THE NEW POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (Anth 205)
Spring 2008
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:10-3:25 pm
Marist Hall 117

Dr. Anna Fournier
Department of Anthropology, Marist Hall 3
Tel. 202-319-5080
fournier@cua.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30-3:00

The course is an introduction to the study of social power in human society. We will engage with concepts of power, domination, authority and legitimacy, and ask how these shape the lives of the people anthropologists study.  The course will focus on contemporary workings of power in non-Western societies, while also situating the latter within the larger political orders of colonialism and capitalism.  The interplay of structure and agency in resisting these global orders will be explored.  We will investigate the making of modern identities (ethnic, racial, national) within the frame of the modern state, paying particular attention to the exclusions and inequalities these projects imply. An exploration of new transnational subjectivities will lead us to a re-examination of state power in Western and non-Western contexts. We will analyze state power against other forms of power (supranational organizations, mafias, paramilitaries) that have concrete effects on populations and yet stand in an ambiguous relation to the state. This will allow us to move to Foucault’s theoretical approaches to power, and in particular, his notion of governmentality.  Finally, we will compare and contrast the forms of power present under conditions of exceptional violence (ethnic conflict, state terror) and everyday “structural violence.”

Course Goals:

At the conclusion of the course, students will be able to:
*describe and critique major theoretical approaches to power
*engage in cross-cultural, comparative reflection about the way power is exercised and experienced
*make a coherent argument about the interplay of agency and structure in shaping human action
*use concrete ethnographic methods for accessing different forms of power and evidencing their social effects

Evaluation:

-Mid-term exam 25%
-Final exam 25%
-Paper 35%
-Class participation 15%

The mid-term and final exams will include definitions, short answers, and essay questions.

The final paper should be 12-15 double-spaced pages in length and is due on the last day of class. Your topic must be approved by the instructor.

Class participation includes attendance, preparation, and participation in class discussions and debates. You will also be asked to keep a journal in which you will note your thoughts on designated readings and films. Your major journal assignment will be a “mini-ethnography” in which you describe all the major power relations in which you engaged (e.g. as a student, an older brother, a consumer) in the course of one particular day.

Required text:

The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. 2006. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

All other texts for the course will be posted on electronic reserves.

Course Outline:

POWER FROM COERCION TO PERSUATION

Week 1 (Jan. 15, 17)
Conceptualizing Power

What are possible sources of social power? Can we equate power with domination, or rule by force? Should we instead view power as rooted in consent and consensus and therefore as the opposite of force or violence? What is at stake in distinguishing violence from power?

*Arendt, Hannah. 1951. Chapter 2. In On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

*Weber, Max. 1878. Chapter III: “Three Types of Legitimate Domination.” In Economy and Society (Vol. 1) Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Week 2 (no class on Jan. 22 [administrative Monday]; class meets Jan 24)
Ideology, Hegemony, Civil Society

Why do people submit to institutionalized power? Is coercion always the most efficient means of ensuring compliance? What is the role of persuasion and accommodation in perpetuating a particular social order? 

*Femia, Joseph V. 1981. “The Concept of Hegemony” (Chapter 2). Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 *Althusser, Louis. 2006. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation.) In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
 
*Allison, Anne. 2005. Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus. In Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Fourth Edition). Caroline B. Bretell and Carolyn F. Sargent. Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
 

 

THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE

Week 3 (Jan. 29, 31)
Resistance

What are the possibilities for subverting the constructions of dominant groups? Must resistance be something conscious and deliberate to be worthy of the name, or can it be unconscious? Is it necessary that resistance make a difference (i.e. effect change in the society), or can it be a way of coping that actually helps perpetuate the system of oppression?

*Scott, James C. 1992. “Domination, Acting and Fantasy.” In The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror. Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

*Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Trough Bedouin Women”. American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 41-55.

*Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 1993. “Talking about Resistance: Ethnography and Theory in Rural France”. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 4. Controversy: Hegemony and the Anthropological Encounter. October 1993, pp. 221-229

FILM: “Divorce Iranian Style”

 

STATE POWER

Week 4 (Feb. 5, 7)
‘Locating’ the State

What everyday practices of state bureaucracies, representations, and fantasies contribute to making the state “real”? To what extent is the state an effect of these practices and cultural processes? How do we begin to apprehend the state ethnographically?

*Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 1, February 2001.

*Taussig, Michael. 1992. “Maleficium: State Fetishism.” (Chap. 7) The Nervous System. New York, London: Routledge.

*Mitchell, Timothy. 2006. “Society, Economy, and the State Effect”. In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Week 5 (Feb. 12, 14)
Bureaucracy, Corruption, Intimacy

Does the constructed “indifference” characteristic of bureaucratic practices enhance or mitigate state power? How does the notion of corruption come to blur the distinction between “state” and “society”, public and private?

*Herzfeld, Michael. “The Roots of Indifference.” (Chap. 2) In The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

*Gupta, Akhil. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

*Yurchak, Alexei. 2002. “Entrepreneurial Governmentality in Postsocialist Russia: A Cultural Investigation of Business Practices.” In The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. Victoria E. Bonnell and Thomas B. Gold, eds. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Week 6 (Feb. 19, 21)
Between Force and Violence: State Terror

How does the state, traditionally seen as a bulwark against violence, come to be described as itself grounded in violence? What are the characteristics of the “culture of fear” produced by such violence? What are some ethnographic strategies for accessing the social effects of terror when secrecy, self-censorship and distrust taint the relation of anthropologist and informant?

