Schedule (Fall 2023)

All weekly readings will be accessible via ereserve or ebooks. Click directly from the syllabus below or ereserve readings can be accessed via the course Moodle page (click link at the top for the list). Please let me know as soon as possible if you have any trouble obtaining the readings. To facilitate discussion, you should have all the readings for the day ready to consult in class (whether in person or online).

Part I: Debates/Methodologies

Week 1: What IS (was) "Globalization"?

Assignments

Week One Chronology: Important Dates in a Connected/ing World

Tues Aug 29 Introductions and Goals

  • DO: "The Globe": Do a google image search for "globe". Look at the array of images that appear, and consider: how is the earth represented, or mapped as a 'globe' or a 'global world'? For whose purposes? What assumptions and/or ideologies seem to be manifest in the image and/or its presentation on the page? Choose one of your favorites to share with the class in this Moodle forum. Using the insert image tool in the Moodle editing box, upload your image and include a line or two discussing what it is noteworthy in this light.

Thurs Aug 31 Economic Globalization? Non-Anthro Debates

Millions of people a day are better off than they would have been without those trade developments, without globalization. And very few people have been harmed by it.
--Dick Cheney, US Vice Pres, 2002

  • READ: Sachs, Jeffrey. “Introduction,” “A Global Family Portrait,” In The End of Poverty. New York: Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 1-25. (ereserve)
  • READ: Stiglitz, Joseph. “Preface” and “The Promise of Global Institutions.” In Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. ix-xvi, 3-22. (ereserve)
  • READ: Flew, Terry. "Globalization, neoglobalization and postglobalization: The challenge of populism and the return of the national," Global Media and Communication 2020, Vol. 16(1). (16 pp). (ereserve)
In Class: Sign up for discussion facilitation (see How to Lead a Good Discussion) and film discussant roles (see Film Discussant Guidelines)

Further Reading

Debates and Influences

Non-Anthro Globalization Debates

  • Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century.

  • Baker, Dean. 2011. The End of Loser Liberalism. Center for Economic and Policy Research.

  • Barber, Benjamin. 1996. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, chap 15, pp. 219-235

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” and “Neo-liberalism, the Utopia (Becoming Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation.” In Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: The New Press, 1998, pp. 1-10, 94-105.

  • Cameron and Palan.  2004. The Imagined Economies of Globalization. Sage. [interesting emic analyses of business and academic discourses of globalization; ; section on business globalization and offshore econ., critique discourses conflating this w/globaliz. as telos]

  • Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Polity Press.

  • Dollar, David and Aart Kraay. “Growth is Good for the Poor.” In The Globalization Reader (2nd Edition) edited by Frank J. Lechner and John Boli. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 177-182.

  • Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Univ. of California Press.

  • Friedman, Thomas. 1999. "Opening Scene:, and Ch. 1 "The New System". The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Anchor Books. Ereserve.

  • Friedman, Thomas. 2005. The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  • Fukuyama, Francis. 1993. The End of History and the Last Man. Harper.

  • Giddens, Anthony. on the third way

  • Glyn, Andrew. 2006. Capitalism Unleashed. Oxford Univ Press.
  • Hacker, Jacob and Paul Pierson. 2010. Winner-Take-All Politics. Simon & Schuster.

  • David Held (Editor), Anthony McGrew (Editor). 2000. The Global Transformations Reader.

  • ------------------. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oxford Univ Press.

  • Hoogvelt, Ankie. 1997. Ch. 6 Globalisation. Globalization and the PostColonial World. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

  • Huntington, Samuel. 1993. The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs; Summer 1993; 72, 3. (avail online)

  • Lee, Simon. 2003. The Political Economy of the Third Way: The Relationship btw. Globaliz. and National Econ Policy. In The Handbook of Globalization, Michie, ed.

  • Klein, Naomi. “New Branded World” and “The Brand Expands.” In No Logo. New York: Picador, 2002, pp. 3-61.

  • Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007, pp.3-21, 142-154, 218-256, 443-466.

  • Krugman, Paul. 2009. The Conscience of a Liberal. WW Norton press.
  • Martin, Hans-Peter and Harald Schumann. 1997. The Global Trap. St. Martin's Press.

  • Oxfam. “Growth with Equity is Good for the Poor.” In The Globalization Reader (2nd Edition) edited by Frank J. Lechner and John Boli. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 183-189.

  • Quiggen, John. 2010. Zombie Economics. Princeton Univ Press.

  • Rosenberg, Justin. 2000. The Follies of Globalization Theory. London: Verso.

  • Rostow, W.W. 1960. Chs. 1-6, 8, 10. The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge University Press.

  • Sachs, Jeffrey. 2011. The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. Random House.

  • Said and Desi. 2003. Trade and Global Civil Society: The Anti-Capitalist Movement Revisited, in Global Civil Society. Oxford.

