GENERAL ASSESSMENT INFORMATION

Note: ANTH3002 has both face-to-face tutorials and an external, online only enrolment, in which participation will be assessed via iLearn discussion boards only. Please see below for instructions on participation.

1) Face-to-Face Tutorial Participation (On Campus): Please complete the weekly readings before class and come to class prepared to discuss the material. Active participation entails contributing thoughtful comments regarding readings, films, and group discussions during each tutorial meeting. In your verbal contributions to class discussions, what we will be looking for is remarks that engage thoughtfully with the readings. It is also important that you engage respectfully with your peers. If you don’t understand or agree with something someone says, ask them to clarify, or explain respectfully why you disagree. Everyone should feel free to speak up in class. Please do not drown out quieter voices, interrupt, or otherwise dominate class discussion.  If you are having trouble speaking up in class discussion, please come to speak with the tutor privately and together we can strategise ways to facilitate your contribution to the tutorials. Each week, try to make a few notes about the lecture and reading to bring to class - questions are very much encouraged! Not understanding an aspect of the week will often provoke a rich discussion. 

2) External Student Participation (iLearn Discussion Board): Each week, external students will be required to contribute weekly to the discussion thread found within each week's iLearn section.

Preparation for posting requires reading of the tutorial material for that week. Each student should post one (1) unique question related to the unit material for the rest of the class to consider.  Posted material should be inspired by the tutorial reading and the lecture directly but may also be tangentially related. It doesn’t have to be a spectacular insight by any means. In short, bring something intellectually stimulating to the table that came to your mind during the week as a result of your covering of unit material. Feel free to share external links, readings, audio/visual material - whatever you like, as long as it is related to the week in question. Each student’s response should be around 200 words. This is obviously not going to be rigidly enforced, but we all know what 200 words looks like, as opposed to a few lines of text.

3) Late Submission Information and Policy: 

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.  A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical issue. This late penalty will apply to non-time 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.

Welcome to Political Anthropology! There are political dimensions to everything; and yet nothing should be reduced only to politics. In this unit we think about power; domination and subordination; resistance and mobilisation; and political processes cross-culturally.

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.

Unit Rationale:   

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.

Week One: Introduction to Political Anthropology and its Key Concept 

Week Two: Anthropology, Colonialism & Science

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

Week Four: The Secret of Order  

Week Five: The Secret of Change

Week Six: The Secret of Action

Week Seven: Project Modernity (1): Nazi Germany and the Turkish Republic as Revoltionary State Projects

Week Eight: Project Modernity (2): Soviet Collectivism

Week Nine: Domination and Resistance (1). Theoretical Issues

Week 10: Domination and Resistance (2): Gender and Religion

Week 11: Violence and Terror 

Week 12: The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation

Week 13: Unit Review