SSC 231 Anthropology and the Study of Politics

Content

Anthropology provides a unique understanding of political process at both the global and local levels. Our discipline offers methodological and theoretical insight into all aspects of power relations, and it does so in a comparative framework. Political anthropology helps us explain, among other things, the sudden transformation of celebrations into riots, multicultural coexistence into ethnic strife, and peaceful public relations into war; and it allows us to better understand the everyday dynamics associated with nationalism, the state, law, and political protest.

Anthropology and the Study of Politics provides students with a firm grounding in the history and development of political anthropology, as well as in some of the issues central to the contemporary anthropological study of politics. In Part One (‘History & Theory’), the course begins with an overview of the field by considering the scope of political anthropologists’ work. Students then focus their attention on the historical and theoretical development of the sub-discipline. They consider some of the pioneering political ethnographies, and, in doing so, they follow a trajectory that leads from the early classics to contemporary accounts, from structural-functionalism to post-modernism. More specifically, we consider how structural functionalism, action theory and Neo-Marxism influenced the anthropologist’s study of politics. Subsequently, in considering ‘power’ as an anthropological concept, Part Two of the course (‘Practice and Application’) focuses in on a number of the important themes that dominate contemporary anthropological accounts of politics. These include: colonialism; resistance; violence and suffering; war and peace; law and dispute settlement; and nations and nationalism.

Political anthropology, however, is about more than just the cross-cultural study of politics. In fact, anthropological studies of politics are, at one and the same time, the study of the politics of anthropology. Thus, throughout the entire semester we will want to swing back and forth between these two anthropological orientations, that is, between the anthropologist’s study power and the anthropologist’s exertion of power. We do so through a critical consideration of our own discipline.

Instructor

Dr. John Friedman

Period

Spring / 2011

Course Material

• Kurtz, Donald (2001).  Political Anthropology: Paradigms and Power, Boulder, CO:  Westview Press.
• Richards, Paul (1996).  Fighting for the Rain Forest:  War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford and Portsmouth, N.H.:  The International African Institute in association with James Currey and Heinemann.
• Vincent, Joan (ed.) (2002).  The Anthropology of Politics:  A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique, Oxford: Blackwell.
• Supplementary reading as assigned

Prerequisites

One needs to have followed one of the following courses in order to take this course:

• SSC 111 Introduction to Sociology
• SSC 131 Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology
• SSC 143 Introduction to Global Studies
• SSC 151 Introduction to Political Theory
• SSC 171 Law, Society and Justice

Required for

This course is an alternative requirement for the following courses:

• SSC 300 Independent Research in Socio-Cultural Anthropology
• SSC 331 Faces of the State: A View from Anthropology
• SSC 332 The Dynamics of Globalization