1. Essays (65%):

Students will write two essays in total, one from each half of the course, dealing with the major themes under discussion.

Essay questions will be self-selected, but this selection will be facilitated by tutorial discussion.

Your essay question must be clearly stated in your assignment.

Major Essay: The major essay will count for 40% of the total mark. This major essay should be approximately 2000 words.

Minor Essay: The minor essay will count for 25% of the semester’s work, and should be approximately 1000 words.

Essays that are written on material from the first half of the course are due at the end of Week 7.

Essays that are written from material in the second half of the course are due at the end of Week 12.

2. Tutorial Reading Response & Tutorial Participation (10%):

Tutorial preparation involves a couple of hours of pleasurable reading each week. To facilitate tutorial discussion, you are required to submit a one-page typed answer to the tutorial question for that week (see lecture and tutorial programme below).

The format of this answer is quite specific and you must address the following criteria:

• Your one-page answer must be double-spaced and in 12-point font. This ensures that everyone does the same amount of work for each week. Do not go over the one-page limit. It is quite challenging to provide a meaningful response to the question in such a small word limit, but this will develop a really important set of skills that will make it easier to grasp some of the complex concepts in the course.
• Answer the question in your own words. Do not simply summarize the reading!!
• In addition to the answer you provide to the tutorial question, you are required to write one succinct sentence capturing the reading’s overall theme.

The tutorial mark will be awarded both on the basis of the written work, as well as on tutorial participation.

• Tutorial papers are to be done every week and they can only be submitted at the tutorial in which the reading is to be discussed.
• You will be handing in 10 tute papers in total (which means out of the 11 weeks of tutorial questions, you can miss handing in one tutorial paper without academic penalty).

3. Take Home Test (25%):

A take-home exam will be uploaded on the Friday of Week 12 and will be due on the Friday of Week 13. No extensions will be allowed and any late returns will be penalized. The exam will consist of a combination of short answers to questions that link together topics and themes covered in lectures, tutorials and practical activities throughout the course. 

Assessment Information

• You must submit your essays through the turnitin link, found on iLearn for this subject.
• Extensions: Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day a written assessment is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends). After the 7th day, a mark of ‘0’ (zero) will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. Submission time for all written assessments is set at 11.55pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical issue. This late penalty will apply to non-timed sensitive assessment (incl essays, reports, posters, portfolios, journals, recordings etc). Late submission of time sensitive tasks (such as tests/exams, performance assessments/presentations, scheduled practical assessments/labs etc) will only be addressed by the unit convenor in a Special consideration application. Special Consideration outcome may result in a new question or topic.
• Important Note: It is a requirement that all students keep a copy of their written work. In the event of work being lost, or if you have handed it in but it is not in our records, you must be able to present a second copy.

ABOUT THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF POWER AND POLITICS

This unit introduces students to many of the vital political practices generating social life in the present. It also introduces students to some of the key literature associated with the anthropology of politics and power. Our exploration of both the practice of power and its analysis will be organized around three enduring questions: the ‘secret of order’, the ‘secret of change’, and the ‘secret of action.’

In the first half of the course students will identify and compare the themes – explicit or otherwise – that dominate the composition of a number of classical political ethnographies, while also exploring the wider question of their colonial contexts and how this context influenced the development of anthropological knowledge. The second half of the unit examines how some of these themes may still be of relevance in illuminating more contemporary manifestations of power, including forms of political practice such as nationalism and its project of social transformation; violence and terror; gender and agency; resistance and collaboration; and peace-making and reconciliation. A continuing concern of the course will be to explore how the writing of ethnography and the making of ethnographic film – that is, textual and visual representations – are implicated in these issues.

Politics and power can be thought of as intimate aspects of our social life and relationships, and hence as aspects of all subjects of anthropological investigation. Processes of domination, resistance and social transformation are inevitably involved in the creation and representation of cultural practices and meanings. Accordingly, the specific investigation of these issues is of great help in contributing to students’ understandings of the present, as well as to their comprehension of other units in the anthropology programme at Macquarie. Appropriately, the various and competing ways that the anthropology of politics has been conceptualized and delimited has meant that political anthropology itself has been described as a “running intellectual battleground.” One key reason for this resides in the historical political context of anthropology. Anthropology is a discipline more immediately familiar and hence more immediately implicated than other disciplines with the transformations produced by European power upon the non-European world. For a long intellectual moment, colonialism’s primary object of control constituted anthropology’s primary object of investigation. For this very reason, in this course we will seek to explore both the anthropology of politics, and the politics of anthropology.

