The Anthropology of Crisis

This course tracks the maneuvers of 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 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 emergencies. 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? What roles can folklore play in reimagining communities, rehabilitating selves, and remaking worlds? Beginning with a critical re-examination of popular discourses of crisis and emergency, we explore the potentials and limitations of these categories as they relate to everyday life and inter-subjective exchange in places as diverse as the refugee camps of Rwanda, the bayous of Louisiana, the pubs of Ireland, the alleyways of Cairo, and the message boards of 4-Chan. Along with troubling the lines between the everyday and the emergency, in the manner of Walter Benjamin, we also investigate Martin Heidegger's distinction between artistic performances that rescue us from the emergency and those that rescue us into the emergency. Through critical engagement with a diverse array of texts, artistic creations, cultural practices, and folkloric performances, this course calls attention to the ways in which scholarly production, humanitarian intervention, political activism, and artistic performance are implicated and imbricated in the production of crisis, for better and for worse. In treating crisis as both experiential reality for those who live through it, and as what Janet Roitman calls a "narrative construction," the course ultimately seeks to interrogate its own premise, illuminating the ways in which the invocation of emergency itself might be considered a form of artistic, imaginative, and transformative interventions.