March, 13th (14:10 – 17:20), and March, 15 (14:10 – 17:20).
Please contact Marina Kondrashova for additional course resources mkondrashova@eu.spb.ru.
Course overview
What is the state, and how might we try to understand it ethnographically? These two big questions have been some of the most generative in recent political anthropology; and are also urgent questions of our time. What, if anything, constitutes state sovereignty today? Should we make a categorical difference between (legitimate) state and (illegitimate) non-state violence? Is state power being eroded as a result of globalization? Or is it being re-constituted in new ways? Can we even generalize in any meaningful sense about “the” state, or does that term conceal the empirical variety of political formations that exist in the world today? This short course, aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, explores some of the answers that have been developed in anthropology and kindred fields to these questions.