ANTH 4020 Explorations in Anthropology: Archaeology Material Culture

Instructor Contact:

Timothy Webmoor, PhD

Email: timothy.webmoor@colorado.edu

About the Course:

This course is designed to foster a better understanding of our material world. It introduces students to material cultures studies and its understanding of how our ever-increasing dependence on things (for better and worse) makes us human. From stone tools to smartphones, cave art to computer circuitry, we live through our things – and they through us. This non-anthropocentric, alternative account of human “evolution” suggests that we are in a feedback cycle that means ever-accumulating stuff. We are headed for a “heavy future.”

Course Prerequisites: none

Objectives:

By the end of the course you should be able to:

• Discuss the Western concepts of subject and object and their limitations in describing humanity’s intimate relationship to “stuff”
• Identify how archaeology’s long-term perspective offers robust insights into the role of materials in becoming and being human
• Understand the role of ethnoarchaeology and analogy in archaeological arguments
• Conceptualize how objects are not passive but have agency and “act back” on our world
• Analyze the concepts of actor-network, affordances, agency, animacy, assemblage, chaînes opératoires, commodity, dialectics, fetish, gift, materialism, relationality and symmetry

Required Texts:

Hodder, Ian. 2018. Where Are We Heading? The evolution of humans and things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Grading (out of 100 points):