Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution: Anthropological Approaches

optional courses

The course highlights the ways in which diverse paradigms in political anthropology shaped our discipline’s approaches to counter-hegemonic, subversive, or revolutionary collective political action. At the same time, the course explores how, at various turning points in anthropology’s history, focusing on contention and protest invoked a re-examination of dominant paradigms and thus propelled the development of political theory in anthropology. More broadly, the course inquires, how do contentious, subversive political mobilizations contribute to social change? How have anthropologists analyzed that relationship at various conjunctures in the world’s post-colonial history? And how may rebellious mobilizations contribute to progressive change, local and global, today? What might the anthropologists’ roles be in this process, beyond that of ‘participant observers’? And just what should our roles be, politically, ethically, heuristically?

This course explores anthropological approaches to contentious politics – from Max Gluckman and the Manchester School, to the boom period of the anthropology of resistance during the 1980s and 1990s, to the currently burgeoning ethnographies of anarchist movements and alterglobalization networks. The themes explored through the lens of selected readings representing these diverse anthropological conceptualizations of political contention are provisionally organized around three key analytic concepts that stand for three broad modalities of subversive political action: resistance, rebellion, and revolution. What might be the analytic purchase of these and other related concepts for the specifically anthropological study of the political? What does ethnography add to the understanding of protest and insurgent politics, with regard to conceptualizations offered by neighbouring disciplines, such as political science or history? How can the diverse modalities of contentious politics be productively defined and elaborated from the perspective of social anthropology? For instance, what is the political edge of ‘resistance’ that marks it off from what Foucault called the ‘little tactics of the habitat’? What are the possible relationships between single-issue acts of protest, spontaneous rebellion, and revolution that waves banners of a new world, totally transformed? Moreover, how do the range, goals, and backgrounds of diverse mobilizations relate to their organizational forms and means of action? More broadly, how do contentious, subversive political mobilizations contribute to social change? How have anthropologists analyzed that relationship at various conjunctures in the world’s post-colonial history? And how may rebellious mobilizations contribute to progressive change, local and global, today? What might the anthropologists’ roles be in this process, beyond that of ‘participant observers’? And what should our roles be, in political, ethical, and heuristic terms?

The course highlights the ways in which diverse paradigms in political anthropology shaped our discipline’s approaches to counter-hegemonic, subversive, or revolutionary collective political action. At the same time, the course explores how, at various turning points in anthropology’s history, focusing on contention and protest invoked a re-examination of dominant paradigms and thus propelled the development of political theory in anthropology. Connected to this are questions of anthropologists’ own political positions with regard to contentious political mobilizations – from generally benevolent yet distanced descriptions of resistance against colonial domination and subsequently against increasingly globalizing capitalist extraction, to anthropologists’ direct, militant participation in contemporary protests movements such as Occupy! and People’s Global Action.

This is a reading-based seminar. Students will be expected to read assigned texts in English and actively participate in the discussion of these texts in class. The weekly reading assignments are likely to range between 30 and 100 pages at a time. By mid-semester students will be required to submit a brief proposal (topic statement) of their course essay. The essays of approximately 2000-2500 words, in good English, critically engaging with at least two of the texts discussed in the course of the semester, will be then due by the end of the summer examination period. The ability to read and comprehend complex texts, engage in critical discussion in class, and to elaborate an original, clear, and concise argument drawing on but also moving beyond the readings, will be essential requirements for participation in this course. At least a basic knowledge of the field of political anthropology will be furthermore desirable.

Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist 17(1): 41-55.

Borneman, J. 1998. Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture. New York: State University of New York Press.

Brown, M.F. 1996. ‘On Resisting Resistance’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 98(4): 729-735.

Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Edelman, M. 1999. Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford: Stanford Universty Press.

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.

1982. ‘The Subject and Power’. H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 208-226. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Fletcher, R. 2001. ‘What Are We Fighting for? Rethinking Resistance in a Pewenche Community in Chile’, The Journal of Peasant Studies,28(3): 37-66.

Gluckman, M. 1954. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Graeber, D. 2007. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland: AK Press.

2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland: AK Press.

Hobart, A. and B. Kapferer (eds), 2012. Contesting the State: The Dynamics of Resistance and Control. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Juris, J.S. 2008. Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press.

Maeckelberg, M. 2009, The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalization Movementis Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto.

Mitchell, T. 1990. ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, Theory and Society 19: 545-577.

Ong, A. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ortner, S.B. 1985. ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173-193.

Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Seymour, S. 2006. ‘Resistance’, Anthropological Theory 6(3): 303-321.

Winegar, J. 2012. ‘The Privilege of Revolution: Gender, Class, Space, and Affect in Egypt’, American Ethnologist 39(1): 67-70.

Students who complete the course will be acquainted with a cross-section of anthropological approaches to protest, resistance, and other forms of contentious collective political action. This will include considerations of theoretical, methodological, political, and ethical aspects of the anthropological study of contentious mobilizations. Students will gain the conceptual instruments and background knowledge that will allow them to critically reflect on the relationship between collective contentious action and social change, as well as between the empirical, ethnographic study of contentious politics and the development of political theory in social anthropology. Moreover, by preparing their course essays, students will gain hands-on practical experience in constructing original, critical, and concise academic arguments in written form.

Main: Written essay on a freely chosen topic relevant to the course, must engage with at least two texts from the course reading list plus additional literature as relevant (max. 2,500 words, details TBA);

Additional: Oral presentation; attendance; class activity.