ANTH 520Political Ethnography

Catalog

This course will explore the major themes in the historical development and contemporary practice of political anthropology within the British and American traditions of cultural and social anthropology. It will examine the origins and evolution of the specific theoretical and methodological concerns which gave rise to modern political anthropology, and will encourage students to develop a critical perspective on the relations between an anthropology of politics and the politics of anthropology. Among the theoretical, methodological and professional issues to be considered in this course are: process and action theory, folk society, interactionism, transactionalism, political economy, regional studies, local-state-nation analyses, neo-evolutionism, Marxist/Marxian approaches, culture history, gender and power, community studies and method, world-systems, political fields and networks, cultural pluralism, subaltern studies, colonialism and post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, nationalism, and borders and boundaries.