George Paul Meiu

With globalization, sex—everywhere—has become more central to who we are as citizens and consumers, how we gain rights and resources, and how we relate to others as members of a specific race, ethnicity, region, or culture. Worldwide, states invest or disinvest in people according to how they have sex, adopt gender identities, or sustain sexual morality. Terrorist organizations claim to use violence to reestablish bastions of piety and sexual propriety; various populist movements imagine immigrants and refugees to threaten their societies, in part, by failing to uphold the sexual norms of adopting countries; and transnational NGOs and activists seek to “rescue” or “rehabilitate” sex workers, gays, lesbians, transgender, and other people vulnerable for their intimate and social lives. The growing importance of sex to a global consumer culture only heightens the rush to secure societies from the so-called “perversions of globalization.” Tourists now travel for sex to various destinations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean; poor, unemployed men and women, in former colonies, sometimes use sex as a means of enrichment and empowerment; and amidst the rise of religious fundamentalisms, commodity ads incite youths to consume sex along other goods to build authentic selves. In this lecture course, we ask: Why does sexuality become so central to how we imagine our world and futures? Why is sex so important in defining us, as subjects and populations? And how do older colonial stereotypes of race, ethnicity, and culture shape sexuality politics in the new global order? To address these questions, we explore about how sex and sexuality relate to politics and the economy.

The domains of family life, kinship, and intimacy represent central sites for the construction and contestation of social and political belonging. This course introduces students to classic and contemporary theories of society, kinship, and citizenship by way of theorizing how economic production, sovereignty, and everyday life emerge through the regulation of relatedness. Anthropologists of the late nineteenth century and of the first half of the twentieth century turned kinship into a key domain for understanding social cohesion and political organization. In the past three decades – following feminist, Marxist, and queer critiques – anthropologists explored how discourses about kinship and the family anchored the ideologies and practices of modernity, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. In this course, we ask: What can various forms of kinship teach us about the politics of social reproduction and the making of citizenship – its modes of belonging and exclusion – in the contemporary world? Why do national and transnational institutions care about how we related to each other, how we build families, and whether we reproduce? Why do we desire that our intimate lives be recognized by the state and by the agents of the global market? And, can our ways of crafting relatedness in everyday life transform how we come to belong to larger political institutions?

Order may refer to the principles by which we tidy a space, organize objects, systematize ideas, or structure time. It can also refer to social, juridical, political, and economic entities and their conditions of cohesion and stability. We speak, for example, of “indigenous order,” “state order,” or the “global world order” as much as we speak of “political disorder” or“social chaos.” Order and its imagined opposites—disorder, chaos, mess—are central to power and authority, personhood and relatedness, legal and religious regimes. But what counts as order is never a given. It is rather entailed in concrete efforts to know, represent, and organize bodies, objects, and ideas so that, from particular vantage points, their conjoining may appear to constitute an orderly totality. Pursuing different kinds of order—seeking to imagine, name, and craft worlds that appear orderly—may offer us a relative sense of certainty, clarity, and security, especially in times of turbulent political-economic transformations. Here, political campaigns, ritual performances, or consumption practices may promise us the “return” of a certain order. But what counts as order and disorder, coherence and chaos is ever shifting in complex fields of contestation. New forms of governance and value production, political ideas of coloniality, indigeneity, or nationalism, and various claims to rights, recognition, and resources, all posit order and disorder in different ways. In this proseminar students will read a set of ethnographic texts think critically about order, disorder, chaos in different contexts.

This undergraduate course explores the links between race, empire, and the production of anthropological knowledge about Africa. Africa has occupied a central place in the making of anthropology as a discipline. Ethnographic studies of African contexts generated leading theories of kinship and society, money and economy, ritual and religion, violence, law, and political order. And, while anthropologists have often used their work to critique racism and social injustice, the discipline of anthropology has been, at times, accused of being the “handmaiden of colonialism” – its discourses complicit in the making of dominant ideologies of racial alterity and imperial power. In this course, students revisit moments of intersection between the history of modern Africa and the history of anthropology in order examine the role of knowledge production in the politics of world-making. We interrogate “Africa” as an ideological category, a source of identity and collective consciousness, and a geo-political context of social life. We ask: What is the political potential of various forms of knowledge production? What do ethnographic engagements with African contexts offer by means of understanding the world at large? And what may anthropological thinking offer by way of envisioning better futures in Africa and beyond?

The rapid and, at times, quite radical transformations of social, political, and economic regimes in the recent history of Eastern Europe have posed key challenges to how people have remembered their pasts and imagined their futures. Over the past two centuries alone, the transition from feudal systems and monarchies to socialist societies and then neoliberal capitalist ones have produced different understandings of social reproduction. The geopolitical shifts between different empires (Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian) and transnational orders (Soviet Union, European Union) have given rise to sometimes conflicting ways of passing down property and custom to craft futures. This course explores this complex and shifting cultural terrain through the lens of memory and inheritance. For anthropologists, inheritance or the ways in which people pass down property, knowledge, and social roles, among other things, has been a central modality for building particular kinds of society: who inherits what (and when) shapes how a society construes and hierarchizes its members, whether according to gender, generation, kinship, race, ethnicity, or class. Strongly tied to the rules of inheritance is the deployment of memory: various modes of remembering and forgetting help sustain or undermine specific social and political orders. What forms of memory and inheritance have emerged in the distinct palimpsest of the historically diverse orders of Eastern Europe? What can historical anthropologists learn from the objects, properties, knowledges, and affects passed down in these contexts and from the silences, secrets, or unconscious legacies they carry? Students will address these questions by learning about the particular cultural politics of Eastern Europe and by raising, through the anthropology of the region, new questions about memory and inheritance in the contemporary world order more broadly.

