POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

This lecture course introduces students to key concepts and questions in the anthropological study of power and politics. What is power? How and when is it concentrated? What is authority? What are its sources? By what forms and means has rule and rulership been conceived in diverse societies? How do anthropologists think about the nation and the state distinctly from the ways in which these categories have been conceptualized in political science and political theory, or by historians of exclusively Western (post-Westphalian) polities? The course materials include anthropological texts and classic works from those adjacent disciplinary traditions, as well as texts from literary and other fields.