Cultural Techniques

Building on the concept of 'cultural techniques,' or 'Kulturtechniken,' that has been developing in recent German media studies, this advanced graduate seminar considers a wide range of culturally specific modes of elementary techniques, from cutting, connecting, to reading, writing, and counting, to cooking, sewing, irrigating, and so on, as ethnographic analytics. The seminar explores the epistemic shift in ethnographic methods and analysis from the symbolic sense of meaning-making to the material condition for such meaning-making. Prerequisite by instructor consent