Anthropology of the State: Politics, Relations, Scales - AET500299
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Time: Mo, 14.10 – 15.40 (6.10.2025–5.1.2026)
Place: Celetna 20, room C334 Office hours: Tue 17.30 - 19.30, Celetna 20, room C215 Course Description How do states actually work? The course answers this question by developing critical perspectives on processes of state construction, reproduction, transformation and dissolution. In the field, social actors often hold conflicting imaginaries at once, and even though we can deconstruct these images theoretically, we have to deal with them empirically as they inform state activity. To develop a grounded and processual perspective, the course concentrates on classic and contemporary socio-cultural anthropological debates, while also taking into account wider developments in social theory. “The” state has been around only surprisingly recently, with the advent of Nationalism, its impact on Western and non-Western imperialisms in the 19th century (Graeber & Wengrow, Steinmetz), and legitimated (and mis-apprehended) by circulating ideas about evolutionism, civilization and development (Thelen & Alber, Li). Marxists have for a long time grappled with the relational meaning and power of the state in the world system (Wolf), exploitative relations and asymmetries of power across scales of statehood (Ferguson & Gupta). Such debates also influenced the nascent Political Anthropology from the 1940s. During its “foundational moment”, classical Political Anthropology defined itself mostly in contradistinction to sociology by focusing on pre-capitalist societies without a state, or those “early states” organized by ritual kingship. At the same time, however, some mavericks from the Manchester School of Social Anthropology (Gluckman and colleagues) took up Marxist perspectives on conflict and imperialism and engaged with colonial bureaucratic practice – studying “intercalary positions” (Gluckman et al., Long, for a critique Kuper), or what we call today the embeddedness of street-level bureaucrats and frontline state actors. From the 1980s, the question of the “disciplines” of modern statecraft has been deliberated in a Foucauldian idiom of power, inspiring perspectives on boundary making between state and society (Mitchell) and the state and nature (Scott). Scott showed how modern states governed the human populations and the Nature of their territories, which inspired an environmental turn with a strong focus on the interface position of “the forester” (Blavascunas) and more-than-human life in the ruins of such modern schemes (Tsing, Mathur). Other new materialist approaches have focused on infrastructural power (affects, and effects) of the state (Dalakoglou, Sedlenieks), and relational approaches have focused on how several of these different aspects and perspectives are mediated and dialectically connected to each other (Dorondel & Popa, Szöke & Schwarcz). A relational anthropology of the state theorizes this mediation as emergent in the social relations formed through repeated exchanges of images and practices between sets of actors. The globally traveling model of the state has locally sedimented in complex state formations, and building blocs of it have been tactically and strategically selected by social actors for constructing possible futures of the state and its relationship with citizens, such as hopeful calls for a new radical politics of redistribution (Ferguson) and rather skeptical accounts of the zombification of ideals such as participatory budgeting (da Silva et al.). In sum, the course proposes to define the state not as a bounded, but a grounded, concrete-complex network of historically constituted relations from the sub-local to the trans-national scales of the state; and it develops four interdependent axes of research: (1) the embeddedness of actors, (2) the negotiation of the boundaries between the state and society/ kin, (3) the relational modalities of state practices, and (4) the asymmetry of power relations. Learning Objectives/ Goals At the end of the course, students will be able to identify contributions, ideas, and concepts in the Anthropology of the State. They can use analytic tools in socio-cultural anthropology to pursue independent inquiry into the state in different world regions and explain different scientific perspectives on the relationships between the state and society, nature, space and history. They will be able to engage with local and global transformations of the state in informed and inquisitive ways. Assignments and Grades The following is a rough overview of how I will evaluate your performance in class. More in-depth descriptions, rubrics, and prompts will be provided with each assignment. - Class preparation for every week by reading, plus active listening and participation: 20 % - 1 essay preparation: 15 % - 1 presentation: 25 % - 1 Final examination (hand-written essay; followed by oral examination): 40 % Course format This course combines lectures, student presentations, seminar discussions, and short analyses of different materials. I expect your full, active, and professional participation in class. This means showing up on time (persistently showing up late will negatively affect your participation grade). Respectfully engaging with the course instructor, lecturers, and your peers. Being responsible for the assigned reading and materials: if you miss a class, it is your responsibility to do the reading and get class notes from one of your peers. Technology Laptops and tablets are allowed for the purposes of viewing course materials and for taking notes during discussion sections. I strongly prefer that you write your notes by hand. Research shows that writing notes by hand improves your understanding of the material and helps you remember it better, since writing it down involves deeper cognitive processing of the material than typing it. I recognize that not all students can or wish to use handwritten notes. If you do use laptops, do turn off your wi-fi during class time to resist the temptation of email, social media, etc. Cell phones should be silenced and should not be used during class. Date Topic; Description; Readings (1-2) 6.10. Introduction: history, power, capitalism, kinship and the state: Thelen, Tatjana, and Erdmute Alber. 