  • Sen, Amartya. “How to Judge Globalism.” Online, or In The Globalization Reader (2nd Edition) edited by Frank J. Lechner and John Boli. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp.16-21.

  • Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal. 2003. Regional Modernities

  • Stiglitz, Joseph. 2007. "Bleakonomics," New York Times (review of Klein's The Shock Doctrine). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.html

  • Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. Intro, skim ch. 1, Chs 2-3, Ch's 5-7. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Studies in Social Discontinuity). New York: Academic Press.

  • Went. Robert. 2000. Ch. 1. Globalization: What's New About it? In Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses.

  • Yergin, Daniel and Joseph Stanislaw. 1998. The Commanding Heights.

Links

Capitalist Mapping

Major transnational institutions

Economic Discourses

U.S. Economics Thinktanks

Heterodox Economics Organizations

Films

Online

  • "The Shock Doctrine," Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron (short film accompanying book of same title). YouTube.

  • Naomi Klein 2007 lecture on The Shock Doctrine (in Canada). YouTube.

  • "Milton Friedman Debates Naomi Klein" (fanvid juxtaposing Friedman lectures with Klein's). YouTube.

  • Free to Choose. 1980 (updated in 1990) by Milton Friedman. PBS series (available online). [begins with MF's self-presentation as son of immigrants, presents immigrants' boot-strap narrative of US promise via free markets; 1990 version begins with Arnold Schwartznegger intro framed same way]
  • Kenworthy-Heilbroner debate about the implications of Milton Friedman's ideas in Free To Choose, New York Review of Books, April, 1980.
  • "Free To Choose," The Economist, 2007 (World leaders and CEOs discuss the influence of Friedman's book and film of the same name on the 1 year anniversary of his death).

  • The New Rulers of the World (2001), (looks at WB, IMF, Indonesia; pedantic but tells straightfoward story; clips could on big Men, conferences held to enter Indonesia legally)

  • "Crisis of Capitalism," RSA Animate of David Harvey lecture, 2010 (Youtube).

In Reed Library

  • Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy by William Cran (6-hour PBS series, first aired 2002).
    Accompanies pro free-market book of same name by D. Yergin and J. Stanislaw, frames in battle of ideas between Keynes and Hayek; supports Hayek.
  • The Shock Doctrine. Pictures/Revolution Films production ; directed by Mat Whitecross & Michael Winterbottom ; produced by Alex Cooke, Andrew Eaton, Avi Lewis, 2011 [uses some of exact footage used in Commanding Heights; this is an independent film made to accompany Naomi Klein's book of the same name; is a direct rejoinder to arguments made in Commanding Heights].

Week 2: "Globalization" and its Discontents: Anthro Debates

Assignments

  • WATCH Film: The Agony of Reform, Second Episode of Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy by William Cran (6-hour PBS series, first aired 2002). (Screen via Moodle).

Tues Sept 5 Critiquing "Globalization", Rethinking Anthro

  • READ: Appadurai, Arjun. 2002 (1996). "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Inda and Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Blackwell. (ereserve) (16 pp)
  • READ: Tsing, Anna. 2002. The Global Situation. in Inda and Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Blackwell. (ereserve) (26 pp)
  • READ: Ferguson, James. “Globalizing Africa? Observations from an Inconvenient Continent.” In Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 25-49. (ereserve) (26 pp).

Handout/Google Doc: Walking Tours of a Transnational City: an (Auto)ethnography Blog
Assign Blog Partners

Thurs Sept 7 Rethinking Anthro Methods Beyond the "Local"

  • READ: Gupta, A. & J. Ferguson. 1997. “Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology”. In Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, 1-47. (ereserve) Reading Guide: READ: 1-18, SKIM: 19-29, READ: p. 29-32, "Other Genres, Other Fields". (22 pp). 
  • READ: Bear, Ho, Tsing and Yanagisako. "Gens: a Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism," 2015. (online). (~5 pp)
  • READ: Anderssen, Ruben. "Power of Narration, Narration of Power: An Anthropological Appendix," in No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics, UCalif press, 2019. (9 pp) (ebook/ereserve)

Demonstration: Using audio, video and images in Moodle

DUE: First audio or video blog commentary, Sunday Sept 10, midnight, posted to your Moodle blog forum: Introduce yourself and begin practicing audio and video blogging in Moodle: Using the tools provided in the Moodle window, record in Moodle and post one short audio clip or one short video clip (max. 2 min) in response to this: From our readings and discussions this week, does anthropology have anything specific to contribute to debates about "globalization" or "post-globalization"? How or why not? Your comments should explicitly refer to at least two of our readings (can include a film) from this or last week.

