ANTH 027C. Ethnographies of Contemporary Latin America

This course examines contemporary Latin America through an anthropological lens, focusing on the enduring effects of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and U.S. intervention. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the course moves across different geographies within Latin America to explore key historical events and social processes, including revolutions, military dictatorships, democratic transitions, and contemporary returns to authoritarianism, with particular attention to how race, class, gender, and sexuality are produced and contested in everyday life across the region. Drawing on recent ethnographies, topics include post-conflict transitions, crime and transnational security regimes, femicide, migration and diasporic formations, enforced disappearance, extractivism, debt, and political ecologies, among others. The course also examines anthropology produced in and about Latin America, engaging debates on decolonial knowledge production, feminist and Black theory and ethnography, Indigenous thought, and social movements.
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Fall 2026. Grimaldi.
Catalog chapter: Sociology and Anthropology
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/sociology-anthropology

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