Instructor: Mariane Ferme
Term: Spring 2019
Time: W 2:00pm - 3:59pm
Units: 4
Course Number: 30232
Seminar for the advanced study of the subject matter of a previously given upper division course, emphasizing reading and discussion.
Course Description:
This seminar is intended for senior majors who have taken the bulk of their required courses in the discipline, and who have an interest in ethnographic and theoretical approaches to questions of power and the political. In addition to reading book-length ethnographies in political anthropology and key articles in the field, students can expect to gain skills in leading discussions on select readings, and write a scholarly research paper during the course of the
semester. Among the authors whose work we may read during the seminar are: Evans- Pritchard, Gluckman, Comaroff and Comaroff, Clastres, Ferguson, Leach, Mbembe, Foucault, Drexler, J Scott, L Abu-Lughod, Weber, Ong. Among the concepts with which students willcritically engage are sovereignty, authority, prestige, power, the relationship between power and the political realm, and the relationship between political, social, and cultural domains as
well as the whole notion of separation of such domains.