Strangers and Intimates: Exploring Public Life

Catalog description

How do we encounter and read each other in public and private spaces? How are these very spaces historically constituted around such distinctions and manners of reading? What do these questions look like in dense heterogeneous cities with differentiated class, caste and ethnic communities? How might we consider the differentiation between private and public in different ethnographic contexts? What kinds of sociality might emerge from these kinds of encounters? This course will explore these questions through social theory and ethnographies. There are two major sets of concepts that will be explored and interrogated. The first is that deriving from the essays of the Georg Simmel such as 'The Face' and 'The Stranger' which explore the new forms of sociality enabled by seemingly anonymous city life, which in turn have been interpreted very differently by Zygmunt Bauman and James Siegel to understand the place of continually excluded outsiders and the high stakes of reading each other. The other is the strand of work on the emergence of the public sphere such as the work of Jurgen Habermas, Richard Sennet, Michael Warner, Nancy Fraser etc. While much of the social theory on the public, the stranger and civility emerge from studies of Euro-American mas politics and city spaces, in this course we will move some of these discussion into considering these questions in the global south and the kinds of sociality (including their historicity) that make up the dense fabric of ordinary life. How does this work out in contexts where we take into account intense social differentiation by class, race, and communitarian divisions? This could be asked of the historical and social context addressed in these theories as well as from the postcolonial world. The course will attempt to understand whether such theorizations can indeed be re-rooted and re-imagined or whether ethnographic…