DUE: Comments on Blogs due Monday, Sept 11, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle blog forum: Comments can be in many forms. Ask follow-up questions, comment on or compliment their writing/media use, discuss how their post made you feel, respond to the writer's use of a theorist or key term, bring in a comparison or contrast with your own readings, bring in another author or film from the course (most important) and then from other courses.

Further Reading

Commanding Heights

Anthropology Debates

  • Abeles, Marc. 2006. Globalization, Power and Survival: An Anthropological Perspective. Anthropological Quarterly 79(3).

  • Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

  • ---------------------. Fear of Small Numbers: Essay on the Geography of Fear, 2006.

  • Biehl, João, Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman. “Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity.” In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp.1-23.

  • Collier, Stephen and Aihwa Ong. “Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp.3-22.

  • Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. “Ethnography on an awkward scale: Postcolonial anthropology and the violence of abstraction.” Ethnography, 2003, 4(2):147-179

  • Comaroffs, eds. 2002. Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.

  • Cooper, Frederick. 2001. "What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 101: 189-213.

  • Coronil, Fernando. 2000. Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism:Speculations  on Capitalism’s Nature. Public Culture12(2): 351–374.

  • Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel and Isaac Marrero-Guillamon. 2019. Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention," American Anthropologist. Vol. 121, No. 1, pp. 220–228.

  • Escobar, Arturo. 2001. Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography 20 (2001) 139–174.

  • Friedman, Jonathan. 2003. Globalization, Dis-integration, Re-organization: The Transformations of Violence. in Friedman, ed., Globalization, The State, and Violence. Rowman and Littlefield.

  • Geertz, Clifford. “The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of the Century.” Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 218-263.

  • Graeber, David. 2002. "The Anthropology of Globalization," American Anthropologist 104 (4).

  • Gupta and Ferg. 2002. Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference. in Inda and Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Blackwell.

  • Hannerz, Ulf. “Notes on the Global Ecumene.” Public Culture, 1989, 1(2): 66-75.

  • Heyman, Josiah and Howard Campbell. "The Anthropology of Global flows: a Critical Reading of Appadurai's Disjuncture and difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Anthropological theory 9 (131), 2009.

  • Ho inter-asian concepts

  • Kearney, Michael. 1995. The Local And The Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism, Annual Rev of Anthro 24, pp 547-565.

  • Mintz, Sidney. 1977. The So-called World System. Dialectical Anthropology 2(4).

  • -----------------. 1998. The Localization of Anthropological Practice. Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117-133.

  • Rabinow, Paul. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp.1-11, 33-50.

  • Turner, Terence. 2003. "Class Projects, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of 'Globalization," In Friedman, ed., Globalization, the State and Violence.

  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. "A Fragmented Globality," in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave.

  • Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People Without a History.

Rethinking Anthropology Methods

  • Burawoy, Michael. 2001. “Manufacturing the Global”. Ethnography 2 (2), pp. 147-159

  • Gupta and Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science.

  • Marcus, George. 1995 "Ethnography in/of the World System: the Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography." Annual Review of Anthropology 24, pp. 95-117

  • Passaro, J. 1997. “’You Can’t Take the Subway to the Field!’: “Village” Epistemologies in the Global Village. In Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, pp. 147-163

  • Stoller, Paul. 1997. “Globalizing Method: The Problems of Doing Ethnography in Transnational Spaces”. Anthropology and Humanism 22 (1), pp. 81-94.

  • Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Commons & Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability, & the Flow of Knowledge. Sean Kingston Publishing, 2004.

Anthropology Readers on Globalization:

  • Carrier and Miller, eds. 1998. Virtualism: a New Political Economy. Oxford: Berg.

  • Peter Dicken (Editor), Philip F. Kelly (Editor), Lily Kong (Editor), Kris Olds (Editor), Henry Wai-chung Yeung (Editor). Globalisation and the Asia-Pacific: Contested Territories. 1999. (Warwick Studies in Globalisation)

  • Edelman and Haugerud, eds. 2005. The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism. Blackwell.

  • Haugerud, Angelique, M. Priscilla Stone, and Peter D. Little, eds. 2000. Commodities and globalization : anthropological perspectives. Rowen and Littlefield.

  • Friedman, Jonathan, ed., 2003. Globalization, The State, and Violence. Rowman and Littlefield.

  • Geschiere, Peter & Birgit Meyer, eds, 1999. Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure.

  • Inda, Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo, eds. 2002, 2008. The anthropology of globalization: a reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

  • Nash, June, ed. 2004. Social Movements: an Anthropology Reader, Blackwell, 2004.

  • Ong, Aihwa and Stephen J. Collier, eds. 2005. Global assemblages : technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing.

