Macquarie University

The Anthropology of Politics and Power - ANTH302

Politics and power can be thought of as intimate aspects of all subjects that anthropologists investigate, as processes of domination, resistance and social transformation are inevitably involved in the creation and representation of cultural practices and relationships. In this unit students identify and compare the themes – explicit or otherwise – that dominate the composition of a number of classical political ethnographies, while also exploring the wider question of their colonial contexts, and how this context influenced the development of anthropological knowledge. The second half of the unit examines how some of these themes may still be of relevance in illuminating more contemporary manifestations of power, including forms of political practice such as nationalism and its related project of social transformation; violence and terror; gender; resistance; collaboration; and reconciliation. A continuing concern of the unit is to explore how the writing of ethnography and the making of ethnographic film – textual and visual representation – are implicated in these issues.