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Regular version of the site
2024/2025

Writing Power

Type: Minor
Delivered by: Department of History
Open to: students of all HSE University campuses
Language: English
ECTS credits: 5

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This final paper of the social anthropology minor links two themes of this course. The first is political anthropology that looks at hierarchies and relations of power. The second is the linguistic turn (‘writing culture’) of the 1980s that marked a radical shift from ‘classical’ to ‘contemporary’ anthropology. It did so by looking not just the anthropology of home, rather than far away places, but also at the social and political relations between anthropologists and the people, communities and relationships that they studied. This put forward the relations of power between the observer and the observed, and also paved the way to the current prominence of such theorists as Foucault. This course takes this ‘home’ also by looking at case studies from Russia/Eastern Europe.