Genealogies of Political Economy
This seminar explores the deep histories and uneven geographies of political economy, cultural politics, and power, emphasizing their salience for contemporary formations of globalization. We examine a series of debates emanating from Marxian conceptualizations of global capitalism, exploring alternative formulations as well. Course themes include: history, power, and social reproduction; spatiality and the politics of scale; translocal linkages and productive inequalities; subject formation and market discipline; the politics of consumption; and theorizing articulation and agency, among others.
Ethnographies of the State
The course focuses on ethnographic representations of state rule, administration, and governmentality. How does one represent 'the state' ethnographically--attending to an ensemble of discourses, institutions, and practices that contribute to the formation of historically specific subjects--without presuming a unified entity or structure that overdetermines 'politics' or the lived experiences of those governed? In turn, how do state practices, institutions, and effects interact with transnational technologies of rule that circulate through so-called Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), discourses of development, and other modern forms of power that regulate social life? In particular, we probe novel formations of sovereignty, discipline, and population that have emerged as the instruments and targets of modern rule.
Undergraduate Courses:
Anthropology of the Environment
Anthropology of Africa
Courses taught by Alexei Yurchak
Postsocialism: Social and Cultural Transformations in the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China
This course focuses on the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that until recently constituted the "socialist bloc." It draws some comparative perspective from the analysis of contemporary China, without concentrating on China specifically. The course explores the transformations of social and cultural logics, power relations, and people's understandings, aspirations, and practices since the end of state socialism. A specific theme explored will be how to think of "post-socialism" on a larger map of economic and cultural "globalization." The 14 weeks of the seminar are divided into several topics, each offering a different perspective on socialism and post-socialism. The idea is to concentrate on these topics not only as an analytical exercise but also as a means for exploring the questions and methods for different forms of ethnographic research in this part of the world. The course combines research and analytical methods drawn from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and political science. Anthropology offers its concern with social contexts of the production and transformation of cultural forms and identities, and its emphasis on their detailed ethnographic investigation. Sociology and political science bring their perspectives on the study of social groups, institutions, and the state.
Undergraduate Courses:
The Expansion of Popular Culture: From Local to Global
Popular Culture and Governmentality: From Local to Global
Courses taught by Lawrence Cohen
Globalization, Medicine, and Triage: Varieties of Transhuman Experience
This doctoral seminar will engage the medical anthropology of translocality in several interlocking senses. The first section of the course reviews modernization, world systems, and neo-diffusionist debates on illness and on the organization of medical institutions. The second section examines the contemporary extension of these debates in critical medical anthropology, focusing on the re-evaluation of the concept of the "health transition" in the light of HIV and TB pandemics. The third section turns to questions of biopolitics and of trauma in the context of translocality, reviewing recent literatures on colonial medicine, and on violence, migration, and genocide. The fourth section examines the usefulness and limits of a concept of transhumanity, working at the interstices of literature on transnationality, transplantation, transgender, and transit itself.
Affiliated Faculty in other UC Berkeley Departments
Michael Burawoy (Sociology)
Manuel Castells (City and Regional Planning)
Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric)
Gil Eyal (Sociology)
Gillian Hart (Geography)
Nancy Peluso (Environmental Science, Policy and Management)
Allan R. Pred (Geography)
Raka Ray (Sociology)
Michael Watts (Geography)
Critical Ethnographies of Globalization and Governmentality
The links below are for subsections within
the Globalization and Governmentality page.
Critical Ethnographies
of Globalization and Governmentality
Anthropology Core Faculty
G & G Core Courses
Affiliated Faculty in
other UC Berkeley Departments
Relevant Publications
Related Globalization
Initiatives at UC Berkeley
Critical
Ethnographies of Globalization and Governmentality
We are a group of professors in anthropology and allied fields interested
in critical ethnographic perspectives on the processes, practices, and
institutions of modernity. While we understand globalization to be composed
of diverse political-economic formations, our crucial concern is to
understand multiple capitalisms and post-socialist transitions in their
historical and contemporary specificity. Far too often, contemporary
studies of globalization are at once ethnographically anemic and lacking
in attention to the complex entanglements of political economy, rationalities,
and cultural politics. Sorely missing in contemporary debates is a sense
of 'grounded' ethnography—detailed, fine-grained explorations of
the cultural practices, symbolic imaginaries, and social relations that
reproduce transnational processes linking distant and diverse sites.
