The Body, Race, and Difference in Contemporary France

Catalog description

Using anthropological frames, students will learn to think about the body and its role in everyday life, paying particular attention to the ways that ethnicity, citizenship, race and belonging are lived and experienced in contemporary France. We will work with materials ranging from the colonial collection of human remains that were used to represent French Universalism in museum projects, to cultural artifacts acquired during the colonization of Africa (their circulation and the current debates around them), to interactive ethnographic work with current social organizations centered around the body, rights and health. Broad questions pivot on two fundamental queries: Is the differentiated body a natural fact? When and how have ethnic and multicultural discourses come into play in the cultural context of France where the political categorization of race is legally forbidden?