  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global transformations : anthropology and the modern world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Links

Keywords: the new Language of Capitalism (glossary project of English professor John Pat Leary)

“Keywords for the Age of Austerity” is a series on the vocabulary of inequality. Certain words, as Raymond Williams wrote in his 1976 classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, bind together ways of seeing culture and society. These shared meanings change over time, shaping and reflecting the society in which they are made. Some of the words I will consider here are old, seemingly innocent terms that have acquired a particular fashion or developed a particular new meaning in recent years; others are recent coinages. All of them relate to affinity for hierarchy and a celebration of the virtues of competition, “the marketplace,” and the virtual technologies of our time. This series will explore the historical meanings embedded in these words as well as the new meanings that our age has given them.

Theorists' Sites

Films

Online

  • Free to Choose. 1980 (updated in 1990) by Milton Friedman. PBS series (available online). [begins with MF's self-presentation as son of immigrants, presents immigrants' boot-strap narrative of US promise via free markets; 1990 version begins with Arnold Schwartznegger intro framed same way]

  • The Globalisation Tapes (by plantation workers in Indonesia/Sumatra, as resistance to, avail online) [interesting clip of workers discussion the terms 'global', 'globalisation']. Films for Action: If we are united in our struggle against worker oppression, united in our search for truth amidst lies, united for a truly participatory democratic economic system, the possibilities are only limited by our courage, our determination, and our capacity to imagine. A collaboration between the Independent Plantation Workers’ Union of Sumatra (Indonesia), the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers (IUF) and Vision Machine Film Project.

    The Globalization Tapes is a film made by workers for workers. The story isn’t told by experts, but by union members from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Their experience is complemented by workers from both Colombia and Holland. The film powerfully documents their exploration of history, globalization, and how unions around the world can support each other and struggle together.

    Using their own forbidden history as a case study, the Indonesian filmmakers trace the development of contemporary globalization from its roots in colonialism to the present. Through chilling first-hand accounts, The Globalization Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy”, and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

In Reed Library

  • The Battle of Ideas. 1st Episode of Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy by William Cran (6-hour PBS series, first aired 2002).

  • The Shock Doctrine. Pictures/Revolution Films production ; directed by Mat Whitecross & Michael Winterbottom ; produced by Alex Cooke, Andrew Eaton, Avi Lewis, 2011 [uses some of exact footage used in Commanding Heights; this is an independent film made to accompany Naomi Klein's book of the same name; is a direct rejoinder to arguments made in Commanding Heights].

  • The Global Assembly Line. Lorraine Gray.

Part II: Histories/Channels

Week 3: Historicizing Globalization and Value (Europe, Africa, Caribbean, China)

Assignments

Look: Week Three Chronology: The Rise of Sugar as a World Commodity according to Sidney Mintz

Tues Sept 12 Divisions of Labor and Land: Value and Power

  • READ: Graeber, David. 2001. Three Ways of Talking about Value, in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. Palgrave. (ereserve) (22 pp.)
  • READ: Karl Marx "So-Called Primitive Accumulation," (Chs. 26-28), Capital Vol. 1, pp. pp. 667-693 (ereserve)
  • READ: Karl Polanyi (1944 (2000) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times pp. 35-80.  (ereserve). Reading Guide: FOCUS: Ch. 3 pp-35-45, FOCUS: Ch. 4 pp 45-48, SKIM: 49-58, FOCUS: ch. 5 pp. 59-67, SKIM: 67-70, FOCUS: Ch. 6: pp. 71-80.
  • LOOK: Images: Polanyi's Arguments in Charts

Thurs Sept 14 Colonized Production

  • OPTIONAL: Cooper, Frederick. 2001. "What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 101: 189-213. (ereserve)
  • READ: Mintz, Sidney. Ch. 2 "Production," p. 19-73. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. (ereserve). Reading Guide: SKIM: up to p. 30, FOCUS: p. 30 on.

Further Reading

Manufactured Landscapes

David Graeber

  • Graeber, David. 2002. "The Anthropology of Globalization," American Anthropologist 104 (4).
  • ----------------------------. "The Globalization Movement" in Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerug (eds) The Anthropology of
    Development and Globalization.

Historicizing Globalization

  • Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century.
  • Foley, Duncan. 2006. Adam's Fallacy: a Guide to Economic Theology. Belknap. [This is a recent, accessible and even-handed overview of theories of political economy by a well-known economist at the New School of Social Research. Covers Smith, Ricardo, Marx, the neo-classical turn and more. Argues that "Adam's Fallacy" is the original fallacious assumption that an "economic" realm could be analyzed separately from all other social realms.]

  • Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: the First 5000 Years.

  • ------------------. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value : the false coin of our own dreams. New York : Palgrave. (bookstore)

  • Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Univ. of California Press.

  • Hopkins, A.D. 2002. “The History of Globalization- And the Globalization of History?”, pp.12-72 In Globalization in World History.

