First part of a year-long course in cultural anthropology, required of first-year graduate students in anthropology and open to other graduate students with the permission of the instructor. The seminar focuses on anthropological theorizing through writings that have shaped the field or revealed its shape as a distinctive discipline. It also explores modes of contextualization that can help us understand the emergence, interconnections, and long afterlives of the texts we read.

This course lays out core theoretical and methodological frameworks for engaging in anthropologically centered multispecies approaches. By foregrounding anthropological and indigenous perspectives in the discourse on multispecies, we center the ethnographic and ecological and decenter assumptions about separation, "civilization" and domination that run through academic mythos and perspectives on human-other entanglements. The Anthropocene as context brings its own suite of distinctive pressures and connecting these politics and eco-realities to the understanding generated by multispecies approaches is the final component of the course.

The goal of the course is to problematize two things: the notion of anthropological archive and practices of ethnographic storytelling that they engender. To pursue this dual task, each week we will explore 1) how the assignment of epistemic value to a distinctive set of artifacts (e.g., objects, bodies, texts, memories, rhetorical tropes, etc.) generates a coherent source of discernable knowledge, and 2) how this knowledge is disciplined and naturalized with the help of theoretical framing, narrative conventions, and plot techniques.