SOAN 377 | American Society, American Culture

Utilizing key aspects of the ethnographic approach and methodology, and complemented with a constellation of interdisciplinary scholarly material tethered to anthropology, this course turns the ethnographic lens on the recent American past. Through a sequential trajectory comprising student-led explorations of American cultural ephemera, students assemble an analytic and empirically-grounded understanding of the evolving American zeitgeist in the decades preceding the postmodern and neoliberal turn. In the second half of the course, students consider a series of lectures and readings that illuminate America's paradigmatic immersion in the postmodern turn, and coincidentally, the extrapolation of the social, political, and economic relations endemic to neoliberalism and the neoliberal era. In the final segment of the course, students peruse a rotating set of theoretically adept materials that seek to explain the American present, and subsequently evaluate these various frameworks based on the understandings of the recent American past they've now assembled.