Today in Awesome: Univ. of Chicago Gets in on the Pirate Action

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Mar 18, 2009 8:20PM

Not content to simply protest figs, the University of Chicago is taking the awesome one step further by offering a class in the upcoming quarter on pirates. The class, Anthro 21254. Intensive Study of a Culture: Pirates is taught by assistant anthropology professor Shannon Lee Dawdy and is - obviously - the most popular class in terms of enrollment. In order to accommodate the number of requests, Dawdy increased the class's size from 90 to 150 students.

So what will the kids be studying? According to the U of C's anthropology course guide:

Pirates, smugglers, and privateers hold a special place in the American cultural imagination, particularly in recent years. But the value of studying piracy and smuggling goes beyond the titillation of popular entertainment in forms such as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. Many of the questions that arise go to the heart of major anthropological problems. Some of these topics are venerable, others are of more recent vintage, such as: the nature of informal economies, the relationship between criminality and the state, transnationalism, the evolution of capitalism, intellectual property and globalization, political revolutions, counter-cultures, and the cultural role of heroic (or anti-heroic) narratives. Each week we will tackle one of these topics, pairing a classic anthropological work with specific examples from the historical, archaeological, and/or ethnographic literature. While the pirates and smugglers of the early modern Caribbean (ca. 1492-1820) will serve as our primary case study, we will be comparing this well-known form to examples spanning from ancient ship-raiders in the Mediterranean to contemporary software "piracy."

Dawdy told the Tribune, "As eggheady as our students are, they also are very much of their generation and in touch with mainstream culture..."It is almost too fun for the University of Chicago, so I will make sure they read a bit of theory every week." Also on the syllabus will be a visit to the Field Museum's Real Pirates exhibit. [Tribune]