2006 Handbooks

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 these contexts 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 related projects of national transformation, violence and terror; gender; resistance, collaboration and reconciliation. A continuing concern of the course will be explore how the writing of ethnography and the making of ethnographic film- textual and visual representation-are implicated in these issues.