Anthropological Perspectives on America under Trump 3102-FTRU
MAGA hats and pink pussy hats. MAHA and mutual aid. ICE patrols and antifa groups. Lines blurring between politics, entertainment, finance, big tech, and influencing. While Donald J. Trump, in the middle of his second term as this course takes place, seems to have been the catalyst for this cultural chaos, the roots go much deeper. We will first examine the historical and cultural currents underlying the United States’ current fractures, from the American Revolution to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while American society is often depicted as split down the middle, we will investigate a wide variety of lives and lifestyles in America under Trump. These case studies will represent a monumentally wide range of political, religious, economic, identitarian, and sociocultural lifeways and worldviews, allowing us to more fully understand the complex textures that make up these lives and investigate what is uniquely American (and what is not) about America under Trump.
The United States Midterm Elections, perennially a bellwether of the American public’s mood and a referendum on the President’s performance, will take place on 3 November 2026, right in the middle of the course. We will keep a close eye on developments across politics, culture, and media—especially social media—that reflect, shape, and are shaped by discordant currents in American life and ask: whose lives are used and abused, changed and stabilized, lionized and villainized, in this era of intense change and fracture?
During our course we will explore the following problems:
What are the politics of memory at stake in different American lifeworlds?
The tension between nostalgia for a “golden age” of American prosperity and the drive to imagine and create innovative futures
What unites America? Or is it united at all?
Is Trump an aberration in American history or an encapsulation of it?
How do Americans make sense of themselves, their neighbors, and their “imagined communit(y/ies)”? Who is left out of these constellations?
What has changed in America’s relationship to violence?
What currents of destruction and creation has America under Trump fostered?
Weaponization of “American values” and cultural memory to foment division
Impact of religions, ideologies, identities, and technology on changing American lifeways
Trumpism and anti-Trumpism in art and culture
Koordynatorzy przedmiotu
Rodzaj przedmiotu
Założenia (opisowo)
Efekty uczenia się
Student is able to analyze and compare anthropological and other texts related to American lives under Trump
Student develops the ability to critically assess how memories and visions of “America” are lived and mobilized in political discourse, cultural production, and societal debates.
Student deepens their understanding of how politics in the Trump age intersects with identity formation, tribalism, and violence in America and abroad
Student becomes more reflexive in approaching the contested narratives of history, identity, culture, politics, memory, and society in American life, discourses, and media
Kryteria oceniania
Assessment criteria
• Mandatory reading of assigned texts and active engagement through oral responses and discussion during seminar sessions.
• Active participation in class, including completion of a 10-minute oral or filmed presentation reflecting on one aspect of American culture as catalyzed, reflected, or activated during the 2026 Midterm Elections
• Oral exam at the end of the course to assess comprehension and critical engagement with the material.
Literatura
Andaya, Elise. 2019. “’I’m Building a Wall around my Uterus’: Abortion Politics and the Politics of Othering in Trump’s America.” Cultural Anthropology 34(1): 10-17.
Beres, Derek, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker. 2023. Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. New York: PublicAffairs.
Bittner, Vanessa K. 2025. “Iconic Extensions and Memetic Audiences: The MAGA Hat as a Site of Conflict in the US Public Sphere.” Cultural Sociology 19(3): 350-373.
Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2023. “From busting cults to breeding cults: Anonymous h/acktivism vs. the (a)nonymous far right and QAnon.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 13(2): 248-263.
Crockford, Susannah. 2018. “Thank God for the Greatest Country on Earth: White Supremacy, Vigilantes, and Survivalists in the Struggle to Define the American Nation.” Religion, State & Society 46(3): 224-242.
Eller, Jack David (ed.). 2021. The Anthropology of Donald Trump: Culture and the Exceptional Moment. London: Routledge.
Fine, Julia C. 2020. "# MagicResistance: Anti‐Trump Witchcraft as Register Circulation." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 30(1): 68-85.
Foote, Kenneth E. 2003. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Revised edition. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Gökarıksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. 201. “Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America.” Gender, Place & Culture 24(5): 628-644.
Koenig, Biko, and Tali Mendelberg. 2026. “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement.” Perspectives on Politics 24(1): 238-255.
LaRiviere, Jason. 2024. “The Just Kidding Jouissance of Dark Brandon.” Representations 168: 170-179.
Leidig, Eviane. 2023 The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lennon, Myles. 2018. “Revisiting ‘the repugnant other’ in the era of Trump.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(3): 439-454.
Luhtakallio, Eeva, and Taina Meriluoto. 2022. “Snap-along ethnography: Studying visual politicization in the social media age.” Ethnography 27(1): 66-86.
Miner, Horace. 1956. “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58(3): 503-507.
Mullard, Jordan CR. 2024. “Authenticity and recognition: Theorising antiracist becomings and allyship in the time of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.” Anthropological Theory 24(2): 111-135.
Pandey, Kritika, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, and Gianne Sheena Sabio. 2021. “Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Behavioral Scientist 65(10): 1287-1301.
Pandian, Anand. 2025. Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rosa, Jonathan, and Yarimar Bonilla. 2017. "Deprovincializing Trump, decolonizing diversity, and unsettling anthropology." American Ethnologist 44(2): 201-208.
Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2018. "“Putting band‐aids on things that need stitches”: Immigration and the landscape of care in rural America." American Anthropologist 120(3): 487-499.
Shange, Savannah. 2019. “Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography.” Transforming Anthropology 27(1): 3-21.
Tuğal, Cihan, Jonathan Smucker, and Kip Roberts. 2026. “Populism, Emotions, and Boundary Work among Political Activists in the Trump Era.” The Sociological Quarterly 67(2): 245-267.
Wells, K.L.H. 2026. “Trump’s ‘Un-American’ Aesthetics.” Visual Resources, https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2026.2708557.
Wentzell, Emily, and Ana-Monica Rasila. 2022. “Collective Care Amid US Individualism through COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participation.” Medical Anthropology 41(1): 34-48.
Whitacre, Ryan, Adeola Oni-Orisan, Nadia Gaber, Carlos Martinez, Liza Buchbinder, Denise Herd, and Seth M. Holmes. 2021. “COVID-19 and the political geography of racialisation: Ethnographic cases in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit.” Global Public Health 16(8-9): 1396-1410.