Prof Mathijs Pelkmans Old.5.08

This course will first be available during the 2025/26 academic session.

This course is available on the BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Melbourne), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Singapore) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

This course focuses on the notions of politics and power and their cross-cultural application. Using Marxist, Weberian, and Foucauldian approaches the course explores how power travels through different socio-cultural contexts, and is part of different political arrangements. Sessions focus on issues such as ordered anarchy, leadership, patron-client relations, sovereignty, populism, surveillance, and violence. Processes of state formation and disintegration, nationalism in its various guises, and state-society relations will be reviewed in order to understand how European, post-colonial, and post-socialist societies are governed.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the AT. 1 hour of lectures in the ST.

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected. This course has a reading week in Week 6 of MT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

Students are expected to submit one essay in the MT to their class teacher on which they will receive formative feedback.

Appadurai, A, 2006, Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger; Blok, A, 1974, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860-1960: a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs; Bryant, R, & Reeves, M, 2021, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty; Clastres, P, 1987, Society against the state: essays in political anthropology; Mbembe, A, 2001, On the Postcolony; Navaro, Y, 2021, The make-believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity. Tuckett, A, 2018, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the spring exam period.