The Anthropology of Politics: Persuasion and Power

Readings

[C] = Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Translated by Robert Hurley in association with Abe Stein. Zone Books, 1989. ISBN: 9780942299014. 

[K] = Kockelman, Paul. The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest. Duke University Press Books, 2016. ISBN: 9780822360728. 

SES #	TOPICS	READINGS
1	Introduction	No readings assigned
Section I: Everyday politics
2	Module 1: Power in language I	Urciuoli, Bonnie. “The Political Topography of Spanish and English: The View from a New York Puerto Rican Neighborhood.” American Ethnologist 18, no. 2 (1991), 295–310.
3	Module 1: Power in language II	Irvine, Judith T. “Strategies of Status Manipulation in the Wolof Greeting.” Chapter 8 in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. 2nd ed. Edited by Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer. Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780521379335.  Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language. Edited by Thomas Albert Sebeok. Forward by John W. Ashton. Literary Licensing, LLC, 2012. ISBN: 9781258432591.
4	Module 2: Language, authority, labor I	Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “A Writing Lesson.” Chapter 28 in Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John Russell. Atheneum, 1964.  ———. “Men, Women and Chiefs.” Chapter 29 in Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John Russell. Atheneum, 1964.
5	Module 2: Language, authority, labor II	Malinowski, Bronislaw. “The Natives of the Trobriand Islands.” Chapter 2 in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Waveland Press Inc., 1984. ISBN: 9780881330847. [Preview with Google Books]  ———. “The Essentials of the Kula.” Chapter 3 in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Waveland Press Inc., 1984. ISBN: 9780881330847. [Preview with Google Books]
Section II: American democratic politics
6	Module 1: The practice of politics I	Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. “Personalized Political Communication in American Campaigns.” Chapter 1 in Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns. Princeton University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780691153056. [Preview with Google Books]  ———. “Contacting Voters at Home.” Chapter 3 in Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns. Princeton University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780691153056. [Preview with Google Books] Westermeyer, William H. “Local Tea Party Groups and the Vibrancy of the Movement.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39, no. S1 (2016): 121–38.
7	Module 1: The practice of politics II	Bonilla, Yarimar, and Rosa Jonathan. “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 4–17.
8	Module 2: Political rhetorics I	Stolee, Galen, and Steve Caton. “Twitter, Trump, and the Base: A Shift to a New Form of Presidential Talk?” Signs and Society 6, no. 1 (2018): 147–65. McGranahan, Carole. “An Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage.” American Ethnologis__t 44, no. 2 ( 2017): 243–48.
9	Module 2: Political rhetorics II	Silverstein, Michael. “The ‘Message’ in the (Political) Battle.” Language & Communication 31, no. 3 (2011): 203–16.
Section III: Publics, counter-publics and states imagined
10	Module 1: Publics I	Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90. Wedeen, Lisa. “The Politics of Deliberation: Qāt Chews as Public Spheres in Yemen.” Public Culture 19, no. 1 (2007): 59–84. Recommended: Taylor, Charles. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 91–124.
11	Module 1: Publics II	Boyer, Dominic, and Alexei Yurchak. “AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 179–221.
12	Module 2: Imagined states I	Geertz, Clifford. “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Refections on the Symbolics of Power.” Chapter 6 in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. 3rd ed. Basic Books, 1985. ISBN: 9780465041626.  Taussig, Michael. “Viscerality, Faith and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no.3 (2016):453–83.
13	Module 2: Imagined states II	Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 981–1002.
14	Module 3: Ethnographies of states and publics imagined I	Gupta, Akhil. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 375–402.
15	Module 3: Ethnographies of states and publics imagined II	Lepselter, Susan. “From the Earth Native’s Point of View: The Earth, the Extraterrestrial and the Natural Ground of Home.” Public Culture 9, no. 2 (1997): 197–208.
Section IV: Non-government and the a-political
16	Module 1: Society against the state I	[C] Chapter 1: Copernicus and the Savages. [C] Chapter 2: Exchange and Power: Philosophy and Indian Chieftainship.  [C] Chapter 3: Independence and Exogamy.
17	Module 1: Society against the state II	[C] Chapter 11: Society against the State. Moyn, Samuel. “Of Savagery And Civil Society: Pierre Clastres And The Transformation Of French Political Thought.” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004): 55–80.
18	Module 2: A-political governance I	[K] Chapter 1: NGOs, Ecotourists, and Endangered Avifauna: Immaterial Labor, Incommensurate Values, and Intersubjective Intentions. [Preview with Google Books] Ferguson, James. “The Anti-Politics Machine.” Chapter 11 in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. ISBN: 9781405114684.
19	Module 2: A-political governance II	[K] Chapter 3: From Reciprocation to Replacement: Grading Use Values, Labor Power, and Personhood. [K] Chapter 4: From Measurement to Meaning: Standardizing and Certifying Homes and Their Inhabitance. Recommended: [K] Chapter 2: A Mayan Ontology of Poultry: Selfhood, Affect, and Animals.
20	Module 2: A-political governance III	Stierl, Maurice. “A Fleet of Mediterranean Border Humanitarians.” Antipode 50, no. 3 (2018): 704–24.
21	Module 3: A-political bureaucracy I	Graeber, David. “Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive Labor.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2 (2012): 105–28. Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36.
22	Module 3: A-political bureaucracy II	Berda,Yael. “Prologue,” and “Dangerous Populations.” In Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Stanford University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781503602823. [Preview with Google Books] Birkin, David. “Cyclura Nubila: The Iguanas of Guantánamo.” Cabinet Magazine 59 (2015): 46–53. Recommended: Berda, Yael. “Perpetual Emergency.” In Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Stanford University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781503602823. [Preview with Google Books]
Section V: Governing political affect
23	Governing political affect I	Shoshan, Nitzan. “Managing Hate: Political Delinquency and Affective Governance in Germany.” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2014): 150–72. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “What Do White People Want?: Interest, Desire, and Affect in Late Liberalism.” e-flux. January 2017.
24	Governing political affect II	Bramen, Carrie Tirado. “Niceness in a Neoliberal Age.” Public Culture 30, no. 2 (2018): 329–50.
25	Governing political affect III	Mazzarella, William. “Totalitarian Tears: Does the Crowd Really Mean It?” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2015): 91–112.
26	Short presentations of final papers	No readings assigned