Table of Contents
ANTH 6916: Culture and development—Key concepts (or, The social in justice)
Semester 2, 2024
Social science has always been central to the study and practice of development as a source of expert knowledge on how societies work and what makes societies change. But where you stand on social change depends on where you sit. When the whole world is on fire, and our collective future is at stake, we need to learn to expand our imagination of what community, society, economy, and change mean. This means taking part in a dialogue among scholars, feminist activists, anticolonial thinkers, and people at the grassroots. When we look at society through multiple lenses, the invisible sources of injustice, oppression, suffering, and disease come into view.
Coordinator: Ryan Schram
Last updated: July 10, 2024
Assignments
- Take-home writing assignment (due Sep. 06 at 11:59 p.m., worth 35%, length 2000)
- Essay (due Nov. 01 at 11:59 p.m., worth 40%, length 3000)
- Various contributions to shared online knowledge base (due weekly, worth 10%, length 500)
- Weekly journal (due weekly, worth 15%, length 500)
Weekly plan of topics and readings
| Week | Date | Topic | Main reading | Other reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | July 31 | Show us the Devil Baby! | Addams (1916) | |
| 2 | August 07 | Social work as ethical knowledge | Addams (1902), intro and chap. 2, pp. 1-70 | Lengermann and Niebrugge (2014) |
| 3 | August 14 | Doing being poor | Desmond (2012); Desmond (2014) | |
| 4 | August 21 | How does it feel to be a problem? | Du Bois (1903); Du Bois (1921) | Battle-Baptiste and Rusert (2018) |
| 5 | August 28 | Double-consciousness, second sight | Fanon ([1952b] 1991); Fanon ([1952a] 1991) | |
| 6 | September 04 | There is no such thing as society: Capitalism, bourgeois civil society, and (neo)liberalism | Marx ([1867] 1972), pp. 319-329, 431-438 | |
| 7 | September 11 | Capitalism as original and ongoing dispossession | Fraser (2014); Dawson (2016) | Fraser (2016) |
| 8 | September 18 | We’re here to help: Expertise as power | Weber (1991); Foucault (1991); Foucault (1982) | |
| 9 | September 25 | Pay no attention to the state behind the curtain | Gupta (2012), chaps. 1-2 | |
| B | October 02 | Mandatory school closure for seasonal celebrations—No class | ||
| 10 | October 09 | Everything’s relative: Society as collective consciousness and total system | Durkheim ([1895] 1966); Mauss ([1925] 1990) | Lukes (1973) |
| 11 | October 16 | In other words: Cosmology and the translatability of cultural difference | Evans-Pritchard (1951); Kohn (2007) | Kohn (2015) |
| 12 | October 23 | Life on other worlds, or other ways of knowing? | Blaser and Cadena (2018); Strathern (2018) | |
| 13 | October 30 | Who has a right to theorize? | Guru (2002); Sarukkai (2007) | Visvanathan (2001); Gurukkal (2013) |
| 14 | November 06 | Reading week | ||
| 15 | November 13 | Finals week |
References
Addams, Jane. 1902. Democracy and social ethics. New York: The Macmillan Company. http://archive.org/details/democracysociale00addauoft.
———. 1916. “The Devil Baby at Hull House.” The Atlantic, October 1, 1916. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1916/10/the-devil-baby-at-hull-house/305428/.
Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, and Britt Rusert. 2018. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=5515147.
Blaser, Mario, and Marisol de la Cadena. 2018. “Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds.” In A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 1–22. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Dawson, Michael C. 2016. “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order.” Critical Historical Studies 3 (1): 143–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/685540.
Desmond, Matthew. 2012. “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (5): 1295–335. https://doi.org/10.1086/663574.
———. 2014. “Relational Ethnography.” Theory and Society 43 (5): 547–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9232-5.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 1–12. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. https://archive.org/details/cu31924024920492.
———. 1921. “The souls of white folk.” In Darkwater: Voices from within the veil, 29–52. New York: Harcourt, Brace. http://archive.org/details/darkwatervoicesf00duborich.
Durkheim, Emile. (1895) 1966. “‘What Is a Social Fact’ and ‘Rules for the Observation of Social Facts’.” In The Rules of the Sociological Method, edited by George E. G. Catlin, translated by Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller, 1–13, 14–46. New York: The Free Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1951. “Some Features of Nuer Religion.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 81 (1/2): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/2844013.
Fanon, Frantz. (1952a) 1991. “The fact of blackness.” In Black skin, white masks, 109–40. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. http://archive.org/details/blackskinwhitema0000fano.
———. (1952b) 1991. “The Negro and language.” In Black skin, white masks, 17–40. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. http://archive.org/details/blackskinwhitema0000fano.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181.
———. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review, no. 86 (April): 55–72.
———. 2016. “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3 (1): 163–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/685814.
Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. A John Hope Franklin Center book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394709.
Guru, Gopal. 2002. “How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences in India?” Economic and Political Weekly 37 (50): 5003–9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4412959.
Gurukkal, Rajan. 2013. “On Mirroring the Social: Can Felt-Ontology Alone Inform the Theory?” Economic and Political Weekly 48 (14): 27–31. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23527281.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” American Ethnologist 34 (1): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3.
———. 2015. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (1): 311–27. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127.
Lengermann, Patricia, and Gillian Niebrugge. 2014. “The Explanatory Power of Ethics: The Sociology of Jane Addams.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity: Formulating a Field of Study, edited by Vincent Jeffries, 99–122. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391865_5.
Lukes, Steven. 1973. “Introduction.” In Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study, 1–36. London: Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. “Selections from introduction, chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Sarukkai, Sundar. 2007. “Dalit Experience and Theory.” Economic and Political Weekly 42 (40): 4043–48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276647.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2018. “Opening up Relations.” In A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 23–52. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Visvanathan, Shiv. 2001. “Durban and Dalit Discourse.” Economic and Political Weekly 36 (33): 3123–27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4410991.
Weber, Max. 1991. “Bureaucracy.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 196–244. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group.