Fall2025

This course explores how culture and power take form through language, narrative, and symbolic action. Using Sophocles’ Antigone as a shared reference point, we examine how key archetypal figures—such as the dissenter, the ruler, the loyalist, and the collective voice—stage foundational conflicts between kinship, law, memory, and authority. Drawing on classical and contemporary anthropological theory, students will develop the analytical tools to trace these dynamics not only in myth, but also in everyday life. The course aims to cultivate a critical ethnographic sensibility: one that connects political imagination, narrative form, and lived experience.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze the interplay between language, culture, and power using anthropological tools, with attention to how meaning, authority, and social order are constructed and contested.
• Interpret classical myths as political laboratories, focusing on how archetypal figures such as Antigone, Creon, Ismene, and the Chorus stage conflicts between kinship, law, recognition, and survival.
• Employ key theoretical frameworks (e.g., Weber on legitimacy, Sahlins on kinship, Cassirer on symbolic form, Kandiyoti on resistance) to make sense of contemporary power relations.
• Recognize archetypal patterns in everyday settings, and explore how these patterns shape, enable, or limit agency.
• Produce short, analytically grounded ethnographic texts, linking personal observations to theoretical insights and narrative structures.
• Practice collaborative thinking and writing, through peer review, feedback, and workshop-based revisions that emphasize clarity, argumentation, and conceptual precision.
• Engage with the moral and emotional dimensions of politics, especially where loyalty, grief, authority, and dissent intersect.