A Family Romance: The Family in Contemporary Society

Catalog description

"The family" is considered one of the most universal structures of human life. The study of kinship has wandered off anthropological syllabi just as it assumes ever greater significance within contemporary (often dystopic) political debates on the societies produced by different kinds of families. This course explores, cross-culturally and historically, how particular models and ideologies of ideal family structure and form have come to dominate and reshape society. We focus particularly on the importance of ideologies of kinship and family within moral imaginations, as well as the inevitable impossible nature of the emotional and material obligations placed by such ideologies. Firstly, the course will ask whether kinship structures are distinct structures of recognition that generate their own ambivalence, anxiety, and comfort. We will focus this through discussing the relationship of kinship to gender roles and ideologies. Secondly, it will locate how talking, thinking, doing and imagining how people are 'properly' related to each other (as well as potential transgressions) are central to imaginations of the social itself. This will also initiate a larger debate on the nature of social change. Thirdly, the course will give students a precise and calibrated entry point into the debates around kinship from the perspective of three differing disciplines, social history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.