Lehrende/r: Dr. Konstanze N'Guessan
Veranstaltungsart: Hauptseminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: post-truth
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 15
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Inhalt: Alternative facts, or post-truth are buzzwords of a diagnosis of the contemporary world we live in that seems haunted by succinct crisis, populism and social media-generated truth bubbles, nurturing scepticism, mistrust in democratic actors and structures and fear or anger. “Post-truth is pre-fascism” warns the American historian Timothy Snyder (2017), whereas others lament that “French postmodernism” has “ruined the West” (Pluckrose 2017). On the other hand, the assumption that we live in a post-truth era is based on questionable assumptions, converting “epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth” (Hannon 2023). In a classic anthropological sense, alternative truths are emic theories of human cultural heterogeneity. Writing about “alternative truths” in a non-normative way, without exoticizing difference was social anthropology’s contribution to social science, our magic skill. Moreover, as the power to speak and establish truth has been unevenly distributed in a world still structured by racialized and gendered power asymmetries: Whose truths are listened too and how is truthiness established? “Facts” have always been and will always be contingent whether looked at from a historical perspective in the longue durée, from an anthropological or feminist perspective questioning the supposed universal assumptions of “as-a-matter-of-fact-knowledge”. Social anthropologists have been tasked with unsettling these assumptions. When Evans-Pritchard wrote about collapsing granaries termites and witchcraft were not alternative facts or post-truth. Is anthropology about truth or truths? Can we study post-truth anthropologically? The seminar will look at anthropological classics of “alternative truths”, such as Evans Pritchard’s work on witchcraft, the social-constructivist and power sensitive regimes or epistemes of truth in the works of Michel Foucault, the Mead-Freeman debate about anthropological knowledge-making, feminist and Black perspectives on anthropological “classics” such as kinship as well as the anthropology of rumor, skepticism, doubt or conspiracy narratives.
