Course Description for ANTH 50.27:

This course will be an anthropological exploration of American popular culture’s fascination with immortality.  The course will examine the implications of “immortality” for subjectivity and trans-corporeality, kinship and emergent communities, species survival and transformative ontologies, and human temporal recalibrations.  Key questions include- How does popular culture in America imagine immortality?  Do the many separate fields of representation share a common vision for the future of humanity?  Or, do they imagine very different futures for humanity?  At what point do humans go from human to transhuman to posthuman?  We will approach these questions from an anthropological perspective that will establish a critical ground for analysis and ethnographic inquiry and representation.  The course will provide anthropolgocial concepts and analytic practices throughout the term.  The course will explore three exploratory fields of inquiry- speculative fiction, technological interventions, and digital futures.