This is a course in the IHUM (Introduction to the Humanities) sequence at Stanford. I run it with Tim Lenoir, Huan Saussy, and our four fellows – Phaedra Bell, René Courée, Victoria Szabo and Robert Wess. A great bunch.

We look at five works – this year they are Plato: Crito, Sei Shonagon: Pillow Book, Shakespeare: Richard II, Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques, and The Sims. For each there are comparative materials such as Hobbes, Orlan, Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Parr, Klaus Theweleit, Guillermo Gomez-Peña …

It is a bit of an intellectual roller coaster.

The topic: bodies, cultures, histories and minds – how are they connected? Virtual bodies, suburban bodies, encrypted bodies, primitive bodies …

The aim: to develop skills of critical and close reading and engagement across a range of disciplinary fields – literary criticism, anthropology, history, philosophy and cognitive science, and more.

The argument: we need to undermine those familiar split dualities:
- mind and body
- internal subjectivity and external objectivity
- words and things
- immateriality and materiality
- self and other
- feelings and thoughts.

The course explores many ways we might do this.

A particular argument is made for rethinking located bodies as dispersed fields, relational networks of connections and associations that run through our material lives, our social and cultural fabric. This takes us into the most recent of cognitive science.

For me Bodies in Place explores some central features of my archaeological interests – working on the material remains of people’s lives. See >> neolithic bodies, the arguments of my book >>ReConstructing Archaeology and my work on site specifics (>>Three Landscapes Project).