A Global History of the Black Atlantic

fakultatywne
proseminaria

Anthropology is an academic discipline distinguished by its imperatives to look at the world from the grassroots and lend voice to those whose voice has not been heard. In the 21st century it is no longer a study of "culture" but, as Eric Wolf postulated in his "Pathways of Power" a study of power - including how "culture" is embedded in larger power structures and relations. Contemporary social and human sciences are also driven by the imperative of transnational perspective - a view onto reality that shows what lay at the interstices of national perspectives. To a large extend the field of "Atlantic studies" has been pioneering in fostering such a perspective. This course will acquaint students with the bolts of nuts of the Atlantic history – which is, at the very same time, a history from below.

While the work of towering figures of 20th century anthropology, such as Bronisław Malinowski or Claude Levi Strauss, was enmeshed in larger theoretical paradigms (such as functionalism or structuralism), nowadays there is no one single grand theory that “explains it all”. Anthropologists in the 21st century work more with concepts instead. A concept serves as a window onto reality. It helps to understand what is going on on the ground, but every concept also has its limits. Thus, researchers today create web of analytical concepts for their respective purposes. This is why anthropological training today entails an extensive survey of academic literature and picking up concepts that may prove useful later on, in the course of actual, empirical fieldwork. Thus, throughout this course, students will become acquainted with an array of anthropological concepts that will later became an integral part of their analytical toolbox.

A week-by-week course outline will be provided to the students before the class begins. The major themes we will address are as follows: the relationship between slavery/violence and modernity; history/science from below; “writing against culture”; the people without history; transnational history; relationship between gender, class and race; the origins of capitalism; post-human perspective on the nature/culture dichotomy; political ecologies; relationship between anthropology and "development".

A week-by-week course outline will be provided to the students before the class begins. Here are some of the texts:

Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1991.

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Not Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

John and Jane Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, “Anthropological Forum”, Volume 22, Issue 2, 2012, pp. 113-131.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 years, New York: Melville House, 2012.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press.

Sid Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, London: Penguin, 1986.

Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail, Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.

Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, London: Verso, 2018.

Michael Taussig, The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil's Labor and the Baptism of Money (abridged).

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism (abridged)

Eric Wolf, Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

By the end of the course, students will have:

- a sound understanding of the research methods in contemporary social anthropology

-in-depth knowledge of anthropological body of research on the Americas

- an command of major theoretical concepts in today's social anthropology

SKILLS.

By the end of the course, students will have:

- developed academic writing skills

- developed critical thinking skills

- developed in-class discussion skills

- developed a skill of an analysis of an academic text

The final grade will comprise of attendance and participatin in class discussions (10%), an in-class presentation of a prescribed texts (20%) and a final research paper (70%).