The Meaning of Life

Our proposed new course, “The Meaning of Life,” is in essence a cross-cultural journey of moral imagination. The subject as we envision it would pair classical anthropological texts with works of art, literature, music, film, games, and more. We draw inspiration from symbolic anthropology’s humanistic conviction that expressive culture—from immersive ritual to contemplative art and music—is a resource that people everywhere use to make sense of the world around them and to provide models for proper conduct. In this conception, the goal of anthropology is to make other cultures’ systems of meaning-making legible to outsiders, while, in the process, enriching our own cultural conceptions of what it means to be human—to “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” By taking this orientation to cultural analysis as a charter for examining the moral dimensions of great and popular works of art and literature, we hope both to convey the relevance of anthropology to understanding human nature and to promote a lifetime of interest in the arts and humanities as arenas for continuing reflection on the meaning of life. Such a course will show how the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences all depend upon one another. We are excited that this interdisciplinary approach will also give us, as educators, the opportunity to expand our scholarly horizons.