  • Maurer, Bill. 2006. The Anthropology of Money. Annual Review of Anthropology 35. [Avail. Online. Very useful recent overview and critique of most recent anthropological debates on economics, money, finance, exchange and more].

  • Mintz, Sidney. 1998. The Localization of Anthropological Practice. Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117-133.

  • Nolan, Peter. 2004. "Epilogue: Adam Smith and the Contradictions of the Free Market Economy," Transforming China: Globalization, Transition and Development. London: Anthem Press. [arguing that Smith had a more complex view of the market than most think].

  • Sassen, Saskia. Chs 1-4. In Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006

  • Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History

  • ----------------------. "Cosmologies of Capitalism,"

  • ----------------------. 1996. "The Sadness of Sweetness; or The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology," Current Anthropology [a sustained ode to Sidney Mintz]

  • ----------------------. 2008a. The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

  • Smith, Adam. 1986 (1776) The Wealth of Nations (Bk 1, chs 1 & 2), pp. 109-121 in Penguin Classics Edition).

  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. "A Fragmented Globality," in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave.

  • Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People Without a History.

Films

Online

In Reed Library

  • Adam Smith and the wealth of nations. presented by Liberty Fund Inc Publication [Indianapolis, IN] : Liberty Fund, 2000
  • H-2 worker. 1990. Docurama ; produced and directed by Stephanie Black ; produced in association with Valley Filmworks, Inc Publication New York, NY : Docurama Films : Distributed in the U.S. by New Video, c2008

    Since World War II, the United States has been issuing H-2 licenses for seasonal farm workers. These workers are meant to be covered by the same laws as regular workers, but these rules are not often followed. While America complains about cheap foreign labor, it uses--and abuses--millions of foreign laborers who do jobs that American workers refuse to do. These people work in heavily subsidized industries, producing the food that North America demands, and because we are unwilling to pay more for that food, employers do not treat these workers with basic human dignity or respect. This film examines the plight of Jamaicans brought to spend six brutal months cutting sugar cane near Lake Okeechobee, Florida, in the late 1980's. There are thousands of H-2 workers in the U.S. in 2008, and their circumstances have not improved with the passing of years. Originally released in 1990, this documentary provides an invaluable resource to understanding current debate over guest worker provisions of immigration legislation. While Florida's sugar cane cutters have been replaced by mechanical harvesters, guest worker programs have expanded in agriculture, hotel, restaurant, forestry, and other industries.
  • The Price of Sugar [videorecording] / directed by Bill Haney ; written by Bill Haney & Peter Rhodes ; produced by Bill Haney and Eric Grunebaum Publication [Waltham, Mass.] : Uncommon Productions, LLC, 2007

    This documentary profiles the courageous Father Christopher Hartley, a Spanish priest who travels to the Dominican Republic to stop a modern-day slavery operation. Thousands of Haitian men are forced to work in inhumane conditions to harvest sugar cane for the wealthy.

Week 4: The Corporation and Neoliberal Governmentality (Europe, U.S., China)

Assignments

  • WATCH Film: The Corporation by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot, Joel Bakan, 2003. (145 min) (Screen via Moodle). Content Notes: Graphic depictions of violent military crackdowns on protests, extreme birth defects, and war violence.

Tues Sept 19 Neoliberalism and the Corporation

  • READ: Bashkow, Ira. 2008. "Will the Real Leviathan Please Sit Down? The Structural Agency of the Corporation", Forthcoming at Prickly Paradigm Press. Reading Guide: READ: p 1-20, SKIM: 21-34, READ: p. 34-52. (ereserve)
  • READ: Philip Mirowski, “ Postface: Defining Neoliberalism ” in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road  from  Mont Pelerin: The  Making  of  the  Neoliberal  Thought  Collective  (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009): 417-455. Reading Guide: FOCUS: pp. 417-428 (Wikipedia example), SKIM: p. 428-33 (Mont Pelerin Society), FOCUS: p. 433-440 (Neoliberal Primer), SKIM: pp. 440-45, (Freedom and Double Truth), FOCUS: pp. 445-6. (ereserve)
Librarian Ann Matsushima Chiu visit and intro to research guide
Thurs Sept 17 Outsourcing: Gendered Labor, Time, Discipline (China)
  • READ: Pun Ngai. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Duke University Press, 2005, p 1-48, 76-108.  Reading Guide: SKIM: Introduction, Focus on Chapters 1 and 3. (ereserve).

DUE: First 400-word Written Blog post due Sunday, Sept 24, midnight, your Moodle blog forum: Introduce your chosen neighborhood/part of city, include a paragraph talking through at least one theorist from the course readings, focus on understanding up to three key terms, and consider applications in your city, or to you as subject/citizen/resident of it. All posts should include citations of at least two sources from the course, including films. You can also add a third from outside the course. You can insert photos or video as well.

