Anthropology and Philosophy

In this course, we examine the ways in which concepts and experience come to be related, by considering how anthropologists have engaged with philosophical texts. Rather than taking philosophy to be the realm of “western” speculative abstraction as against anthropology as the study of “non-western” cultures and lived experience, we instead consider relations of affinity and antagonism between these disciplines. In terms of affinities, we examine the significant difference that particular philosophers have made in reorienting anthropological thought through the specific examples of Wittgenstein, Marx, Deleuze, Rousseau and Schmitt. In terms of antagonisms, we examine moments in the history of anthropology that have been animated by a critique of philosophical concepts. Through these affinities and antagonisms, this course aims to introduce students to divergent approaches to key inter-disciplinary questions that lie at the heart of a liberal arts education such as what it means to “think”, concepts of politics, ethics and morality, as well as ideas of the human in relation non-human life.