatively, we could say that it is not its lack of form but water’s magnificent capacity to take a huge variety of forms, the infinite metamorphoses it is capable of–spouts, streams, pools, fast or slow-flowing, whipped into turbulence, pulled by the moon, soaking things, and finding its level at rest–that creates the challenges of finding ways to engage its significance for life” (Andrea Ballesteros, A Future History of Water, 2019: 12).

In order to grasp water’s significance for life, during this semester we will draw from a broad range of scholarship and practice exploring the human engagement with water’s multiple forms. We will read studies from human geography and social ecology as well as contemporary ethnographies that focus on the human relationship with water across the Americas –in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and the US-Mexico borderlands. These explorations will be combined with photographic essays, poetry, and select films. Queer, feminist, and Indigenous philosophies that construct evocative re/imaginings of water will play an important role in the class dialogue. From this multi-modal foundation, we will view how hydro-social interactions emerge in historically and culturally specific ways and consider the de-colonial possibilities for the future of water. Students will produce one multi-modal experiment – a photo essay, a short video, a podcast, a soundscape, or a short collection of poems – that evokes a water portrait or examines a central consideration or question developed over the course of the class.

This course introduces the history, theory, and research practice of ethnographic film. Using a broad array of films and texts, we will analyze the role of film and audio-visual media within anthropology and examine the various theoretical and methodological approaches (e.g. observational cinema, cinéma vérité, direct cinema, experimental and self-reflective films, Indigenous film and media production, participatory methods, etc.). Practical terminology and the theoretical and aesthetic basics of film will be introduced through on-going and collaborative film analysis and discussion of form. Students will strengthen their analytical and rhetorical skills through critical viewing, engaged classroom dialogue, examination of diverse texts, purposeful writing, and a group presentation.

In the wake of climate change, anthropologists increasingly position the future as a generative object of study (Appadurai 2013; Ortner 2016; Salazar et al. 2017). Circumventing hegemonic notions of an apocalyptic Game Over climate scenario, scholars argue for nuanced consideration of the borders where people and other living beings are co-constructing visions of futurity beyond the boundaries of extractive capital (see, for example, Gómez-Barris 2017; Haraway 2016; Ingold 2013; Shotwell 2016; Tsing 2015). Drawing from political, economic, and audiovisual anthropology, critical Indigenous scholarship, and feminist theory, this course will focus on the Sonoran Desert region along the U.S. Mexico border to consider key questions regarding migration and surveillance, climate vulnerability, and social movements for livable futures.

In the midst of widespread ecological destruction, extractive capitalism, economic precarity, and persistent social inequalities, theorist Donna Haraway argues that our challenge is “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, (and) to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (2016: 1). In this course, we will look for these engagements. We will read ethnographies conducted in urban landscapes (Stoetzer 2018), extractive zones (Gómez-Barris 2017), among the Runa in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon (Kohn 2013), and among forests in Italy (Mathews 2018) and forests in Japan and the Pacific Northwest (Tsing 2017). These texts will help us think through how anthropologists are re-conceptualizing our relationship to earth and its multi-species inhabitants. Employing a “radical curiosity” (Haraway 2016), we will question notions of “purity” and “contamination,” and examine how “nature” is audio-visually framed. Following the lines of experimental filmmakers like Michif media artist Amanda Spotted Fawn Strong (Dowell 2018), Métis/Dine artist Marie Clements (Ginsburg 2018), and Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo (Gomez-Barris 2017), we will consider how Indigenous counter-publics are creating diverse conceptualizations of futurity. Students will have the opportunity to explore experimental audio-visual and multimedia ethnographic practices as we consider key arguments and questions that help students to create a dialogue about the possibilities for “living ethically in compromised times” (Shotwell 2016).

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán has said that a country without documentary film is like a family without a photo album. Building on Guzmán’s idea, we will consider how contemporary Latin American cinema reveals nuanced thinking about memory, power and violence, place and home, race, gender, and class through the representation of present-day political and sociocultural subjectivities. How might these films constitute a collective photo album? Which inherited pasts do they represent and contest? What futures do they imagine? Making connections between ethnographic, documentary, and fiction film we will study how directors from across the Americas have made cinema political by making the extraordinary familial and the intimate social. Each week we will discuss one film from the following filmmakers: Jayro Bustamante, Eduardo Coutinho, Alfonso Cuarón, Sandra Gómez, Sara Gómez, Patricio Guzmán, Heddy Honigman, Tatiana Huezo, Lisette Orozco, Marta Rodríguez, Marianne Rondón, and Damián Syifron.

Whether studying Indigenous resistance to oil and gas pipelines in North America, the humanitarian crisis in Syria, or the ascendancy to office of polarizing political figures, the urgency and complexity of contemporary global affairs underscore the continued need for in-depth ethnography built from nuanced analysis. Developed by critical race theorist and civil rights advocate Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality (1991) is one key concept we will consider within this context. An intersectional analysis interrogates the complexities of conflict and inequality by engaging with multiple theories of power. This intersectional perspective can provide a dynamic understanding of the ways in which everyday socioeconomic, environmental, and political realities impact heterogeneous bodies (and vice versa). It alludes to multiple registers of voice and listening – as a means for narrating and recognizing identity claims and transforming both intimate and public spheres. In dialogue with concepts from the anthropology of voice and listening, this course will introduce some of the foundational theories of gender, race, class, and sexuality that frame an intersectional analysis. We will address central arguments and debates, and consider how feminist and queer scholars, and anthropologists working in the fields of law, migration, education, and healthcare have built upon, changed, and adapted Crenshaw’s concept to reflect changing circumstances and new questions. We will consider how anthropologists construct their analysis through the study of language practices, diverse forms of media, and in settings such as schools, social movements, and state and community organizations. By developing a close, critical reading of theoretical and ethnographic texts, we will explore the ways in which anthropologists think with and through theoretical concepts, and embed analytical categories and questions into their ethnographic analysis.

Anthropologists are travelers and narrators. Whether we travel within our own localities, communities and cultures or venture long distances, we face the task of narrating what we encounter and whom we meet along the path of inquiry. This course is concerned with how to become more critical, reflexive and exacting narrators. Through the lens of ‘digital storytelling’ (Alexandra, 2015; Burgess, 2006; Dreher, 2010; Gubrium & Turner, 2010; Otáñez & Guerrero, 2015)–a participatory media practice and relative newcomer to anthropological inquiry–we will ask a series of questions. How can audiovisual storytelling enliven, as anthropologist Michael Jackson (2008) calls it, the ‘narrative imperative?’ In what ways is audiovisual production a form of inquiry? What are the affordances and challenges unique to digital storytelling as a co-creative documentary practice? We will analyze documentary and ethnographic artifacts (literary and academic texts, on-line media, film and video) that address a dynamic array of contemporary issues including refugee immigration and asylum, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. From this foundation, students will engage in short exercises that culminate in the production of a 2-3 minute audio-visual composition based on lived experiences, research interests and ethnographic questions. By interrogating key sources and producing the assets to create and edit one digital story, students will have the opportunity to consider answers and develop new questions.