DUE: Comments (can be audio or video) on Blogs due Monday, Sept 25, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle blog forum: Comments can be in many forms. Ask follow-up questions, comment on or compliment their writing/media use, discuss how their post made you feel, respond to the writer's use of a theorist or key term, bring in a comparison or contrast with your own blog post/experience of walking the city, bring in another author or film from the course (most important) and then from other courses.

Further Reading

The Corporation

  • Bakan, Joel. 2004. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

  • Nace, Ted. 2003. Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of America. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Neoliberal States and Corporations

  • Abeles, Marc. 2006. Globalization, Power and Survival: An Anthropological Perspective. Anthropological Quarterly 79(3).

  • Asad, Talal. 2004. Where are the Margins of the State? in Das and Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State, SAR Press.

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” and “Neo-liberalism, the Utopia (Becoming Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation.” In Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: The New Press, 1998, pp. 1-10, 94-105.

  • Neil Brenner, Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, & Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies. Theory & Society 28(1):39–78, 1999.

  • Chalfin, Brenda. “Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the Anthropology of the State.” In Current Anthropology, April 2006, 47(2):243-262.

  • Coronil, Fernando. 2000. Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism:Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature. Public Culture12(2): 351–374. Available online.

  • Das and Poole. 2004. State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. in Das and Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State, SAR Press.

  • Ferguson, James. 2006. Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond 'the State and Civil Society in the Study of African Politics," in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke.

  • Friedman, Jonathan. 2003. Globalization, Dis-integration, Re-organization: The Transformations of Violence. in Friedman, ed., Globalization, The State, and Violence. Rowman and Littlefield.

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

  • Michel Foucault (2000) "Governmentality" in The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault , p. 87-104 (ereserve)

  • Hansen, Thoman Blom and Finn Stepputat. “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 2006. 35:295–315.

  • Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 1-4. (ch. 1 on Freedom starts with neoliberal state or ch. 4 The Neoliberal State, p 68-86)

  • Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

  • Lemke, Thomas. (2001) "'The Birth of Bio-politics': Michel Foucault's Lectures at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality" In: Economy and Society 30 (2).

  • Newheiser, David. Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism.
    Although Foucault’s 1979 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics promised to treat the theme of biopolitics, the course deals at length with neoliberalism while mentioning biopolitics hardly at all. Some scholars account for this elision by claiming that Foucault sympathized with neoliberalism; I argue on the contrary that Foucault develops a penetrating critique of the neoliberal claim to preserve individual liberty. I show that the Chicago economist Gary Becker exemplifies what Foucault describes elsewhere as biopolitics: a form of power applied to the behaviour of a population through the normalizing use of statistics. Although Becker’s preference for indirect intervention might seem to preserve the independence of individuals, under biopolitics individual liberty is itself the means by which populations are governed indirectly. In my view, by describing the history and ambivalence of neoliberal biopolitics, Foucault fosters a critical vigilance that is the precondition for creative political resistance.

  • Ong, Aihwa. Intro., Ch.s 1-2, Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke, 1999.

  • --------------. “Graduated Sovereignty.” In Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 75-96.

  • Sassen, Saskia. “Denationalizing State Agendas and Privatizing Norm-Making.” In Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 222-276.

  • Trouillot, M.R. 2001. The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization. Current Anthropology 42(1):125-138.

  • Tsing, Anna. 2005. "The Economy of Appearances," in Friction : an ethnography of global connection / Princeton,  N.J. : Princeton University Press, pp. 55-77. (bookstore, book reserve).

Outsourcing Labor and Production

  • Sassen, Saskia. "Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy," Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. NY: The New Press, 1998, p. 81-100. (ereserve, book reserve)

  • Biao, Xiang. “Prologue,” “Introduction,” The World System of Body Shopping,” “Ending Remarks.” In Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp.xiii-xix, 1-12, 100-115.

  • Dunn, Elizabeth. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, pp. 1-27, 94-129.

  • Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia. “Maquilladoras: The View from Inside,” “Epilogue.” For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico’s Frontier. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983, pp. 108-132, 190-194.

  • Freeman, Carla. “Designing Women: Corporate Discipline and Barbados’ Off-Shore Pink-collar Sector.” Cultural Anthropology, 1993, 8(2):169-186.

  • Gunewardena, Nandina and Ann Kingsolver, eds. 2007. The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities. SAR press.

  • Sassen, Saskia. “Notes on the Incorporation of Third World Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Production.” In Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press, 1999, pp. 111-134.

  • Watson, James, ed. McDonald's in Asia.

Neoliberal Temporalities

  • E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer "Time and Space" (pp. 94-108)

  • E.P. Thompson, 1967. "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" Past & Present 38:56-97.

  • Fabian Time and the Other

  • Jane Guyer (2007) "Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time" American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No.3, pp. 409--421,

  • Halberstam, Judith/Jack. 2005. In a queer time and place : transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York : New York University Press.

