ANTH 401.001 Anthropological Theory Samuel Gerald Collins MW, 2-3:15 pm LA 2114 Office Hours: Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays, 9-10 am Phone: x3199 (email) scollins@towson.edu homepage: https://samuelgeraldcollins.wixsite.com/samu elcollins Course Description When A.L. Kroeber wrote in 1935 that anthropology had one foot “squarely in history,” he reflected the uneasy transition anthropology was making out of Victorian evolutionism (Kroeber 1935: 568). It was a pivotal moment for anthropology and its growing emphasis on field-based inquiry. But in rejecting the unilinear schema of E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer, anthropologists still found themselves mired in the hierarchies and colonialism of their own 19 th century past, even as they grappled towards the possibility of something else. The first hurdle for anthropology was the problem of “coevalness”: the admittance that anthropology’s interlocutors shared the same temporality with us (Fabian 1983). But the second still vexes anthropology today: the creeping tempocentrism that locates the future in deterministic modernist discourse, denying alternative futures both to anthropology’s interlocutors and to the field of anthropology itself. It is the colonialist machine as a future project—the reduction of alternatives to an abyssal homogeneity that positions both anthropology and its interlocutors along the margins of modernist development. In this class, we look to challenges to anthropology’s future tempocentrisms in five, contemporary ethnographies. Each emerges from a consciousness of what Kleist and Jansen call the “political economy of hope”: “the unequal social processes that produce and distribute temporal dispositions in a particular [ . . .] social constellation at a particular time” (2016: 382). Our plans and hopes have been colonized in advance by an ideology that insists that the future will be little different than today, and that the challenge to the status quo is “unrealistic” amidst the “realism” of social oppression and environmental apocalypse. This will lead us to areas of emergence and resistance, and to islands of hope, what Ernst Bloch called the “utopian impulse”: the everyday desire for alternatives to the status quo, for improvements in lives, opportunities and social justice. All of these will gesture towards other configurations of race, gender, family, agency and nature and, along the way, help us to interrogate anthropology’s pasts