*Green, Linda. 1994. “Fear as a Way of Life.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, Issue 2, May 1994, pp. 227-256.

*Perice, Glen. 1997. “Rumors and Politics in Haiti.” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 1, January 1997.

*Skydmore, Monique. 2003. “Darker Than Midnight: Fear, Vulnerability, and Terror Making in Urban Burma”.  American Ethnologist 30 (1): pp. 5-21.

BEYOND THE STATE

Week 7 (Feb. 26, 28)
Inside and Outside the Law: paramilitaries, mafias, oligarchies

Is “the state” always recognizable/legible? What are the effects on local populations of forces that simultaneously are and are not of the state? What forms of vulnerability are created by forces operating both within and outside the law?

*Ries, Nancy. 2002. Honest Bandits and Warped People: Russian Narratives of Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay. In Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change. Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay B. Warren, eds. Durham & London: Duke University Press. pp. 275-315

*Poole, Deborah. 2004. “Between Threat and Guarantee: Justice and Community in the Margins of the Peruvian State”.  In Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

*Sanford, Victoria. 2004. “Contesting Displacement in Columbia: Citizenship and State Sovereignty at the Margins”. In Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Week 8  SPRING BREAK

Week 9 (March 11, 13)
From Law to Tactics: Neoliberal Governmentality

What are the global actors (e.g. international corporations, institutions, and media organizations) that exercise power over people’s lives?  How is power exercised through transnational standards and norms, especially in societies that are supposedly “transitioning” toward the free market and democracy? How does the notion of “risk” come to justify certain state and non-state modes of control and intervention in our own society?

*Foucault, Michel. 2006. “Governmentality”. In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

*Dunn, Elizabeth. 2005. “Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe”.  In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong, eds. Oxford: Blackwell.

*Rabinow, Paul. 2005. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality.” In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics. Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Week 10 (March 18; no classes on March 20, Holy Thursday)
Structural Violence

Hailed by some as the “most advanced” political system, liberal democracy has also come under criticism for its exclusion and neglect of certain populations. What are the forces at play in producing everyday structural violence marked by poverty, disease, and death?

*Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. “Dreamworlds of Democracy” (Chap. 1) In Dreamworlds and Catastrophe: The Passing of Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

*Farmer, Paul.  2004. “On Suffering and Structural Violence.” In Violence in War and Peace. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

*Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1989. “Lifeboat Ethics: Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil.” Natural History 98 (10): pp. 8-16.  

CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITIES

Week 11 (March 25, 27)
Constructing Ethnicity

How is the concept of ethnicity reconfigured by the move from essentialist to constructivist perspectives? What is the interplay between self- and other-imposed identity? What analytical work does the concept of identity perform? Could we dispense with the concept altogether?

*Barth, Fredrik.1969. “Introduction”. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference.  Boston: Little, Brown.

*Drummond, Lee. 1980. “The Cultural Continuum: A Theory of Intersystems.” Man 15, pp. 352-374.

*Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity’.” Theory and Society 29, pp. 1-47. 

Week 12 (April 1,3)
The Nation and its Exclusions

How do members of a community come to think of themselves as “national”? To what extent are collective identities such as national identities the result of (often violent) practices of normalization, homogeneisation, and exclusion?

*Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. (selections)

*Chatterjee, Partha.1986.  The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (selections)

*Williams, Brackette. “A Class Act: The Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain”. Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 18, pp.401-444.

Week 13 (April 8, 10)
From Colonialism to Globalization

How have local populations dealt with the enforced social change brought about by colonial power? In what creative ways have colonized societies been able to rework colonial culture to so as to make some of its elements meaningful within their own cultural contexts?

*Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History.  Berkeley: University of California Press. (selections)

*Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (selections)
 
*Lewellen, Ted. C. 1992. “Anthropology in the World System” (Chap. 9) In Political Anthropology: An Introduction (Second Edition).

 

Week 14 (April 15, 17)
Globalization between Hybridity and Cultural Imperialism

Does globalization result in an increasingly culturally homogenous world? How do local populations adapt to and domesticate the “culture of capitalism”?  Can we speak of a local/global hybridity in a way that acknowledges both human agency/adaptability and the constrains of imperialism and unequal power relations?

*Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo. 2002. “Introduction: a world in motion.” In The Anthropology of Globalization. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

*Ong, Aihwa.1987. “Spirits of Resistance.” (Chap. 9) In Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.

*Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1995. “The Objects of Soap Opera: Egyptian television and the cultural politics of modernity. In Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. Daniel Miller, ed. pp.109-210.

Week 15 (April 22, 24)
Beyond the community in “communal” violence

Are so-called communal or “ethnic” conflicts always about ethnicity? What are the roles of elites, the state, and international organizations in perpetuating and/or resolving conflict? How can the exploration of colonial modes of ethnic classification help us understand the roots of conflict? How does the violence of conflict itself come to produce rigid boundaries between previously fluid groups?

 *Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

*Bracewell, Wendy. 2000. “Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism 6 (4), pp. 563-90.

*Mehta, Deepak. 2001. “Boundaries, Names, Alterities: A Case Study of a ‘Communal Riot’ in Dharavi, Bombay. Veena Das et al, eds. Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press.

FILM: “Hotel Rwanda”

Week 16 (April 29, May 1)
Review for final exam (please bring your questions)
-Final papers due May1st