The syllabus is intended to present a contemporary introduction to perennial tensions in the social sciences and particularly in anthropology.

One of these tension concerns the relationship between materiality and imagination, between the imagination of materiality ("social construction of reality"), and the materiality of imagination ("resources and affordances").

A particular version of this tension concerns the relation between tradition and innovation, between the weight of history requiring various forms of archaeology (including archaeology of knowledge) and the collapse of arbitrary orders through internal and external mechanisms (systemic contradictions, population movements, resistance).

In 2022, as the recent pandemic fades, some of the general points addressed in the course will be presented and discussed in term of both the apparition and spread of a virus like COVID-19 AND its institutionalization in State mandates, and resistance to mandates. I take the virus as but the latest of many many challenges facing all people, in government, institutions like schools and colleges, in churches and families, now and here, then since human beings have lived and everywhere. The virus, and what other people do with it, are major challenges to usual modes of operation, with no clear pathways to follow in order to alleviate the dangers. The situation requires ongoing educative acts of analysis, deliberation, imagination that are always performed with others who both expand and limit what one might do.