ANU 2022 政治人类学 - States and Citizens

Australian National University Semester 1, 2022 Wednesdays 1-4pm in AD Hope Building Room G12

Course Description

We will explore the concept of “the state” and the subjectivity of “citizen” in this course. The state can be understood as a theoretical abstraction or social imaginary but it also manifests in a myriad of forms through ideologies, institutions, governance procedures, laws, police, public infrastructure, border control, public health, and even in the mundane conduct of daily life. Modern citizenship in relation to a recognized state is attached to identity, ethnicity, reproduction, geographic boundaries, and tracking technologies such as the passport. An anthropology of the state incorporates an interdisciplinary approach and draws on complementary disciplines such as political science, geography, sociology, and economics. In the first half of the course, we examine the theoretical definitions, the institutional formations, and the cultural ideologies associated with statehood such as nationalism and patriotism. In the second half of the course, we focus on existent and emergent social issues that illuminate the fractured and contested relationship between state and citizen. These pressing concerns challenge our understanding of the responsibilities of the state and the corresponding duties of citizenship. Topics include surveillance technologies, public infrastructure, social welfare, population health, cryptocurrencies, and climate change activism. We conclude the course by reflecting on other potentialities for the organization of human societies. Is it possible to imagine alternative futures?

Course Outline

WEEK 1 February 23 Introduction

Discussion of the course syllabus, assessment requirements, reading topics, and sign-up for presentations.

WEEK 2 March 2 Theories of the State

Brown, Wendy. 1992. “Finding the Man in the State.” Feminist Studies 18(1): 7-34.

Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. “New Formations of Power, the Oligarchic-Corporate State, and Anthropological Ideological Discourse.” Anthropological Theory 5(3): 285–99.

Mitchell, Timothy, 2006. “Society, Economy, and the State Effect.” In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, pp. 169-186. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42(1): 125-138.

WEEK 3 March 9 Institutions and Ideology

Das, Veena. 2006. “The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility.” In Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, pp. 162-183. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ferguson, James 2010. The Uses of Neoliberalism. Antipode 41:166-84.Scott, James C. 1998. Part 1: State Projects of Legibility and Simplification. In Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, pp. 9-83. New Haven: Yale university Press.

WEEK 4 March 16 Bureaucracy

Allard, Olivier, and Harry Walker. 2016. “Paper, Power, and Procedure: Reflections on Amazonian Appropriations of Bureaucracy and Documents.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 21(3): 402-413.

Graeber, David. 2012. “Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive Labor.” HAU: journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(2): 105-128.Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of

Politics, and the Imagined State." American Ethnologist 22(2): 375-402.Hoag, Colin. 2014. “Dereliction at the South African Department of Home Affairs: Time for the Anthropology of Bureaucracy.” Critique of Anthropology 34(4): 410-428.

WEEK 5 March 23 Citizenship, Ethnonationalism, and Patriotism

Hoffman, Lisa. 2006. “Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism: On Governmentality in Late-Socialist China.” Economy and Society 35(4): 550-570.

Hooker, Juliet. 2016. “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of US Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair." Political Theory 44(4): 448-469.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism." American Ethnologist 44(2): 209-214.

Rickford, Russell. 2016. “Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle.”New Labor Forum 25(1): 34-42.

Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Chee Heng Leng and Vu Thi Kieu Dung. 2013. “Commercially Arranged Marriage and the Negotiation of Citizenship Rights among Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Multiracial Singapore.” Asian Ethnicity 14(2): 139-156.

WEEK 6 March 30 Refugees, Borders, and Immigration Systems

Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29(4): 981-1002.

Holmes, Seth M., and Heide Castañeda. 2016. “Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death.” American Ethnologist 43(1): 12-24.

McConnell, Fiona. 2013. “Citizens and Refugees: Constructing and NegotiatingTibetan Identities in Exile.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(4): 967-983.

Turner, Bryan S. 2008. “Citizenship, Reproduction and the State: InternationalMarriage and Human Rights.” Citizenship Studies 12(1): 45-54.

Mid-Semester Break [NO CLASS April 4-18]

Please use this time to work on your first major essay which is DUE on April 19 by 12noon

WEEK 7 April 20 Surveillance Capitalism

Aho, Brett, and Roberta Duffield. 2020. “Beyond Surveillance Capitalism: Privacy,Regulation and Big Data in Europe and China.” Economy and Society 49(2): 187-212.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2002. “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4): 779-805.

Foster, John Bellamy, and Robert W. McChesney. 2014. “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age.” Monthly Review 66(3): 1-31.

Wong, Karen Li Xan, and Amy Shields Dobson. 2019. “We’re Just Data: Exploring China’s Social Credit System in Relation to Digital Platform Ratings Cultures in Westernised Democracies." Global Media and China 4(2): 220-232.

WEEK 8 April 27 Public Infrastructure and Social Welfare

Checker, Melissa. 2011. “Wiped Out by the ‘Greenwave’: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability.” City & Society 23(2): 210-229.

Earle, Lucy. 2012. “From Insurgent to Transgressive Citizenship: Housing, Social Movements and the Politics of Rights in São Paulo.” Journal of Latin American Studies 44(1):97-126.

Harvey, David, 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53: 23-40.

Zhang, Li. 2002. “Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China.” Public Culture 14(2): 311-334.

WEEK 9 May 4 Population Dynamics

Li, Tania Murray. 2010. “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations.” Antipode 41: 66-93.

Strijbosch, Karlien. 2015. “Single and the City: State Influences on Intimate Relationships of Young, Single, Well-‐‑Educated Women in Singapore.” Journal of Marriage and Family 77(5): 1108-1125.

Whittaker, Andrea. 2022. “Demodystopias: Narratives of Ultra-Low Fertility in Asia.”Economy and Society 51(1): 116-137.

Yan, Yunxiang. 2021. “The Statist Model of Family Policy Making.” In Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century, pp. 223-252. Leiden: Brill.

WEEK 10 May 11 Cryptocurrencies and Financial Systems

Calvão, Filipe. 2019. “Crypto-‐‑miners: Digital Labor and the Power of Blockchain Technology.” Economic Anthropology 6(1): 123-134.

Crandall, Jillian. 2019. “Blockchains and the “Chains of Empire”: Contextualizing Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Neoliberalism in Puerto Rico.” Design and Culture 11(3):279-300.

Pak Lei Chong, Gladys. 2019. “Cashless China: Securitization of Everyday Life through Alipay’s Social Credit System—Sesame Credit.” Chinese Journal of Communication12(3): 290-307.

Parkin, Jack. 2019. “The Senatorial Governance of Bitcoin: Making (De)Centralized Money.” Economy and Society 48(4): 463-487.

WEEK 11 May 18 Climate Change and Global Citizenship

Connor, Linda H. 2012. “Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia.” Oceania 82(3): 228-249.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. “Disaster Capitalism.” Harper’s Magazine 315: 47-58.

Ritchie, Jenny. 2021. “Movement from the Margins to Global Recognition: ClimateChange Activism by Young People and in Particular Indigenous Youth.” International Studies in Sociology of Education 30 (1-2): 53-72.

Sasser, Jade S. 2014. “The Wave of the Future? Youth Advocacy at the Nexus of Population and Climate Change.” The Geographical Journal 180(2): 102-110.

WEEK 12 May 25 Anarchy

Clastres, Pierre. 1989. “Society Against the State” IN Society Against the State: Essays inPolitical Anthropology. Translated by Robert Hurley in association with Abe Stein, pp. 189-218. New York: Zone Books.

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Smith, Neil. 2010. “The Revolutionary Imperative.” Antipode 41: 50-65.