This is a required course for the master s degree. This course builds on 25 years of feminist approaches within anthropology, paying particular attention to the theorization of gender in conjunction with key anthropological categories such as kinship, space, production, colonialism, and sexuality. These theories are central to our coursework, and should inform the research projects which all students complete for the course. After analyzing contemporary debates in the literature about the concept itself, we will review the history of the Jewish Diaspora and compare it with the histories of peoples from Africa, Asia and Europe. In the second part of the course, we will concentrate on Karl Marx' commodity fetishism and the psychoanalytic theory of sexual fetishism, and critiques of the term by modern anthropologists.
Fetishism seems to be a very ambiguous term.
Karl-Heinz Kohl Sacred objects in African, Melanesian, Native American and European cultures shall be analyzed in their social and cultural context. Adriana Petryna Science and technology figure centrally in the social, cultural, and political changes that are reshaping our world. This seminar explores conceptions of science and scientific practice as they transform notions of life, death, nature, and personhood. It also examines, from a comparative perspective, how science and technology are integrated in market formations, strategies of governance, and identity-making processes. A review of social theoretical and feminist positions and debates on rational-technical power will be followed by readings of contemporary ethnographies of science.