Political Anthropology

Catalog description

What do we mean when we use the terms "politics" or "political"? Through a combination of classic and contemporary anthropological readings, this course attends to a range of topics and case studies that address this question. Drawing upon anthropological theory and ethnographic study, the course examines the ways in which social groups enact, contest, reproduce and transform power relations in different contexts. In many cases, anthropological approaches help to complicate our understanding of otherwise familiar political formations and institutions: nation, state, and citizen, for example. In other instances, anthropologists find politics in often overlooked places, such as kinship, ritual, infrastructure, and ordinary life. The course begins by introducing classic anthropological studies that challenged conventional understandings of politics and power. Next, we consider how this approach has been applied to analyze the dynamics between nation, state and citizen. The final half of the course then makes sense of contemporary political formations and power relations emerging under a changing global political order.