240508 SE Intimacy of Power: New Political Anthropology (P2) (2022S)

This course takes stock of contemporary political anthropology to showcase some available approaches for understanding the political in its various metamorphoses. The course compares top-down understandings and bottom-up approaches to political organisation, and seeks to formulate an expansive, non-normative and intimate understanding of power, hegemony, and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1) Understand some of the dominant directions in political anthropology
2) Critique normativist assumptions about politics through expansive, ethnographic understandings of it
3) Explore political dynamics through everyday, intimate encounters.

Last several decades have witnessed the re-examination of the relation between culture and power. One influential mark of such endeavour was Michael Herzfeld’s notion of ‘cultural intimacy’, as a local knowledge of inconsistencies of official state rhetoric that both destabilises it, and creates a sense of national belonging. Departing from this focus on informality, but also incorporating everyday sociality and the role of emotion, this course uses ‘intimacy’ as a heuristic for researching the social life of politics. It shows how attempts to create impersonal rule of law inevitably create unofficial, intimate subjectivities and practices of rule-breaking, as well as how the latter are not simply resistant, but a key constituent of consent in modern citizenship.

The course starts with a discussion of national stereotypes, pride and shame, and the way they make nation states sites of belonging. We continue with discussion of corruption practices and informal sides of economy, examining the ‘political intimacy’ that various modernisation projects end up creating. This is followed by case studies of embedded cosmopolitanisms in world 'peripheries', and in aftermaths of ethnonational conflicts. Finally, we will examine the role of cynicism and performativity in modern citizenship, debates on the role of affect and emotion in political economy, and the role of humour, parody and satire in new wave of protests and civic engagements that recently spanned across Europe. Furthermore, populist mobilisation as a form of affective coming together of the ‘people’, is explored ethnographically.

The course puts the research on Central and Eastern Europe in debate with literature on other regions, particularly Mediterranean (mostly Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East), Western Europe and India. Following concepts, rather than areas, it aims to equip students with analytical tools for broadening their understanding of contemporary political dynamics. It is meant for anthropology students as well as those coming from other social science and humanities background. By the end of the course, the students should be able to formulate research questions pertinent to contemporary political anthropology.