The hauptseminar will explore the place of infrastructure in the human history (past and present) and will tease out the social, political and cultural meanings of infrastructure. Through a series of historical and ethnographic examples but also by reading theoretical papers the seminar will explore topics such as materiality and symbolism of infrastructure. The seminar will also make the link with the course on environmental history and environmental anthropology by looking into concepts such as environing infrastructure and the infrastructure of environment.
The course is an excursion to the main theories of environmental history and environmental anthropology with an emphasis on climate change, ecological restoration, rewilding and multispecies ethnography. The course explains how environmental historians and anthropologists look at “nature” as a social construction but also will explain why many historians and anthropologists consider nonhumans (or more-than-humans) as having agency (having powers to act even if they do not have consciousness). Further, the course will explore notions such as “wilderness” and “wildness”, nature and culture, multispecies ethnography and the new “ontological turn” in environmental history and anthropology.