Classes

Anth 3002 involves a two-hour lecture-seminar. Part of this weekly seminar will be used for lectures, part for films and part for discussion. The lecture-seminar will be recorded but much discussion will be lost in this process. Students are strongly encouraged to attend the weekly lecture/seminar.

Students are also required to attend face-to-face weekly tutorials. Please check the timetable for room/schedule details.

Lecture and Tutorial Programme ANTH 3002 [This is a Provisional schedule that may change slightly]

Note: All tutorial readings and core articles are found on the library website in the e-reserve section (you can search for ANTH302 in e-reserve or follow the link on iLearn). All listed secondary readings are in three-day loan (books), electronic reserve (journal articles) or available in electronic data bases.

Part One: The Political Anthropology of Colonialism

The first six weeks of the course introduce students to the key issues in anthropology’s long historic encounter[s] with state and stateless societies, which raise many fascinating questions about how such societies instituted themselves politically. Yet these questions also arose in the context of both the planned and unplanned colonial transformation of those societies, generally by the very nation states and business corporations of the European anthropologists themselves. As a consequence, anthropologists have always been studying and constructing moving targets – albeit more or less consciously: political regimes undergoing multiple transformations in which anthropologists themselves were implicated, with political institutions and practices in flux as incorporation into global flows of capital, ideologies and social practices proceeded.

Week One: Introduction to Political Anthropology and its Key Concepts

Film: First Contact

Tutorial Activity: Discussion of First Contact, Course Overview and Assessment Details

Week Two: Anthropology, Colonialism & Science

Film: Robert Gardner’s The Nuer

Tutorial Question: Given Feuchtwang’s analysis of the relationship between the colonial State and anthropological knowledge, who should fund anthropological research?

Tutorial Reading:

S. Feuchtwang (1973) ‘The Discipline and its Sponsors’, in Asad, T. (ed.) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Humanities Press, New York.

Week Three: World Systems Theory, Global Cultural History & Anthropology

Film: Joe Leahy’s Neighbours

Tutorial Question: Using Kahn’s discussion, give some examples of how ideas of cultural difference might be connected to contemporary processes of power.

Tutorial Reading:

Kahn, J. (1995) ‘Preface’ and ‘Culture, Hegemony, Representation: A Postcolonial Empire?’ in Culture, Multiculture, Postculture, Sage, London.   

Part Two: Representing Politics

In the next three weeks of the course we will seek to ground some of the above claims in the complexities of a number of ‘classic’ political anthropology texts, seeking to clarify the assumptions ethnographers have made about culture, structure, historical change, conflict, authority, and individual activism in the process of representing particular societies. Student seminar presentations make up a proportion of the seminar sessions.

Week Four: The Secret of Order

Tutorial Question: For what reasons does Clastres accuse western political philosophy of ethnocentrism?

Tutorial Reading:

Clastres, P. (1977) ‘Copernicus and the Savages’, and ‘Exchange and Power: Philosophy of the Indian Chieftainship’ (Chapters One & Two) in Society against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power among the Indians of the Americas. Urizen Books.

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Fortes, M. & Evans-Pritchard, E. (1940) Introduction to African Political Systems. Oxford University Press, London.

Evans-Pritchard, E. ‘The Nuer of the Southern Sudan’, in Fortes, M. & Evans-Pritchard, E. (1940) African Political Systems. Oxford University Press, London.

Kuklick, H. (1984) ‘Tribal Exemplars: Images of Political Authority in British Anthropology’, in G. Stocking Jr. (ed.) Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology.  University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Meeker, M. (2002) ‘Amnesia’, in A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Gough, K. (1971) ‘Nuer Kinship: A Re-Examination’, in T. Beidelman (ed.) The Translation of Culture. Tavistock Publications, London.

Asad, T. (1973) ‘Two European Images of Non-European Rule’, in Asad, T (ed.) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter

[See also review essay on ‘Anthropology of colonialism’ in Annual Review of Anthropology 1993]

Week Five: The Secret of Change

Tutorial Question: Can we speak of exploitation in pre-capitalist societies?

Tutorial Reading:

Kahn, J. (1981) ‘Marxist Anthropology & Segmentary Societies: A Review of the Literature’, in The Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist Societies. Humanities Press, New York.

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Leach, E. (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma. (Foreword, Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapters 6 - 10) London School of Economics and Political Science, London.

