Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Course Description
An introduction to the ethnographic study of politics, this course examines how anthropologists have understood politics to function in various social and economic systems: from small-scale societies to liberal democratic states. Starting with anthropological accounts of the politics of everyday life, we will examine what constitutes the political across several sites: electoral politics, public spheres, bureaucracies and humanitarian governance. Students are asked to read the assigned texts with attention to what is and is not understood to be political. Specifcally, they are asked to consider how questions of authority, coercion and violence have been theorized to relate to the question of politics, and how some aspects of social life have been regimented in explicitly non-political ways. What moral imaginaries are opened by the promise of politics, and how do they inform the practical governance of lives?
Course Objectives
Upon taking this course, students will be able to:
- identify the key anthropological debates about the role of “politics” in social life
- differentiate between different kinds of political operations, from the everyday to the state
- perform an anthropological analysis of political power in everyday life
The course will also help students develop close reading, critical thinking and academic writing skills.
Requirements
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Class attendance and participation | 20% |
| 10 1-page reading response essays | 30% |
| Midterm paper | 20% |
| Final paper | 30% |
For detailed information on the activities in the table above, see the Assignments section.
Texts
There are two books I encourage you to buy, because we will be reading much of them:
Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Translated by Robert Hurley in association with Abe Stein. Zone Books, 1989. ISBN: 9780942299014.
Kockelman, Paul. The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest. Duke University Press Books, 2016. ISBN: 9780822360728. [Preview with Google Books]
The other texts are articles and book chapters and can be found in the Readings section.
Citations
Plagiarism is a serious offense. It’s also wrong. If your text repeats part of another text verbatim, use quotation marks and include the source in parentheses (author’s last name, year: page number). If your text paraphrases another, include the source from which you’ve borrowed ideas in parentheses (author’s last name, year). For more information on citation formats, check out the Chicago Manual of Style Online.
Calendar
| SES # | TOPICS | DUE DATES |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | |
| Section I: Everyday politics | ||
| 2–3 | Module 1: Power in language | |
| 4–5 | Module 2: Language, authority, labor | |
| Section II: American democratic politics | ||
| 6–7 | Module 1: The practice of politics | |
| 8–9 | Module 2: Political rhetorics | Midterm papers due during session 9 |
| Section III: Publics, counter-publics and states imagined | ||
| 10–11 | Module 1: Publics | |
| 12–13 | Module 2: Imagined states | |
| 14–15 | Module 3: Ethnographies of states and publics imagined | |
| Section IV: Non-government and the a-political | ||
| 16–17 | Module 1: Society against the state | |
| 18–20 | Module 2: A-political governance | |
| 21–22 | Module 3: A-political bureaucracy | Research proposals due during session 22 |
| Section V: Governing political affect | ||
| 23–25 | Governing political affect | |
| 26 | Short presentations of final papers | Final papers due |
