The course will explore several meanings of the word ’enchantment’. While theorists of Western modernity from Weber to Charles Taylor have described a ’disenchanted’ world, with sharp distinctions between subject and object, human and thing, anthropologists since Frazer, Malinowski and Mauss have evoked non-Western, ’enchanted’ worlds, where such distinctions do not apply. In a broader sense one might argue that the romantic agenda implied in basic anthropological terms such as ”holism” and ”participant observation” allow us to see ’enchantment’ as a fundamental analytical and methodological strategy of anthropology. Discussing texts by such diverse authors as Foucault, Barth, Wagner, Gell, Bateson and Verdery, these ideas – and their significance for the contemporary anthropological agenda – will be explored.

Toward the end of the course, students will write a 5-page written assignment. BA students may later expand this into a BA essay, while MA (kandidat) students may expand it into a course essay (as may foreign students).

BA students read only the compulsory literature for the course. MA students must in addition read 200 pages of supplementary literature.