Anthropology of the Body

What is a body? What makes it visible, knowable, or meaningful? How does it produce knowledge and shape what we see, experience, and understand? This course centers the body as a critical site of anthropological inquiry.

Through theory and ethnography, we explore the body as material, metaphorical, and conceptual.

Our thinking is shaped by phenomenology, semiotics, feminist and critical race theory, and anthropological approaches to embodiment and practice.

We engage ethnographic investigations of the body in spaces where it is performed, studied, and transformed—from hospitals and beauty salons to sites of bodily movement and labor.

Together, these ethnographic and theoretical engagements guide students toward producing final research papers on the body as a site of inquiry and as navigated, contested, and lived.