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Course Syllabus

2022/2023

Economical and Political Anthropology

Category 'Best Course for Broadening Horizons and Diversity of Knowledge and Skills'
Category 'Best Course for New Knowledge and Skills'
Type: Minor
Delivered by: Department of History
Where: School of Arts and Humanities
When: 1, 2 module
Open to: students of all HSE University campuses
Instructors: Рахманова Лидия Яковлевна, Aleksei Ryzhkov, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Language: English
ECTS credits: 5
Contact hours: 60

Course Syllabus

Full SyllabusAsk Question

Abstract

Power is one of most fundamental explanatory categories in social sciences. What is power in anthropological perspective? How is it related to wealth and prestige? How is “the economic” related to “the political”, and how universal and cross-cultural are these categories? How does the diversity and complexity of today’s world look from this point of view? The main goal of this course is the exploration of two closely related anthropological sub-disciplines: political and economic anthropology. The course draws on ethnographic examples from the world’s various regions and sociocultural contexts, such as the post-Soviet and post-colonial, Western and non-western, global north and south. In doing so, its lectures, seminars and student projects examine ethnographic and theoretical approaches in politics and economics as areas of anthropological inquiry. Student project work includes subjects such as the anthropology of the market, debt, gifts, migration, the state and everyday politics, governance, new forms of sovereignty and ownership. These and other topics are to be considered from the point of view of anthropology of economics and the state; conflicts and identity politics, including nationality/ethnicity and gender/sexuality.
Learning Objectives

Learning Objectives

  • The minor's second course introduces a series of lectures and seminars devoted to the discussion of key conceptual issues related to economic and political anthropology. The aim of this course is to learn core theories related to the topic and to provoke comprehensive discussion in relation to key readings.
Expected Learning Outcomes

Expected Learning Outcomes

  • Able to learn and demonstrate skills in the field, other than the major field
  • Work with information: find, define and use the information from different sources which required for solving of research and professional problems (including the system approach)
  • Able to efficiently communicate based on the goals and communication situations
Course Contents

Course Contents

  • Debt and precarity.
  • The field, the site and the scale.
  • Patronage and market.
  • Citizenship and migration.
  • Governmentality.
  • Faces of surveillance (anthropology of anthropology).
  • Sovereignty.
  • Plans and practices of rule.
  • Governance techniques.
  • Affect.
  • Necropolitics.
  • Economy and politics.
  • Police and policing. Colloquium, course revision.
  • Anthropology and political theory.
Assessment Elements

Assessment Elements

  • non-blocking Essays
  • non-blocking Attendance
  • non-blocking Discussion
  • non-blocking Colloquium
  • non-blocking Research paper
Interim Assessment

Interim Assessment

  • 2022/2023 2nd module
    0.05 * Discussion + 0.05 * Attendance + 0.3 * Research paper + 0.2 * Colloquium + 0.4 * Essays
Bibliography

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

  • Adkins, L. (2017). Speculative futures in the time of debt. Sociological Review, 65(3), 448–462. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12442
  • Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1519297
  • Alain Testart, & Amy Jacobs. (2002). The extent and significance of debt slavery. Revue Française de Sociologie, (1), 173. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsper&AN=edsper.rfsoc.0035.2969.2002.sup.43.1.5570
  • Althusser, L., & Brewster, B. (2001). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1021735
  • Carsten, J. (1995). The politics of forgetting: Migration, kinship and memory on the periphery of the Southeast Asian.. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1(2), 317. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034691
  • Cook, R. (2001). The mediated manufacture of an “avant-garde”: a Bourdieusian analysis of the field of contemporary art in London, 1997-9. Sociological Review, 49(1), 164–185. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2001.tb03540.x
  • Foucault, M., Burchell, G., Senellart, M., Ewald, F., & Fontana, A. (2009). Security, Territory, Population : Lectures at the College De France, 1977 - 78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=379853
  • Francisco Ferrandiz, & Antonius C. G. M. Robben. (2015). Necropolitics : Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1648789
  • Graeber, D. (2013). The Democracy Project : A History, a Crisis, a Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=736794
  • HAN, C. (2011). SYMPTOMS OF ANOTHER LIFE: Time, Possibility, and Domestic Relations in Chile’s Credit Economy. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.103990A8
  • Hull, M. S. (2012). Government of Paper : The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=450754
  • Marcus, G. E. (1995). ETHNOGRAPHY IN/OF THE WORLD SYSTEM: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000523
  • Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. (2012). Bear Skins and Macaroni: On Social Life of Things in a Siberian State Collective, and On the Performativity of Gift and Commodity Distinctions. Journal of Economic Sociology, (2), 59. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsrep&AN=edsrep.a.hig.ecosoc.v13y2012i2p59.81
  • Pedersen, M. A. (2017). Debt as an Urban Chronotope in Mongolia. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 82(3), 475–491. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2016.1192213
  • Peebles, G. (2012). Whitewashing and leg-bailing: on the spatiality of debt. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 20(4), 429–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2012.00221.x
  • Polanyi, K. (2014). The Great Transformation : The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Vol. Unabridged). Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=715728
  • Sahlins, M. (2017). Stone Age Economics. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1511307
  • Shoshan, N. (2016). The Management of Hate : Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany. [N.p.]: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1223466
  • Ssorin-Chaikov, N. (2015). Sociopolitics. Reviews in Anthropology, 44(1), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2015.1001645
  • Willis, P. E. (2016). Learning to Labour : How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. London: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1609596
  • Ximena Picallo Visconti, Akhil Gupta, & James Ferguson. (2000). Gupta, Akhil ; James Ferguson (eds.). Anthropological locations : boundaries and grounds of a field science. Berkeley ; Los Angeles ; Londres : University of California Press, 1997. Estudios de Asia y África, (3), 544. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsdoj&AN=edsdoj.7f921f83511e41c19869104abbab1170
  • Ссорин-Чайков, Н. В. (2011). From the ‘invention of tradition’ to the ethnography of the state: the Podkamennaia Tunguska river, 1920s ; От изобретения традиции к этнографии государства: Подкаменная Тунгуска, 1920-е годы. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.C69B3758

Recommended Additional Bibliography

  • Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=324615
  • Lindquist, G. (2009). Conjuring Hope : Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia. New York: Berghahn Books. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=761604
  • Malinowski, B. (2014). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=760780
  • Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1050347
  • Polanyi, K. (2010). Article - “Our Obsolete Market Mentality.” Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.DA7BA4CC
  • Schmitt, C. (2005). Political Theology : Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Vol. University of Chicago Press ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=335369
  • Stewart, K. (2008). Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=599104

Authors

  • RAKHMANOVA LIDIYA YAKOVLEVNA
  • SSORINCHAYKOV NIKOLAY VLADIMIROVICH
  • Султанова Алия Илдаровна