300657 Anthropology of Life (S) (SoSe 2021)

In his last published interview in Le Monde in 2004, a few days before his death, Jacques Derrida stated the following: “I have always been interested in the question of survival, the meaning of which does not add to life and death. It is originary: life is survival. […] Survival is life beyond life, life more than life, […] because survival is not simply what remains, it is the most intense life possible.” With these last words, Derrida addresses an age-old issue in philosophy and anthropology: the opposition between biological and political life; zoe and bios; mere life and qualified existence (Fassin 2010). Derrida’s concept of survival seems to dissolve this dichotomy and instead draws attention to the fact that life lived cannot be compartmentalized or ranked. Moreover, the art of living is not necessarily a life lived well but attains a value through the quest for life (Kleinmann 2014).
In this seminar, we take a lead from this briefly delineated theoretical framework. We will read anthropological case studies that emphasize the connection between biological and socio-political existence. At the same time, this scholarship offers insights into the diverse ways of life lived on the ground and how this unfolds in different cultural, political, and economic contexts across the globe. As we will see, these contexts shape life, but they never completely determine it. In certain regards, life remains always unpredictable and unfinished.
The seminar will be structured in three thematic blocks. In the first part, we will read theoretical works familiarising ourselves with recent conceptualisations of life. In the second part, we will read case studies that focus on the diversity of living, while the last part will be dedicated to the theme of death, a perspective that allows perhaps the most privileged view on life. Life and death in this seminar should not be seen as opposites, but as mutually encompassing processes. To have a constructive discourse of life, we first need a mature discourse of death, as recent global developments reveal.

Bibliography

Biehl, Joao and Peter Locke, ed. 2017. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press.
Biehl, João. 2005. Vita. Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Han, Clara, and Veena Das ed. 2016. Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Oakland: University of California Press.
Jackson, Michael. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects. New York: Berghahn Books.
Fassin, Didier. 2018. Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.