Whitehead Seminar Course Description

Whitehead Seminar in Critical Thought
Spring 2008; Tues 6:30-9:00 p.m.

ETHICS AND DIFFERENCE (EXTD 310)
A course on the idea of difference in historical perspective; focuses on ethical aspects of claiming/identifying difference. Study of difference in texts by the Philosophers of the Enlightenment, journals or personal papers of voyagers and colonial administrators, fiction, reflections on method by anthropologists, 20th-century critical/philosophical work, medical ethics. Emphasizes critical thought and expression. Focuses on methods for close reading/study to generate and develop research questions. Individual assignments based on students’ interests/disciplines. Themes of difference include gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, disability, and differential power in individual or group relationships.
Prerequisite: Open to seniors; juniors by permission of instructor. Distribution: Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy.

We will begin our readings with the progressive, even revolutionary, ideas of the Enlightenment, focusing on how the Philosophers of the Eighteenth-Century thought about difference and why they were interested in it as a concept. We will then explore how the notion of difference functioned in European thought from the period of sustained contact with real situations of difference occasioned by voyagers, missionaries, and traders to different parts of the globe: the British and French in India, Africa, and the Caribbean, the Germans in Cameroon, or the Spanish in Latin America, for example. Short selections from diaries, fictional accounts, personal papers and/or letters from the period will be read and analyzed. How did these travelers interpret and understand the different cultures they encountered? What sorts of vocabulary and strategies did they use in language to express their conceptualization of difference? Is it possible to learn something about the conditions of the encounter by reading closely such accounts? Can these personal and subjective texts point us towards particular questions and fields of inquiry about the reality of these encounters?

Moving to the period of colonization proper, we will study how “difference” as a characteristic of the colonized subjects affected colonial administrators’ attitude toward those they governed and in what way it figured as an element in decision-making and policies. What role did difference have with respect to control, policing, education, exchange, marriage, burial, travel, immigration, and independence? Colonial documents, laws, policies, and propaganda will be studied from primary and secondary sources. How was difference exhibited in European museums and in colonial propaganda? At this time, we will be particularly interested in ethnography, which approaches the study of social phenomena through observation. How did pioneers in this method that would subsequently be used widely by cultural and social anthropologists go about delineating what they would study and how did they study it? What were the ethical questions they grappled with in creating such ethnographies about difference? What was the relationship between this knowledge and colonialism? How did scientific (medical) research weigh in on this relationship? In what ways did alterity become medicalized? How does this matter to us today? How have the writings of Jacques Lacan revolutionized Freud’s work? How did they draw upon the intellectual climate of the moment in thinking about the “self” and influence Western thought of the 60’s and 70’s? How does this affect how we view the human body? What kinds of traces of this history can we see in how we conceive of difference in various disciplines and professional areas? Students will draw heavily from their discipline/areas of interest in class discussion and framing of assignments. Along with this historical sketching, we will read from several important intellectuals’ writings on otherness (Sartre, Beauvoir, Bakhtin, Althusser). We will privilege the work of Emmanuel Levinas (the Lithuanian-born French-Jewish philosopher), whose engagement with the ethics of otherness has influenced practitioners and theoreticians in various fields.

The second part of the course focuses on the idea of “global” culture. How are the questions we studied in historical context pertinent to the world we live in? We will set about establishing the limits of the notion of the “global,” which will be a properly methodological tool for our analyses and not simply a time-bound idea for contemporary society. We will debate what these provisional limits mean for the purposes of our class. Students will begin work on a project to study “artifacts” from this global context as they examine how the notion of difference is used: by whom, for what, to what ends? The artifacts may range from cinema or advertising clips, still advertising, fictional writing, newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches, articles from scholarly journals, theory or methodology from different disciplines, speeches by those prominent in this global world as we defined it. Several examples will be considered collectively in class. Two literary texts from the list will be read in their entirety for in-class discussion and debate. We will be interested in understanding ruptures from, and continuities with, the development sketched in the first part of the class in each of these analyses. Students will produce final reports that will include close reading, contextual and factual research, and sustained argument to support their claims about how “difference” functions in the object/text of their choice.

The course culminates in a workshop run in collaboration with an invited guest. Grades are based on presence, participation, one presentation, one essay/exam, one final assignment.

Ms. Prabhu

Created by : Nimmi Ariyaratne '07
Maintained by : Anjali Prabhu
Date created : 07.12.2007
Date modified : 08.09.2007