This course addresses a series of debates in anthropology about ‘nature' and legitimacy in a variety of contexts that tend to be overlaid by heavy regulatory, if not bureaucratic, structures: sociocultural, political, biological, technological, legal, religious, economic. For this complex set of issues, there could be no better focus than the reproduction of society, especially that of children, across time and place. An explicit focus on reproduction and regulation makes clear connections to the core of the classic sociocultural anthropology canon. However, its application to contemporary debates in areas such as the technologies of birth control and assisted/biogenetic reproduction, international migration and ‘integration,' human rights legislation, and the conveyance legitimacy across nations, generations and monetary currencies - all these offer rich new promise.
