Authority and community, persuasion and communication, coercion and loyalties in transitions to the post-modern "new world order" form the subject of this course.   It examines cultural constructions of "community" and "identity" in the contemporary world, ethnic violence, trans-national networks and cultural heritage politics that have come to comprise the anthropology of politics.   This new political anthropology pays particular attention to organizations and relations that are problematic for classical approaches to freedom and order, domination and resistance, religious activism and community, and made all the more so by the communications revolution.  Special attention will be given to the social practices of media that foster "imagined" or "virtual" communities.
 

Course requirements include a schedule of readings (4 books and some articles) for discussion in class. There will be a midterm paper on readings to that point. By midterm, students will select and present an outline of topics for a final term paper.
 

Required Reading:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Handler, Richard. Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Herzfeld, Michael. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Eickelman, Dale F. & Jon W. Anderson (eds.) New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
 
 

What is political anthropology?

Political anthropology is the study of politics "up close," classically in face-to-face decision-making and authority in small-scale societies. The "new" political anthropology shifts the topic from primitive/traditional societies and from decision-making or conflict-resolution to the contemporary world.  It deals with contemporary "ethnic" politics, fundamentalisms, and with the mediation of authority and participation as discourses about identity, authority, community.  It asks how these are socially organized and imagined.  These shifts break with classic dichotomies of political analysis--such as rational action/primordial sentiment, instrumental/psychological, interests/ideology--and with speculation that would universalize such dimensions.  In this course we will focus on transactions in identity and on the social practices of media in political (public) realms.

What we will do in this course.

This class will operate as a mixture of lecture (usually on Tuesdays) and seminar (usually on the Thursday meetings); so you should come to class prepared to discuss readings assigned for that day.  Participation counts for 10% of your grade.  There will be a short paper on a film (20%) due by the end of September (See below), a midterm (30%) and a research paper or project (40%) due at the end of the course in lieu of a final.  For the midterm, you will be asked to develop a comparison or an application of ideas in the first two books, Anderson's Imagined Communities and Handlers Politics of Culture.  Graduate students must develop a research paper that departs in some substantial and original way from the assigned readings;  ideally, it should be part of an eventual thesis project, and necessarily it must be discussed with me before mid-semester (Oct 11).   You may develop a case study around current or long-standing issues--such as northern Ireland, the Balkans, Nigeria, Somalia, European "unification," the reorientations of post-Soviet Central Asia, Islamic or other fundamentalisms, Israel/Palestine, India, liberation theology, insurrections and resistance in South America, economic networks in East Asia or various venues of "cultural" politics in the contemporary USA--using perspectives and approaches examined in this course.

We will read and discuss four books (available in the bookstore and in the library) and some supplementary articles (available in the Anthropology Department commons room).  Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is a modern classic and provides our point of departure.  Handler's book is a study of Quebecois ethno-nationalism, Herzfeld's examines supposedly rational bureaucracy as ritual and symbolic action.  The essays in New Media in the Muslim World take a bottom-up look at the social practices of expanding participation in mediated communication that come back to Anderson.

How to contact me

Syllabus

  (AUG 29)  Introduction: Theme and Topics of the Course. 31)  Reimagining political authority and community.

READ: Clifford Geertz, "Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture."  In The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973. pp. 3-30).  See also Part IV for an early statement of a culturalist approach to the politics of post-colonial "nation-building."    For a more systematic, theoretical formulation of the parallel interlude in the emergence of western nation-states, see Juergen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).