Friedman, J. (1975) ‘Tribes, States and Transformations’, in M. Bloch (ed.) Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology. Malaby Press, London.

Nugent, D. (1982) ‘Closed Systems and Contradiction: The Kachin in and out of History’, in Man 17, 3, pp. 502-527.

Leach, E. (1983) ‘Imaginary Kachins’, Correspondence in Man 18, 1 & Nugent, D. (1983) ‘Imaginary Kachins’, Reply to correspondence in Man 18, 1.

Week Six: The Secret of Action

Tutorial Question: What might a focus on the purposive political actions of individuals simultaneously obscure?

Tutorial Reading:

Lindquist, J. (2015) ‘Anthropology of Brokers and Brokerage’, in Encyclopedia of Social and Economic Sciences, pp. 870-874.

Vincent, J. (1978) ‘Political Anthropology: Manipulative Strategies’, in Annual Review of Anthropology 7.

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Barth, F. (1959) Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. The Athlone Press, London.

Asad, T. (1972) ‘Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: A Reconsideration of Swat Political Organization’, in Man 7, 1.

Meeker, M. (1980) ‘The Twilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth’s Study of Swat’, in Man 15, pp. 682-701.

Lindholm, C. (1981) ‘History and the Heroic Pakhtun’, Correspondence in Man 16.

Meeker, M (1981) Reply to correspondence in Man 16.

[See also ‘Overview: Sixty years in Anthropology’, by Barth in Annual Review of Anthropology, 2007]

Part Three: The Political Anthropology of Modernity

The most recent globalization of the world economy has encouraged anthropologists to theorize the ways tensions and accommodations between local, national and global forces impact on the political processes and the social relations of societies represented in their ethnographic writing. It has also encouraged a re-thinking of how we might understand the human diversity traditionally studied by anthropologists and paradoxically both produced and managed by nation states and modern modes of governance. This section will centre on some of the questions these studies raise, on the effects and unintended consequences of self-conscious modernizing projects of different nation-states and elites, and on the political legacy of European colonialism.  

Week Seven: Project Modernity (1): Nationalism, Republicanism and Language Reform in Turkey

Film: Triumph of the Will

Tutorial Question: In Scott’s contrast between high modernist planning versus practical knowledge/ local practices, which side do you come down on?

Tutorial Reading:

Scott, J. (1998) ‘Nature and Space’ (Chapter One), in Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Week Eight: Project Modernity (2): Soviet Collectivism

Film: Three Songs of Lenin

Tutorial Question: In their discussion of ‘primitive’ society, how are Marx and Sahlins’ contrasting interpretations related to their different analysis of capitalism?

Tutorial Reading:

Overing, J. (1993) ‘The Anarchy and Collectivism of the ‘Savage Other’: Marx and Sahlins in the Amazon’, in C. Hann (ed.) Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Local Practice.

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Humphrey, C. (1983) Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

Humphrey, C. (2002) ‘Marx Went Away, but Karl Stayed Behind’, in J. Vincent (ed.) The Anthropology of Politics. Blackwell, Oxford.

Scott, J. (1998) ‘Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams’ (Chapter Six), in Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Verdery, K. (1991) ‘Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the “Transition”’, in American Ethnologist 18, No 3.

Fitzpatrick, S. (1999) Chapter Three from Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Verdery, K (1999) Introduction to The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Reis, N. (2009) ‘Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia’, in Cultural Anthropology 24, 2.

Week Nine: TBA

Week Ten: Domination & Resistance (1): Theoretical Problems

Tutorial Question: How might we understand relations between gender, language and power in Australia?

Tutorial Reading:

Gal, S. (1991) ‘Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender’ in M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. University of California Press, Berkeley

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Ortner, S. (1995) Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.

Scott, J. (1985) ‘Normal Exploitation, Normal Resistance’, Chapter 2 in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Reed-Danahay, D. (1993) ‘Talking About Resistance: Ethnography and Theory in Rural France’, in Anthropological Quarterly 66, 4.

Das, V. (1994) ‘Modernity and Biography: Women’s Lives in Contemporary India’, in Thesis Eleven, No. 39.

Week Eleven: Domination & Resistance (2): Islam and Gender

Film: Divorce Iranian Style

Tutorial Question: Do Muslim women need saving (from Islam)?

Tutorial Readings:

Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others’, in American Anthropologist 104 (3)

Komecoglu, U. (2009) ‘Micro Spaces, Performative Repertoires and Gender Wars among Islamist Youth in Istanbul’, in Journal of Intercultural Studies 30, 1: 107-119.

