Professor Charlene Makley
Office: 312 Vollum
Phone: 771-1112, ext. 7461
Office Hours: Mon. 3:30-5; Fri. 9-10:30
Course Description
Anthropologists have long been interested in the complex
dynamism of social life. Yet early attempts to account for this dynamism
in the construction of cultural and linguistic worlds were obscured in
favor of static representations of "cultures" and dualistic
understandings of sociocultural structures versus individual actions or
intentions. This course considers "performance" and "performativity"
to be recent rubrics that group together a wide variety of social theorists
who have focused instead on the emergent and contested nature of all meanings
as they are communicated in everyday and ritualized speech and practice.
The course will develop from key foundational texts in the science and
philosophy of language to more recent theoretical and ethnographic work
to explore the implications of this perspective for understanding language
as social action, the nature of "context" and interpretive politics,
the relationships between formal events or performances and everyday life,
and the social construction of selves and others. By directing analytic
focus to the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiplicity inherent to social
life, the course challenges students to reconsider some of the central
issues in anthropological theory, such as agency, identity, power and
resistance. Prerequisite Anthropology 211. Conference.