2018. ‘Reconnecting State and Kinship: Temporalities, Scales, Classifications.’ in Reconnecting State and Kinship, edited by Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–35. 13.10. Politics and the State across scales: Critique of hierarchical thinking: Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.’ American Ethnologist 29 (4), 981–1002. 20.10. Historical state transformations and classifications I, pre-colonial processes: Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. “Full Circle: On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique.” In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 441–92. 27.10. Historical state formations and classifications II, colonialism: Gluckman, Max. 1940. “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand.” Bantu Studies 14 (1): 1–30 (read until p. 14). Steinmetz, George. 2017. “The Octopus and the Hekatonkheire.” In The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, edited by Kimberly Morgan and Ann Orloff, New York: Cambridge University Press, 369–94. 3.11. Historical state formations and classifications III, Post-colonial and Marxian critique: Wolf, Eric. 1990. “Facing Power–Old Insights, New Questions.” American Anthropologist 92 (3), 586–96. Li, Tania Murray. 2019. “Politics, Interrupted.” Anthropological Theory 19 (1): 29–53. 10.11. The classic Manchester School: intercalary positions, knowledge at the interface, embeddedness: Gluckman, Max, Clyde Mitchell, and John Barnes. 1949. ‘The Village Headman in British Central Africa.’ Africa, 89–106. Kuper, Adam. 1970. ‘Gluckman’s Village Headman.’ American Anthropologist 72 (2), 355–58. Long, Norman. 2001 (1987). ‘The Dynamics of Knowledge Interfaces between Bureaucrats and Peasants.’ in Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives. London [et al.]: Routledge, 189-213. 17.11. Day of Freedom and Democracy Public Holiday, no class, no readings 24.11. Seeing Like a State; Foresters’ attempts at governing nature: Scott, James. 1998. ‘Nature and Space.’ in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 11-52. Blavascunas, Eunice. 2020. “The Forester.” In Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest. Indiana University Press, 31–58. 1.12. On more-than-human life in (state) capitalist ruins: Tsing, Anna. 2015. “Serendipity” and “Ruins.” In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 293–213. Mathur, Nayanika. 2016. “The Reign of Terror of the Big Cat.” In Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Cambridge and Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 140–64. 8.12. Post-socialist hope for the state, grid-desire, and the embedded workings of the state: Jansen, Stef. 2015. “Waiting for a Bus [or, Towards an Anthropology of Gridding].” In Yearnings in the Meantime: “Normal Lives” and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Berghahn, 59–86. Dorondel, Ştefan, and Mihai Popa. 2018. “Workings of the State: Administrative Lists, European Union Food Aid, and the Local Practices of Distribution in Rural Romania.” In Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State, edited by Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. Berghahn, 124–40. 15.12. Boundary work and the modalities of power: Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics’ American Political Science Review 85 (1), 77-96. Schwarcz, Gyöngyi, and Alexandra Szőke. 2018. “Creating the State Locally through Welfare Provision: Two Mayors, Two Welfare Regimes in Rural Hungary.” In Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State, edited by Tatjana Thelen, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Larissa Vetters. New York & Oxford, 141–57. 5.1. Futures of the state - On radical contemporary politics and the zombification of hope in participatory governance: “Conclusion. What Next for Distributive Politics?” In Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press, 192–216. Silva, Sven da, Martijn Koster, and Pieter Vries. 2023. “Neither Dead nor Alive: Participatory Slum Governance as a Zombie Program.” City & Society 35 (2): 65–76. 12.1. ff. Final examination (written and oral) Course readings and syllabus I believe that a course and its instructor should be adaptable. This means that readings and course activities may change to suite course developments, forward fruitful discussions, or to address student interests. For this reason, the readings in this syllabus should be regarded as provisional. For any given week, the readings will be available on Canvas. While readings may, from time-to-time change, the course policies and procedures listed in this syllabus will not. It is your responsibility to know them. Reading Policy All of the course readings for this class can be found on Canvas. In some classes, we will spend significant time discussing particular readings. In others, we will treat them as background. In all cases, if there is something you don’t understand in the material, it is your responsibility to make sure that you gain an understanding of it by asking questions and raising issues. You are expected to arrive at class ready to discuss any and all of the required course readings. 1 Essay (400 words) 15% The essays have to be prepared in the following format: Concisely summarise the main arguments of the reading. Analyse the significance of given texts to the anthropology of the state. Compare and contrast the readings with other texts on the same topic that you are familiar with. Draw parallels from your own experience or from a society that you are familiar with regarding the topic of the presentation. Raise questions related to the topic that can be discussed in class. Share the essays with me one day before class until 23.59 pm. 1 Presentation (15 minutes) 25% The presentation has to be prepared in the following format: use a power point or similar program and share it with me on the day before class 23.59 pm. In your presentation, concisely summarise the main arguments of the readings for the week. Analyse the significance of the given texts to the anthropology of the state. Compare and contrast the readings with other texts on the same topic that you are familiar with. Draw