ANTH 571D - Aesthetics, Politics, Religion

Credits: Variable

The intersection of aesthetics, politics and religion is perhaps most familiar in the identification of aesthetics with religion insofar as they have both been understood to be concerned with domains of transcendence, distant from the imperatives of commodification and the exigencies of politics. This view has, of course, been subject to sustained critique for decades now. In this seminar we will examine various strands of this critical scholarship, drawing on both philosophical and empirical perspectives, and address recent attempts to reconfigure the linkages among these three domains in terms of their institutional expression and their experiential effects.