ClassInfo - Fall 2024 Anthropology Classes

Fall 2024 | ANTH 4049 Section 001: Religion and Culture (32161)

Instructor(s): Aisha Ghani
Class Component:: Lecture
Credits:: 3 Credits
Grading Basis:: Student Option
Instructor Consent:: No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:: In Person
Times and Locations:: Regular Academic Session

09/03/2024 - 12/11/2024

Tue 04:00PM - 06:30PM

UMTC, West Bank

Blegen Hall 210
Enrollment Status:: Open (14 of 15 seats filled)
Also Offered:: Fall 2024

Course Catalog Description:: Our subtitle is "sacredness." The operational presupposition of the class is that sacredness is more than a mental phenomenon: it involves objects and bodies. Modern perspectives on religion have long downplayed this "material" aspect as they privileged iconoclastic spirituality. The anthropology of religion aims to go beyond the material/spiritual opposition and asks how rituals employ objects and bodies in order to capture the effect we might call spiritual or mystical. Intellectually, this is an extremely difficult wisdom for the moderns to grasp because the binary oppositions between the spiritual and the material, between mind and the body, subtend modern society's very sense of order and rationality. This class is successful if we can have even a glimpse of how much difficulty we moderns have in seeing beyond these binaries. Take, for example, sacrifice. It is almost intuitive that the human condition abides in the requisition of sacrifice: redemption is found by suffering, abundance secured by loss, and the gift of life enabled by death. Such an intuition is as universal as its practiced intent is ambiguous to us. Ambiguous because the following questions immediately rise: For whom or in whose "eyes" is a gesture of sacrificial offering supposed to be accounted for? If one facilitates one's own death in the hands of one's enemy in a redemptive gesture - which is, arguably, the case of Jesus Christ - would the enemy part of the redeemed? We will raise the most impenetrable of such questions through compelling examples in contemporary politics, such as the post-9/11 category of so-called religiously-motivated protest suicide. As Talal Asad argues, one of the reasons the "suicide bombing" is so disconcerting to us is not because of the extent of its violence - which is not remarkable compared to technology-driven terror tactics - but because the act violates our dearest binaries: victim/victimizer, dying/killing, means/ends, and crime/punishment. At the bottom of these
Class Description:: Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Textbooks:: https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/32161/1249

ClassInfo Links - Fall 2024 Anthropology Classes

To link directly to this ClassInfo page from your website or to save it as a bookmark, use:: http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=ANTH&catalog_nbr=4049&term=1249
To see a URL-only list for use in the Faculty Center URL fields, use:: http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=ANTH&catalog_nbr=4049&term=1249&url=1
To see this page output as XML, use:: http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=ANTH&catalog_nbr=4049&term=1249&xml=1
To see this page output as JSON, use:: http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=ANTH&catalog_nbr=4049&term=1249&json=1
To see this page output as CSV, use:: http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=ANTH&catalog_nbr=4049&term=1249&csv=1

ClassInfo created and maintained by the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

If you have questions about specific courses, we strongly encourage you to contact the department where the course resides.