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Abu-Lughod, L. (1990) ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, in American Ethnologist 17, 1.

Hegland, M. (2003) ‘Shi’a Women’s Rituals in Northwest Pakistan: The Shortcomings and Significance of Resistance’, in Anthropological Quarterly 76, No 3.

Mahmood, S. (2001) ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, in Cultural Anthropology 16, 2: 202-236.

Brenner, S. (1996) ‘Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and the Veil’, in American Ethnologist 23, 4: 673-697.

Zine, J. (2006) ‘Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Resistance’, in (En]gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflage Politics. K. Hunt & K. Rygiel (eds), UK, Ashgate Publishing. 

Week Twelve: Violence and Terror

Tutorial Question: Can Das’ discussion of witnessing be applied to Primo Levi’s work?

Tutorial Readings:

Das, V. (1997) ‘The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Poisonous Knowledge and Subjectivity’, in V. Das ed., Violence and Subjectivity, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Levi, P. (1987) ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, in If This Is A Man. London, Sphere.

Recommended Readings for Essay:

Hutchinson, S. (1996) Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hutchinson, S. (1998) ‘Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation: Nuer Experiences of the Continuing Second Sudanese Civil War’, in R. Werbner (ed.) Memory and the Postcolony. Zed Books, London.

Hutchinson, S. (2000) ‘Nuer Ethnicity Militarized’, in Anthropology Today, 16, 3.

Simons, A. (1999) ‘War: Back to the Future’, Annual Review of Anthropology 28.

Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (1983) ‘Introduction’ in The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Week Thirteen: The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation

Tutorial Question: In projects of reconciliation, is it just to make victims the primary actor, expecting them to initiate what those in power are unwilling to do?

Tutorial Reading:

M. Humphries (2002) ‘Trauma, Truth and Reconciliation’, in The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma. Routledge, London.

ANTH 302: Reserve List

Books:

* Fortes, M. & Evans-Pritchard, E. eds. (1940) African Political Systems. Oxford University Press, London.

* T. Beidelman (ed.) The Translation of Culture. Tavistock Publications, London.

* G. Stocking Jr. (ed.) Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology.  University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

* J.Beattie & R. Lienhardt (eds.) Essays in Memory of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. Oxford University Press, London.

* Asad, T (ed.) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter 

* Leach, E. (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma. London School of Economics and Political Science, London.

* M. Bloch (ed.) Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology. Malaby Press, London.

* Barth, F. (1959) Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans. The Athlone Press, London.

* Humphrey, C. (1983) Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

* J. Vincent (ed.) (2002) The Anthropology of Politics. Blackwell, Oxford.

* Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, New Haven.

* Fitzpatrick, S. (1999) Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press.

* Scott, J. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Yale University Press.

* Hutchinson, S. (1996) Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. University of California Press, Berkeley.

* R. Werbner (ed.) Memory and the Postcolony. Zed Books, London.

* Verdery, K (1999) The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York : Columbia University Press.

* Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

* K. Hunt & K. Rygiel (eds) (En]gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflage Politics. UK, Ashgate Publishing.

Articles from Journals

** Nugent, D. (1982) ‘Closed Systems and Contradiction: The Kachin in and out of History’, in Man 17, 3, pp. 502-527.

** Asad, T. (1972) ‘Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: A Reconsideration of Swat Political Organization’, in Man 7, 1.

** Lindholm, C. (1981) ‘History and the Heroic Pakhtun’, Correspondence in Man 16 &

Meeker, M (1981) ‘Reply to correspondence’, in Man 16.

** Abu-Lughod, L. (1990) ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, in American Ethnologist 17, 1.

** Mitchell, T. (1990) ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, in Theory and Society 19, 5.

** Reed-Danahay, D. (1993) ‘Talking About Resistance: Ethnography and Theory in Rural France’, in Anthropological Quarterly 66, 4.

** Hutchinson, S. (2000) ‘Nuer Ethnicity Militarized’, in Anthropology Today, 16, 3.

** Leach, E. (1983) ‘Imaginary Kachins’, Correspondence in Man 18, 1 and Nugent, D. (1983) ‘Imaginary Kachins’, Reply to correspondence in Man 18, 1

** Meeker, M. (1980) ‘The Twilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth’s Study of Swat’, in Man 15, pp. 682-701.

** Ortner, S. (1995) Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.