240038 VO Anthropology of the Caribbean (2023S)

The Caribbean is a complex geographical region that comprises the island archipelagos of the Caribbean Sea and the surrounding areas of the American mainland. The region is in fact southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and the North American mainland, east of Central America, and north of South. America. This area spans many and various societies, histories and peoples. Defined as a “crossroad of the world”, the modern Caribbean is inhabited by the descendants of people from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The presence of all these manifold influences and histories of violence outlines the rich and complex socio-economic, political and temporal stratifications of this geographical area. Furthermore, it contributes to the extraordinary diversity in languages, religions, political textures, landscapes, and environmental relations. At the political level, for instance, such diversity emerges in the political organization of the Caribbean territories where nation-states, overseas departments and dependencies co-exist.
This course therefore focuses on the critical analysis of the various anthropological research conducted in the Caribbean as well as the multiple ways scholars have represented its people and societies. Through an in-depth approach, the course intends to discuss the political, social, economic, cultural and historical aspects of this geographical areas. Through an anthropological lens and an ethnographic attention, the students will learn about the main historical vicissitudes, social facts, governments and social issues that have traversed the Caribbean. Colonialism, slavery, racialization, structural inequality, modernization, liberalism, and, more recently, neoliberalism, are instances of the topics examined in the course. Throughout the course, the students will engage with the profound transformations undergone by the region which have generated new entanglements with global capitalism, new political relations between various socio-cultural networks and societies as well as the formation of social movements around health issues, environmental pollution and neoliberal resource extraction. Finally, students will explore relevant mechanisms of social, economic and political differentiation in the colonial past and into the present. Racial hierarchy, religious difference, class-inequality, healing and health, gender relations, and sexuality are some of the aspects that will be discussed to better understand the ways different socio-cultural groups in the Caribbean have emerged and developed.