Subject Area: Sociology and Anthropology

Each of us has a self and an identity by virtue of being human. But do other living beings have a self? Do other living beings have society in the same way humans do? In this course, you will consider some traditional assumptions of selfhood (e.g., the capacity for reason, speech, and memory) from a range of different sociological perspectives. You will consider how recent interdisciplinary work challenges some of these basic assumptions. You will examine arguments for and against extending selfhood to other living beings in order to add complexity and texture to sociological attempts to understand the self. This course will give you many opportunities to consider the relevance of theories of the self for further studies in Sociology and Anthropology and for other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.