Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University
Fall Semester, 2011, Advanced Level, 7.5 ECTS
Lecturer: Johan Lindquist
Key Themes in Contemporary Anthropology
The course offers a selective overview of a number of key empirical and theoretical themes or
fields of study in contemporary anthropology. The themes and reading lists are replaced on a
regular basis to keep the course up to date. The course focuses attention on contextualizing
and historicizing the themes in order to offer an understanding of how contemporary
anthropology has developed. This semester the overarching theme is anthropology after
globalization. Themes that follow from this include: the global city, globalization from below,
ethnographies of the state, and after development. The course will be organized as a research
practicum in which students will read and engage with academic journals and journal articles.
Course Requirements
1) You must attend the lecture and seminars and have prepared for the discussion by doing the
readings ahead of time.
2) You must post on the class website by 9 p.m. the evening before each seminar. I will
explain the specific task at each weekly lecture and post the same information the same day.
You make a post by entering the class website via Mondo. On the menu bar on the left-hand
side click on “forum,” then click on “general discussion,” and finally clicka on “starta nytt
toppinlägg.” After you are finished, click on “gör inlägg.” I will moderate and publish all the
posts after 9 p.m.
3) In collaboration with a small group of 3-4 students you will read through all of the
abstracts of articles published in the last 25 years in a leading anthropology journal. Identify
further key themes in this process and choose one article to read. The purpose of this exercise
is to learn to read quickly in order to gain an overview of the development of the field. Each
group will present the results of their discussion in an extra seminar session.
4) Together with the course readings and discussions, the results from the group discussion
will form the basis for the final exam, which I will hand out on January 10 and which will be
due on January 13 by 3 p.m. The printed copy of the exam must be delivered to my mailbox
or office at the department.
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Week 1: Anthropology After Globalization
Lecture: December 1, E319, 1-3 p.m.
Seminars: December 6, Group 1, E347, 10-12 a.m., Group 2, E347, 1-3 p.m.
Readings:
Ulf Hannerz (1987) “The World in Creolisation,” Africa 57(4): 546-559.
Arjun Appadurai (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,”
Public Culture 2(2): 1-24.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992) “Beyond ’Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics
of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23.
George Marcus (1995) “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited
Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.
Anna Tsing (2000) “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 327-360.
Amartya Sen (2002) “How to Judge Globalism,” The American Prospect 13(1), 5 pages.
David Harvey (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press), pp. 1-4.
Recommended:
Sherry Ortner (1984) “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 26(1): 126-166.
Ulf Hannerz (1989) “Notes on the Global Ecumene,” Public Culture 1(2): 66-75.
Michael Kearney (1995) “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and
Transnationalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 547-565.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2000) “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second
Coming,” (abridged version) in M. Edelman and A. Haugerud (eds), The Anthropology of
Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary
Neoliberlism (Blackwell), pp. 177-187. (Available as en e-book through the Stockholm
University Library)
Carla Freeman (2001) “Is Local : Global as Feminine : Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of
Globalization,” Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society 26(4): 1007-1037.
Kalb, Don (2005) “From Flows to Violence: Politics and Knowledge in the Debates on
Globalization and Empire,” Anthropological Theory 5(2):176-204.
Aihwa Ong (2007) “Neoliberalism as a mobile technology,” Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 32(1): 3–8.
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Film Screening (as part of the theme Globalization from Below, see Week 3)
December 4, 11:30-17, The Ethnographic Museum, Djurgårdsbrunnsvägen 34.
ETNODOK, film club for etnographic film. This week’s theme is “Political activism”
Screenings and discussions of Maple Razsa’s Bastards of Utopia and Stefan Jarl and Lukas
Moodysson’s “The Terrorists.” Both filmmakers will be present. (Note: 80 crowns). For those
of you who cannot make the screening, we will set up an alternative date.
Week 2: The Global City
Guest Lecturer: Erik Harms, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University.
Lecture: December 7, E319, 1-3 p.m.
Seminars: December 9, Group 1, E347, 10-12 a.m., Group 2, E347, 1-3 p.m.
Readings:
Saskia Sassen (2000) “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a
Theorization,” Public Culture 12(1): 215-223.
Theodore Bestor (2001) “Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City,”
American Anthropologist 103(1): 76-95.
Mike Davis (1992) “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,” in M. Sorkin
(ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill
and Wang), pp. 154-180.
Teresa Caldeira (1996) “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,” Public Culture
8(2): 303-328.
