The very title, "Critical Foundations of Anthropology," calls for reflection. “Critical” may refer to one set of concerns, “Foundations” to another. Does the title, “Critical Foundations,” suggest a critical view on foundations? Is “critical foundations” an oxymoron, since the very purpose of critique is to question what we think we know, to question and destabilize received conventions of thought, to question one’s confidence in answers? Does it demand that we engage new questions? Not least we will ask what is included and excluded from that which was commonly asserted (and protected) as “the canon,” and not least to confront the “common” in “common sense.” In this seminar we will work neither to defend the principles, practices, and politics of an earlier anthropology nor reject and dismiss that work out of hand. The effort here is rather to situate what questions were being asked, why those questions were asked and not others, who was doing the asking, what constituted the proper domains of inquiry and what did not. Can we make sense of our present by understanding better what was the political and global landscape in which anthropology developed as a discipline, as a form of knowledge, as a knowledge-producing machine, one whose ‘winnowing’ practices filtered out its conditions of production and the politics, colonial and otherwise, that have allowed anthropologists to pursue what they once did and do today.