Governmentality

Catalog description

Governmentality - a concept articulated by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) - has become a key analytic of much recent critical writing in cultural anthropology. Taking governmentality as a point of departure, this graduate seminar will investigate governmentality as an analytical framework oriented towards interpreting our world. We will consider works by anthropologists, and scholars in related fields, who have drawn on Foucault's methods and concepts in relationship to a wide range of socio-political, philosophical and historical thought, and critically engage their attempts to deploy his approach in ethnographic analysis.