Intimacy

Course Description

Summary

What does intimacy reveal about our social worlds? This seminar explores a range of recent methods in the study of intimacy, as well as what it means to make intimate knowledge claims. Through neighboring concepts in Anthropology, such as kinship, friendship and relatedness, as well as through intimacy’s imbrication with economy, sexuality, violence, and more-than-human worlds, this course considers the varied shapes that intimacy takes across distinct social worlds. Even as it shapeshifts, we will consider how intimacy figures in the production and maintenance of power. We will also consider the limits and possibilities of “knowing intimately,” which undergirds much of ethnographic practice