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Why do bad things happen? This seminar explores how people give sense to misfortunes, crises, and disasters. We will explore key terms through which the misfortunate is understood — such as ‘risk,’ ‘disaster,’ ‘emergency,’ and ‘crisis’ — and we will query the social implications of the frameworks of intelligibility often associated with them. The module is structured around a genealogy of anthropological thought connecting classic studies of witchcraft to contemporary critiques of the politics of risk. Students will read about contemporary witchcraft beliefs, and about how people interpret industrial disaster. We ask: What are the diverse ideological functions of the language of ‘evil,’ ‘threat,’ ‘danger,’ ‘risk’? What forms of power inhabit this language? Whose suffering and misfortunes matter most when collective crises are declared or anticipated? What are the connections between forms of representation of misfortunes and how we respond to them? How do such interventions and responses to crises sometimes magnify the social (or ecological or medical) problems they wish to address? In analysing classic anthropological literature on misfortune and new ethnographic accounts of recent crises and catastrophes, this seminar invites anthropologists reflexively to interrogate and refine the analysis of misfortune and its connection to diverse forms of social order, meaning, power, knowledge, and contestation.
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