  • David Harvey "Time-Space Compression" in The Condition of Postmodernity

  • Rabinow, Paul. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp.1-11, 33-50. (Biehl uses)

  • Munn 1992 The Cultural Anthropology of Time

  • Richard Sennett (2000) "Flexible: the restructuring of time" in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences o/Work in the New Capitalism

Links

Corporations and Ethics

Citizen's United Supreme Court Decision (Jan. 2010)

Facebook Goes Public (Feb. 2012)

Apple iPad Manufacturing in China Controversy (Jan-Feb 2012 to present)

The Rise of Crowdworking (2005 on)

The Trump Corporation

Films

Online

  • The New Rulers of the World (2001), (looks at WB, IMF, Indonesia)
  • "Debbie Spend it Now" Political ad (for Pete Hoekstra, former MI (R) congressman, candidate for US Senate, aired during 2012 Superbowl)
  • "Debbie Spend it Now" Parody (Youtube)
  • American Factory (Netflix), Obama produced this!
    Directed by veteran documentarians Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert, American Factory follows along — mostly in a fly-on-the-wall fashion — as the closed GM factory in Dayton is reopened as Fuyao Glass America, the US branch of a Chinese company that manufactures automotive glass. Daytonians who struggled after they were laid off from GM rejoice when they are rehired by the new company, but soon find that their expectations about labor practices and corporate culture clash with the new management’s ideals. (Vox, 2019)

In Reed Library

  • Betrayed

  • The Red Tail

  • Life and debt. a Tuff Gong Pictures Production ; a film by Stephanie Black ; narration written by Jamaica Kincaid ; produced and directed by Stephanie Black Publication New York, NY : Tuff Gong Pictures : Distributed by New Yorker Video, c2003

    This documentary examines the effects of World Bank and the International Monetary Fund loans on the infrastructure Jamaica established in the wake of independence from the UK in 1962. Seven billion in debt (circa 2000), Jamaica has seen its agricultural industries laid to waste by the impossibility of competing with subsidized, multi-national American based companies. The poverty of 'average' Jamaican in a shantytown near Kingston is in stark contrast to the luxurious tropical fantasy paradise experienced by tourists in posh Montego Bay. In a dog-eat-dog global economy, the US and its multinational corporate clients have all the advantages, while Jamaica has no agriculture, no industry, and no tax base--only ever-growing debt.

  • The Globalisation Tapes (by plantation workers in Indonesia/Sumatra, as resistance to, avail online)

  • Bigger than Enron (Frontline: addresses complicity of corporate regulators/auditing) [need to order]

  • The life and times of Rosie the riveter, 1987, 65 min. Five women reminisce about their jobs and working conditions during World War II.

  • The Global Assembly Line. 1986. Lorraine Gray. [award-winning film, aired on PBS]

  • A Decent Factory by Thomas Balmès

  • Maquilapolis by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre

  • Mardi Gras: made in China. director: David Redmon; producer: David Redmon

    A documentary that explores the production, consumption, and disposal of Mardi Gras beads. Filmed on location in Fuzhou, China and New Orleans, Louisiana, the film follows "The Bead Trail" backwards from the bacchanalia at Mardi Gras to the factories in Fuzhou where the beads are made. When each group is shown images of the other, the cycle of misunderstanding goes a long way in explaining how the commodity chain is kept in place.

  • Maquila a tale of two Mexicos. director: Saul Landau and Sonia Argulo; producer: Saul Landau and George McAlmon ; College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences and Media Vision at California State Polytechnic University.

    Examines the maquiladoras, U.S.-owned export factories employing inexpensive Mexican labor. Covers the displacement of peasant farmers who migrate to northern border cities such as Juarez and Tiajuana, where they endure dangerous working conditions in the maquilas for very low wages. Also examines the environmental disasters generated by these factories and the unsafe living conditions of the workers, which have resulted in a series of brutal rapes and murders of young women employees. Examines the violent rural confrontations between the Mexican Army and Mayan peasant farmers as part of the government's efforts to suppress the rebellion. Features interviews with workers, factory managers, government officials, army officers, indigenous peasants, and economists.

  • Modern heroes, modern slaves. director: Marie Boti; producer: Productions Multi-Monde in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

    Shows the human and sometimes tragic side of the overseas contract worker from the Philippines, where each day, thousands of women leave to seek work as domestics in more prosperous places.

  • Poto mitan: Haitian women, pillars of the global economy. director: Renée Bergan Mark Schuller; producer: Renée Bergan Mark Schuller.

    Told through the compelling lives of five courageous Haitian women workers, POTO MITAN gives the global economy a human face. Each woman's personal story explains neoliberal globalization, how it is gendered, and how it impacts Haiti. And while POTO MITAN offers an in-depth understanding of Haiti, its focus on women's subjugation, worker exploitation, poverty, and resistance demonstrates that these are global struggles.

