Anthropology of Crisis

This course tracks the maneuvers of folklore and expressive culture through crises, conflict zones, and emergency situations. By examining the creative interventions of storytellers, performers, and artists in response to a wide range of profound ruptures and transformations—from political upheaval to genocidal violence, forced migration, social revolution, ecological disaster, and everyday rites of passage—the course illuminates and interrogates the powers, potentials, politics, and poetics of cultural performance, communal storytelling, ritual praxis, and folkloric tradition in the face of destabilizing change and unprecedented emergence. We ask how storytellers revive and revise old stories to confront new challenges, how preexisting expressive forms weather unprecedented socio-cultural storms, and how individuals and communities attempt to re-narrate themselves after calamity. What role can storytelling play in imagining communities, navigating rites of passage, and confronting existential and ethical dilemmas? How do people turn their afflictions into art, make sense of their sufferings, treat their traumas, and transform their tribulations? What roles can folklore play in reimagining communities, rehabilitating selves, and remaking worlds?