Moral Geographies - 2016

Moral Geographies AASR 42908, ANTH 42445

Alireza Doostdar Office: S 227

W 11-1:50 S 201

Course Description How are moral practices and imaginations spatialized? How are spatial practices shaped by and inflected with moral imagination, anxiety, and discipline? This course attends to these and other questions having to do with space, religion, and politics through a reading of a selection of ethnographic and historical works. Some themes we will address include pilgrimage, mobility, travel, conquest, diaspora, and displacement. Course Requirements Attendance and active participation are mandatory: unexcused absences will affect your grade, as will non-participation in discussion. Students are expected to post weekly comments on the week's readings to the discussion board on Chalk. These comments should be one or two paragraphs in length and uploaded no later than midnight on the night prior to class in order to allow everyone else to read and reflect on them. In addition to these comments, each participant will post a substantive response (of no more than two paragraphs) to at least one post by another student. These are also to be posted before midnight prior to class. You may skip three weeks of postings, so that in total there should be seven original posts and seven responses over seven weeks for each student. (feel free to post more than one comment/response in one week, but you still need to cover seven weeks) Each week, one or more volunteer presenters will start us off with a 15-minute critical engagement with the week’s readings (longer if we have more than one presenter). Rather than summarizing the entire readings or presenting a list of questions, the presentation should develop a thesis in relation to them. This could take the form of engaging with one or more of the texts’ arguments, exploring a problem or ambiguity left unresolved or inchoate, probing the texts’ methodologies, examining their analytic apparatuses, drawing out theoretical implications that are left implicit, and so on. The important point is that the presentation should have an argument that can be the starting point for our conversation. The final writing assignment is a 10-20 page paper. You may draw on your own ethnographic or historical research to write an original research paper. Alternatively, you may write a critical synthetic

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essay examining a theme related to the course across several of the texts we have read (and you may bring in others that we have not read). Schedule and Readings Some readings will be available in electronic format on Chalk and others will be available for purchase at the Seminary Co-op. We all know the delights and seductions of Amazon, but please consider buying your books at the Seminary Co-op to help this excellent Hyde Park institution survive in the face of the onslaught of online big business. In addition to being on sale at the Co-op, a few books are also held at the university library as ebooks, and will be indicated as such below. 

Week 1 (March 30) Orientations Readings: David Harvey Space as a Keyword, Doreen Massey For Space (selections), Elizabeth McAlister Globalization and the Religious Production of Space. Recommended: Kim Knott Geography, Space, and the Sacred (all on Chalk)

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Week 2 (April 6) Spatiotemporal Transformation Reading: Nancy Munn The Fame of Gawa

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Week 3 (April 13) Sacred Space Reading: Elaine Pena Performing Piety (ebook available)

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Week 4 (April 20) Pilgrimage Reading: Nancy Frey Pilgrim Stories (ebook available)

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Week 5 (April 27) Learning and Travel Reading: Zareena Grewal Islam is a Foreign Country

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Week 6 (May 4) Claiming Space Reading: Pascal Menoret Joyriding in Riyadh

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Week 7 (May 11) Contesting Movement Readings: Anna Tsing In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (selections), Darryl Li A Universal Enemy?, Engseng Ho Empire Through Diasporic Eyes (all on Chalk)

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Week 8 (May 18) Displacement Reading: Liisa Malkki Purity and Exile

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Week 9 (May 25) Conquest Reading: Meron Benvenisti Sacred Landscape (ebook available)

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Week 10 (June 1) Mobility and Restlessness Reading: Julie Chu Cosmologies of Credit (ebook available)

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