LARTS 375 — Intrepid Anthropologists, Writing Life

3 credits
Spring
Priya Chandrasekaran

Prerequisite: LARTS 112 . What does it mean to be a brave writer? How can grounding oneself in one’s own experience, community, and culture open the collective imagination about the society we can build together? This course invites you into the worlds of versatile intellectuals who broke academic conventions and opened the field of anthropology in remarkable ways. We will read the personal essays, ethnographies, and fiction of José Maria Arguedas, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ursula Le Guin—writers whose ears, minds, and hearts were finely tuned to the places and people they depicted. We will discuss how their storytelling and artistic choices stretched beyond representation to capture the music, humanity, hardships, and beauty of social life and inspire social change. We will also explore the context of their upbringings and identities through documentaries, presentations, and photo essays. In addition to analyzing the contributions of these writers, students will have the opportunity to produce their own creative work about a community, place, or social issue that inspires them to write bravely.