Allison Truitt (2008) “On the back of a motorbike: Middle-class mobility in Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam,” American Ethnologist 35(1): 3-19.
Jonathan Bach (2010) “Peasants into Citizens: Urban Villages in the Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone,” Cultural Anthropology, 25(3): 421–458.
Recommended:
Friedrich Engels (1943) The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (Allen and
Unwin), pp. 1-74.
Setha Low (2001) “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban
Fear,” American Anthropologist 103(1): 45-58.
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Week 3: Globalization from Below
Guest Lecturer: Maple Razsa, Assistant Professor of Global Studies, Colby College; Visiting
Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.
Lecture: December 12, D289, 1-3 p.m.
Seminars: December 15, Group 1, E347, 10-12 a.m., Group 2, E347, 1-3 p.m.
Readings:
Hilary Cunningham (1999) “The Ethnography of Transnational Social Activism:
Understanding the Global as Local Practice,” American Ethnologist 26(3): 583–604.
Arjun Appadurai (2000) “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public
Culture 12(1): 1-19.
David Graeber (2005) “The Globalization Movement: Some Points of Clarification,” in M.
Edelman and A. Haugerud (eds), The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From
Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberlism (Blackwell), pp. 169-173.
(Available as en e-book through the Stockholm University Library)
Erin Fitz-Henry (2011) “Distant Allies, Proximate Enemies: Rethinking the Scales of the
Antibase Movement in Ecuador,” American Ethnologist 38(2): 323–337.
Maple Razsa (unpublished manuscript) “Bastards of Utopia: An Ethnography of Radical
Politics after Yugoslav Socialism.”
Recommended:
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2009) “Non-hegemonic Globalizations: Alternative Transnational
Processes and Agents,” Anthropological Theory 9(3): 297-329.
Week 4: Ethnographies of the State
Lecture: December 19, F389, 10-12 p.m.
Seminars: December 22, Group 1, E371, 10-12 a.m., Group 2, E371, 1-3 p.m.
Readings:
Philip Abrams (1988) “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical
Sociology 1(1): 58–89.
Akhil Gupta (1995) “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of
Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist 22(2): 375-402.
Michel Rolph Trouillot (2001) “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization:
Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind,”Current Anthropology 42(1): 125-138.
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James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of
Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29(4): 981-1002.
Matthew Hull (2008) “Ruled by Records: The Appropriation of Land and the
Misappropriation of Lists in Islamabad,” American Ethnologist (34)4: 501–518.
Recommended:
Benedict R. O'G. Anderson (1983) “Old State, New Society: Indonesia's New Order in
Comparative Historical Perspective,” The Journal of Asian Studies 42(3): 477-496.
Week 5: After Development
Lecture: January 5, B413, 1-3 p.m.
Seminars: January 9, Group 1, E355, 10-12 a.m., Group 2, E355, 1-3 p.m.
Readings:
James Ferguson (1994) “The Anti-Politics Machine: ’Development’ and Bureaucratic Power
in Lesotho,” The Ecologist 24(5): 176-181. Available at:
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/class_homepages/geog_3682_f08/Articles/Ferguson%20
-%20The%20Anti%20Politics%20Machine.pdf
William Fisher (1997) “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices,”
Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 439-464.
Tania Li (1999) “Compromising Power: Development, Culture, and Rule in
Indonesia,”Cultural Anthropology 14(3): 295-322.
David Mosse (2006) “Anti-social Anthropology? Objectivity, Objection, and the Ethnography
of Public Policy and Professional Communities,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 12(4): 935–956.
Julia Elyachar (2002) “Mappings of Power: The State, NGOs, and International Organizations
in the Informal Economy of Cairo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45(3): 571605.
Peter Redfield (2006) “A Less Modest Witness,” American Ethnologist 33(1): 3–26.
Mariella Pandolfi (2008) “Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the
Postcommunist Balkan Territories,” in MJ DelVecchio Good et al. (eds), Postcolonial
Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World (University of California
Press), pp. 157-186. (Available as en e-book through the Stockholm University Library)
Daromir Rudnyckyj (2009) “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary
Indonesia,” Cultural Anthropology 24(1): 104–141.
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Recommended:
Mark Duffield (2002) “Social Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as
a Relation of Global Liberal Governance,” Development and Change 33(5): 1049–1071.
Final Seminar Discussion about Journal Projects
January 10, 10-12 a.m., Clasroom to be announced
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