This course explores the political economy of anthropological knowledge production. It examines anthropology’s relation to alterity and sociality in different historical contexts, in the colony and in the metropole, in the socialist East and the capitalist West, at the center and at the periphery. Anthropology has long been seen as a quintessentially “Western discourse” problematically aligned with the ideologies of power. Rather than approach the discipline as a unified whole, however, this seminar revisits key moments, figures, and events that demonstrate how important anthropological concepts emerged as expressions of—and reflections upon—complex historical conjunctures. Various attempts to conceptualize society, culture, race, hegemony, value, commodity fetishism, the state, ontology, and alterity have resonated with, but also beyond, their immediate contexts of theorization. Informed by a desire to de-center “the canon” (without losing sight, that is, of the effects of its normative centrality) or to decolonize the discipline, we pursue a set of theoretical and ethnographic detours through and around key anthropological moments and concepts, all along seeking to understand how idioms, objects, and events of theoretical and ethnographic attachment shape and are shaped by historical context. Thus, students are encouraged to think anthropologically about anthropology, its concepts, practices, potentialities, and futures. This presupposes not only reading texts closely but also identifying how the assigned readings resonate with one another; what potentialities they have for understanding the present and anticipating the future; and to how such potentialities are to be activated, pursued, actualized.

This practical course teaches the basics of anthropological methodology with reference to qualitative and interpretative research. Its focus is ethnography in its double sense as process and product of intensive fieldwork. Through readings, discussions, and practical exercises, participants will learn concrete methods for answering anthropological questions and for expanding their ethnographic imagination. How can ethnographic research capture the shifting dynamics of globalization? And how can anthropologists examine the ways local, national, and global processes shape the lived experiences of research interlocutors? Students will learn how to design research projects, undertake active observations, interview, write fieldnotes, compile genealogies and time surveys, carry out space analysis and archival research, and collect and think with artifacts. These methods will also raise a set of ethical questions about the kinds of social rapport that anthropologists and their field interlocutors might cultivate and about the myriad identities and subjectivities produced through the fieldwork encounter. The last part of this practicum focuses on how anthropologists can transform field data into ethnographic writing with a central focus on questions of representation, poetics, and truth.

“Fetish” and “fetishism” have offered anthropologists, psychoanalysts, historians, and other scholars an important conceptual language to tackle the dynamics of capitalism, governance, coloniality, and modernity. From Karl Marx’s “commodity fetishism” and Sigmund Freud’s “sexual fetishism” to various anthropological studies of fetishism as religious practice, the idea of the fetish has been central to social theory. The fetish has referred alternatively to how our ideas of objects erase the histories of their production; how our disavowed or discarded sources of desire generate new erotic pleasure; or how things animated by spirits shape our social action in unexpected ways. More recently, postcolonial critiques have emphasized how the concrete objects and fantasies previously dismissed as “fetishes” (i.e., false consciousness)—masks, icons, representations—can represent important starting points for imagining and understanding the world at large.

Emphasizing the interconnectivity of different global regions, cultures, or social classes and the tensions and ambiguities that such interconnectivity inevitably generates, the fetish may help us better understand various social phenomena. These include, for example, the branding, advertising, and consumption of commodities; the rising charismatic figures animating new forms of populism and ethno-nationalism; civil society’s political mobilizations through the removal or destruction of icons (i.e., iconoclasm); myriad forms of self-making, sexuality, and erotic expression; as well as processes of racialization, ethnicization, and cultural differentiation. Through a close reading of key texts and theorists, this seminar asks: What can the concept “fetish” offer us by way of better understanding the world in which we live? And how can reimagine fetishism from contemporary social, political, and economic conundrums?

With late capitalism, across the world, the spectacular rise of various kinds of mobility—migration, humanitarianism, and tourism, among others—has fueled a seemingly opposite trend: a growing preoccupation with autochthony, a desire to distinguish between those who belong and those who do not—to secure citizens and polities from the threats of the “foreign.” Intimacy has played a central role in the ensuing dilemmas. On the one hand, it has fueled mobility. People migrate in search for the means to build and support relations of love, care, and kinship; they claim family reunification rights or invoke discrimination on the basis of sexual or gender identity to obtain residency or asylum in different countries; or, as NGO workers and tourists do, travel to reform or consume intimacies, sexual or otherwise, in different places. On the other hand, intimacy has also become an important criterion of belonging and exclusion. Anxieties over the proliferation of “foreign” sexual and kinship mores, fears that private life may undermine national being, have permeate preoccupations with citizenship. This seminar explores intersections of intimacy, mobility, and belonging in late capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic studies that map various mobilities in and between Africa and Europe, the seminar examines such intersections give rise new conundrums about money, wealth, and wellbeing; youth, age, and generation; ritual and religion; morality and respectability; nationalism and terrorism; among other things. We ask: Why is intimacy so central to mobility and belonging in the present? What forms of subjecthood, value, or political organization have emerged in these contexts? And what do such emergent phenomena reveal about the contemporary world order?