ANTHR 3130 - [Latin American Forms of Colonial Possession]

(crosslisted)
(also LATA 3130) @ # (CA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2013-2014.

C. Garces.

The persistence of colonial relationships in Latin America will be interrogated in this course using methods drawn from ethnography, psychoanalysis, historiography, political theory, and experimental literature. Key to this line of inquiry is the anthropological problematization of metaphors and practices of possession. Our course readings will explore the psychological internalization of colonial domination; the political ceremonies of territorial sovereignty; the everyday rituals of personal enchantment and disenchantment; the occult applications of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery; and the historical processes of de- and re-colonization that mark notions of “possession” with such longstanding and fraught cross-cultural implications. This class will demonstrate how commonplace understandings of race, class, ethnicity, labor, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, personhood, religion, and the state gain shape and meaning through discourses of possession.