Dr Mathijs Pelkmans, OLD 6.13.

MSc Social Anthropology, MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Anthropology of Learning and Cognition, MSc Law, Anthropology and Society, MSc China in Comparative Perspective, MSc Development Studies, MSc Human Rights, MSc Regulation and Regulation (Research), MSc Comparative Politics and MPA Public and Economic Policy/ MPA Public Policy and Management.

A background in the social sciences, preferably in anthropology.

This course focuses on the notion of power and its cross-cultural application. Using Marxist, Weberian, and Foucauldian approaches it explores how power travels through different socio-cultural contexts, paying attention to issues such as domination and resistance, patron-client relations, the mafia, revolution and violence. A recurring theme throughout the course concerns the state. How should the state be studied anthropologically? 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.

Lectures weekly MT, Seminars weekly MT.

Students will do presentations during seminars for which they will receive formative feedback. They will also have an opportunity to write tutorial essays on topics from the course which will be formatively assessed.

Anderson, B 1991 [1983] Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism; Asad, Talal 1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter; Barth, F 1965 Political leadership among Swat Pathans; Blok, Anton 1988 The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860-1960; a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs; Evans-Pritchard, EE and M Fortes 1940 African Political Systems; Evans Pritchard, EE The Nuer; Gledhill, John 1994 Power and its disguises; Hansen, T B and F Stepputat (eds) 2001 States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State; Leach, Edmund 1954 The Political Systems of Highland Burma; Mbembe, A 2001 On the Postcolony; Navaro-Yashin, Yael 2002 Faces of the state: secularism and public life in Turkey; J Vincent, 2002 The Anthropology of Politics

There is a two-hour examination (100%) in the ST.