The key objective of this course is to understand the ritual efficacy of bonding in terms of enabling, perpetuating, regulating, and dissolving partnerships transcending exclusively human social ties. The course will focus on practices constituting friendship, alliance, and marriage, and other forms of bonding whether temporary or perpetual problematizing the inherent assumptions regarding time, commitment, intimacy, power, sexual difference, and species. The course will explore rites involving the transhuman, designed along the lines of, but at the same time questioning the priority of human weddings.