Our major goal, therefore, is to understand globalization through the
means of critical ethnography—a methodology that explores how markets
interact with political rule, social forms, and the production of cultural
values across uneven geographies and histories of the modern. Our ethnographic
approach cuts against the grain of a recent tendency to map, unproblematically,
the economic onto the global and the cultural onto the local. Global
and local suggest a politics of scale and perspective—relational
categories, not essentialized differences. Cultural processes and productive
inequalities are translocal yet mediated through institutional forms—such
as the household, the workplace, and the state—that are themselves
situated in particular 'localities'. These globalizing tendencies suggest
processes of reterritorialization, not deterritorialization. Relationships
among identities, polities, and communities are being radically reconfigured,
not eclipsed.
Ethnographic investigation of the relations among discipline, sovereignty,
and population will disclose how particular forms of governmentality
are fundamental to specific political economic regimes: mafia rule,
the garrison state, neo-authoritarianism, neo-liberalism, and post-socialism,
to name but a few. In turn, this entails a specification of conceptual
keywords—e.g. values, needs, security, risk, and welfare—that
are essential to a systematic understanding of how the cultural politics
of citizenship, identity, and community are constituted in relation
to market discipline, political regulation, and media representation.
Our focus on the dynamic interplay between global forces and processes
of subject formation highlights the interpretations, actions, and patterns
that vary with class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, locality,
and nationality. This perspective reveals not simply a cultural politics
of difference and identity, but also points to the mutually informing
relationships among technologies of ruling, cultivation of selves, and
regimes of rationality. This project, while anchored in anthropology,
builds on interdisciplinary dialogues drawing on a variety of methodologies
in the social sciences and humanities.
Anthropology
Core Faculty
Aihwa Ong (Professor,
Chair of Center for Southeast Asian Studies)
Donald Moore (Assistant
Professor)
Paul Rabinow
(Professor)
Alexei Yurchak
(Assistant Professor)
Lawrence Cohen
(Associate Professor, Program Co-Director of Medical Anthropology)
G & G Core Courses
Courses taught by Aihwa Ong
Globalization, Governmentality, and Citizenship
This seminar will sort out theories and accounts of globalization, the nation-state, and citizenship in anthropology and allied fields. First, we will explore the links between American neoliberalism and economic globalization on the one hand, and processes of democratization and grassroots globalization on the other. Second, comparative globalization requires us to rethink the state in relation to the governance of society. We will assess different approaches to the novel forms emerging in regimes of ruling, strategies of accumulation, and social technologies that regulate population. Third, interactions between non-state actors and nation-states, and between state, society, and space give rise to new meanings of citizenship. Questions about citizenship in the globalized world are fundamentally about contemporary politics and what it means to be human today.
A Critical Anthropology of Transnationality and Cosmopolitanism
The anthropology of transnationalism has been dominated by a "cultural globalization" perspective that in an uncanny way mimics neoliberal transnationalism, with its stress on cultural flows, cultural diversity and hybridity, and mass consumption. This seminar will take a critical approach to our understanding of diverse transnational networks, and their links to a variety of cosmopolitan dispositions and politics, especially in global cities.
Modernity, Anthropological Aspects
By reading a number of key anthropological texts over the past 100 years, this seminar will consider what modernity and modernism have meant to anthropologists and why we need to bring some conceptual clarity to the discussion.
Undergraduate Courses:
Globalization and Gender in the Asia-Pacific
Culture, Nation-State, and Transnationalism in Southeast Asia
Courses taught by Paul Rabinow
The Analytics of Modernity
This seminar--intended mainly for anthropology graduate students--will explore several of the main twentieth-century thinkers who have provided an "analytics" of modernity. Analytics is to be distinguished from theory. The course this year will provide an extended encounter with the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin.
Courses taught by Donald S. Moore
Relevant
Publications
Michael Burawoy
(co-editor) Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern
Metropolis (Univ. of California Press, 1991).
(co-editor) Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist
World (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
Manuel Castells
The Information Age
Vol. I, The Rise of Network Society (Blackwell, 1996).
Vol. III, The End of the Millennium (Blackwell, 1999).
Pheng Cheah
(co-editor) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Duke
Univ. Press, 1998).
Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion. In Traces, Vol.
1, No. 1 (forthcoming, Fall 2000).
Reflections on Globalization and the (In)human. In Alphabet City, No.
7.
Social Insecurity. Len Guenther and Cornelius Heesters, eds. (forthcoming,
Fall 2000).
Spectral Nationality: The Living-on of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial
Globalization. In Boundary 2, 26(3):225-252 (Fall 1999).
Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in the Current Global Conjuncture. In Public
Culture, 9(2):233-266 (Winter 1997).
Violent Light: The Idea of Publicness in Modern Philosophy and in Global
Neocolonialism. In Social Text, No. 43, 163-190 (Fall 1995).
Lawrence Cohen
No Aging in India (Univ. of California Press, 1998).
Where it Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation.
In Daedalus 128(4):135-165 (Fall 1999).
Gil Eyal
Anti-Politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists
and the Czech Transition to Capitalism. In Theory and Society 29(1):49-92
(Feb 2000).
(With Ivan Szelenyi and Eleanor Townsley) Making Capitalism without
Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central
Europe. London: Verso (1998).
Gillian Hart
A Critique of Industrial Restructuring and the New Institutionalism.
In Antipode, Vol. 30, No. 4 (October 1998).
Regional Growth Linkages in the Era of Liberalization: A Critique of
the New Agrarian Optimism. In Development and Change Vol. 29, No. 1
(January 1998).
Multiple Trajectories of Rural Industrialization. In Agrarian Questions,
D. Goodman and M. Watts, eds. (Routledge 1997).
The Agrarian Question and Industrial Dispersal in South Africa: Agro-Industrial
Linkages through Asian Eyes. In The Agrarian Question in South Africa.
H. Berstein, ed. (Frank Cass 1996).
Donald Moore
The Crucible of Cultural Politics: Reworking 'Development' in Zimbabwe's
Eastern Highlands. In American Ethnologist 26(3):654-689 (August 1999).
Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping Resistance
in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands. In Cultural Anthropology 13(3):344-382
(August 1998).
Aihwa Ong
Blackwell Companion
to Global Anthropology (forthcoming).
Modernity, Anthropological Aspects. In Int. Encyclopedia of the Behavioral
and Social Sciences (Sage, forthcoming).
Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia. In Theory, Culture, and Society
(forthcoming).
Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke
Univ. Press, 1999).
(co-editor) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese
Transnationalism (Routledge, 1997).
Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (SUNY Press, 1987).
Nancy Peluso
Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Univ.
of California Press, 1992).
Coercing Conservation? The Politics of State Resource Control. In Global
Environmental Change 3(2):199-217.
Allan Pred
Recognizing European Modernity (Routledge, 1995).
(with Michael Watts) Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent
(Rutgers UP, 1992).
Paul Rabinow
French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999).
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1989).
The Foucault Reader (Univ. of Chicago Press, 199x).
(co-editor) Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1992).
Raka Ray
Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India (Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1999).
Michael Watts
Collective Wish Images: Geographical Imaginaries and the Crisis of National
Development. In: Human Geography Today, Doreen Massey et al., eds. (Polity
Press, 1999).
Postindustrial Nature: Agrarian Questions of the late 20th Century,
edited with David Goodman (Routledge 1997).
Liberation Ecologies, edited with Richard Peet (Routledge, 1996).
Geographies of Global Change, edited with R.J. Johnston and Peter J.
Taylor (Blackwell, 1995).
Silent Violence (Univ. of California Press, 1983).
Alexei Yurchak
(Forthcoming) Entrepreneurial Governmentality in Post-Socialist Russia.
A cultural investigation of business practices. In: The New Entrepreneurs
of Europe and Asia. V. E. Bonnell and T. B. Gold, eds. New York: M.E.
Sharpe.
Privatize Your Name: Symbolic Work in a Post-Soviet Linguistic Market.
In: Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(3) (2000).
Gagarin and the Rave Kids: Transforming Power, Identity, and Aesthetics
in the Post-Soviet Night Life. In: Consuming Russia: Popular Culture,
Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev. A. Baker, ed. (Duke University Press,
1999).
The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and the Anekdot.
In: Public Culture 9:2 (1997).
Related
Globalization Initiatives at UC Berkeley
Crossing
Borders
Communities
in Contention
Environmental
Politics
Organs
Watch
Critical Studies
in Medicine, Science and the Body
Anthropology
of Biotechnology
Faculty Research
Organs Watch
Biotechnology
Multimedia Authoring: MACTiA
Faculty
Monographs
Journal
Articles
Lecture
Series
290 Lecture Series
MedAnthro Lecture Series
ARF
Brown Bag Lecture Series
Emeritus Lecture Series
Student
Organizations
K.A.S.
A.G.O.R.A.
A.U.A.
Graduate
Student Contacts
Organized Research Groups
Critical Studies in Medicine,
Science and the Body
Area Studies Centers