parallels from your own experience or from a society that you are familiar with regarding the topic of the presentation. Raise questions related to the topic that can be discussed in class. If there are enough students, the presentation can be prepared as a group work. Policy on Plagiarism I strongly believe that learning is a collaborative venture. I encourage you to study with your peers, meet to discuss readings with them, and, on assignments, to work together with them. That said, the work that you produce for this course must be your own. There are no exceptions to this rule and no legitimate excuses for violating it. If you fail to acknowledge others’ work or that you are caught overtly plagiarizing from online or written sources, you will receive zero percentage points on the assignment and may be subject to disciplinary procedures. Office Hours Please, feel free to contact me via email. I prefer that you contact me directly rather than through Canvas. Please also keep in mind that I am as busy as you. Make sure you consult the course syllabus, other handouts, your peers and the course Canvas site before sending an e-mail. Note that e-mail should not be seen as an alternative to meeting with me during office hours. Nor should e-mail be used as a mechanism to receive private tutorials or to explain material that was covered in classes you missed (those are your responsibility to obtain from your peers). I will endeavor to respond within 24 hours, though I do not respond to email on the weekends or after 5pm, so plan ahead. Contacting me the night before an assignment is due is, by definition, too late. My office hours are your time, and you are welcome to drop by at any time during them. Because, at particular times in the semester, many of you will want to see me, I do recommend setting up an appointment ahead of time. Also, if you have a regular class conflict during my office hours, I am more than happy to set up an appointment with you at another time, however, I ask that you do not just drop by my office outside of office hours without checking first. I may be there but will be working on other things with pressing deadlines. Attendance Attendance at all course and section meetings is required. You are permitted two unexplained course absences per semester. After that, each absence will reduce your overall participation grade by 1/3 of a grade. If you have a legitimate reason to miss class, it is your responsibility to let me know by email before class. Statement on Learning Success Your success in this class is important to me. We will all need accommodations because we all learn differently. If there are aspects of this course that prevent you from learning or exclude you, please let me know as soon as possible. We will develop strategies to meet both your needs and the requirements of the course. I also encourage you to reach out to the student resources available through Charles University. Student Rights & Responsibilities You have a right to a learning environment that supports mental and physical wellness. You have a right to respect. You have a right to be assessed and graded fairly. You have a right to freedom of opinion and expression. You have a right to privacy and confidentiality. You have a right to meaningful and equal participation, to self-organize groups to improve your learning environment. You have a right to learn in an environment that is welcoming to all people. No student shall be isolated, excluded or diminished in any way. With these rights come responsibilities: You are responsible for taking care of yourself, managing your time, and communicating with the teacher, guest lecturers and with others if things start to feel out of control or overwhelming. You are responsible for acting in a way that is worthy of respect and always respectful of others. Your experience with this course is directly related to the quality of the energy that you bring to it, and your energy shapes the quality of your peers’ experiences. You are responsible for creating an inclusive environment and for speaking up when someone is excluded. You are responsible for holding yourself accountable to these standards, holding each other to these standards, and holding the teacher accountable as well. Personal Pronoun Preference Professional courtesy and sensitivity are especially important with respect to individuals and topics dealing with differences of race, culture, religion, politics, sexual orientation, gender, gender variance, and nationalities. Class rosters are provided to the instructor with the student’s legal name. I will gladly honor your request to address you by a name different than what appears on the roster, and by the gender pronouns you use. Please advise me of this preference early in the semester so that I may make appropriate changes to my records. Note on academic dishonesty Plagiarism is a severe crime. In my experience, it mostly comes from students’ insecurity with academic writing that they are relatively new to. Rather than copying someone else’s text and helping AI rephrase it (which makes it much less easily detectable than it was a couple of years ago), I suggest to write your own thoughts in simple words and it will get easier over time. Note on using AI tools If you are using AI tools, highlight the part of the text where you have used AI and add a footnote explaining which AI tool and which query you used. You are still required to read, understand, critique and interpret ethnographic texts on your own and form coherent arguments based on your readings. At the same time, I see no issues asking AI tools to help you rephrase your thought. You should still have a go at trying to rephrase the ideas in the text we read in your own words. It can be challenging, especially if you are not a native speaker, but for the next few years, it is still considered a useful skill to have. Free grammar tools such as Grammarly are recommended for use to improve the legibility of your work. <br>https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/o3c1cujlnps67ypeldjqa/AKxNB0frwMQee3UtZ_70LTI?rlkey=olab84zi0g4ypl8j3z7gf6xjg&dl=0<br> Poslední úprava: Thiemann André, Dr. phil. (26.09.2025)
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