  • Working Sister (Da Gong Mei), 1998, 28 min.

    Seventeen-year-old farm girl Xu Li Li works in a factory in the south, and travels the 1000 miles home to her family farm for the New Year. One of the 'da gong mei', the working sisters, she talks about her life at the factory and back home on the farm.

  • Is Wal-Mart good for America? [videorecording] / senior producer, Hedrick Smith ; written by Hedrick Smith & Rick Young ; produced and directed by Rick Young ; WGBH PBS Video, 2004

    Examines Wal-Mart's importation of Chinese goods into the United States. Discusses that while some economists credit Wal-Mart's focus on low costs with helping contain U.S. inflation, others charge that the company is the main force driving the massive overseas shift to China in the production of American consumer goods, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and a lower standard of living in the U.S

Week 5: Infrastructures and Networks: Cities, Media and Finance (U.S.)

Assignments

Tues Sept 26 Finance/Infrastructure/Network

  • READ: Sassen, Saskia. 2002. "Introduction: Locating Cities on Global Circuits," in Sassen, ed., Global Cities, Linked Networks. Routledge. (ereserve). (28 pp)
  • READ: Karen Ho, Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks. Cultural Anthropology 20(1):68–96, 2005. (ereserve)
  • READ: Zaloom, Caitlin. Introduction. Out of the pits : traders and technology from Chicago to London /Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006. (p 1-14) (ereserve).

Thurs Sept 28

  • READ: Zaloom, Caitlin. Out of the pits : traders and technology from Chicago to London /Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006. Reading Guide: READ: Chapter 1, SKIM chapter 2, READ chapter 5 "Economic Men," pp. 111-125 (ereserve).

Further Reading

Global Cities/Digital Networks

  • The global cities reader / edited by Neil Brenner and Roger Keil Publication London ; New York : Routledge, 2006.

  • Harvey, David. 2003. "The City as a Body Politic," in Schneider, Jane and Ida Susser, eds. 2003. Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. Berg.

  • Herman and McChesney. Global Media [lays out history of 1980s-90s media deregulation and conglomeration], Global transformations reader.

  • Humphrey, Caroline. 2003. "Rethinking Infrastructure: Siberian Cities and the Great Freeze of January 2001," in Schneider, Jane and Ida Susser, eds. 2003. Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. Berg.

  • Larkin, Brian. Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy, Public Culture.

  • ----------------. Pirate Infrastructures.

  • ----------------. Signal and noise : media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria / Brian Larkin Publication Durham : Duke University Press, 2008

  • Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen, ed.s. Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

  • Latour, Bruno.  Science in Action

  • -----------------.  We have Never been Modern

  • -----------------. 2005. Reassembling the Social:An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford U Press.

  • Oppenheim, Robert. 2007. Actor-Network Theory and Anthropology after Science, Technology and Society, Anthropological Theory 7.

  • Riles, Annelise. 2000. Network Inside Out.

  • Sassen, Saskia. "Electronic markets and activist networks: The weight of social logics in digital formations", in Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, eds. Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)

  • ----------------. "Mediating practices : women with/in cyberspace", in eds. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, Living with cyberspace : technology & society in the 21st century (London : Athlone ; New York : Continuum, 2002) 

  • -----------------. 1991. The global city : New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press.

  • Schneider, Jane and Ida Susser, eds. 2003. Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. Berg.

  • Theory and Culture Journal. Special Issue: City of Potentialities: Race, Violence and Invention, 2016.
    The section concerns how we might think more specifically about how to act in domains where complexity is both a resource for the imagination and an impediment to action. What kinds of dilemmas do residents face and what kinds of practices do they engage in in order to continuously gather up the tools and possibilities to endure in volatile urban conditions, where volatility seems a critical force in the simultaneous undoing and remaking of life, as well as in providing assets and opportunities to inhabitants? How does violence obscure the various manoeuvres and practices that keep things together or apart?

Anthropology and Finance

  • Douglas Holmes and George E. Marcus "Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography" in Global Assemblages pp. 235-252

  • Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma "Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity" Public Culture, Winter 2002; 14: pp. 191 - 213

  • Maurer, Bill. The Anthropology of Money. Annual Rev. Anth.

  • Miyazaki, Hirokazu and Annelise Riles. 2005. "Failure as an Endpoint," In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

  • Ouroussoff, Alexandra. 2012. Wall Street at War. Polity Press (based on over 6 years fieldwork in powerful corporations and credit rating agencies).

  • Olds, Kris and Nigel Thrift. 2005. "Reengineering the Soul of Capitalism--on a global scale, In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

  • Pascal, Ulysses. 2011. Beyond synchronicity : the semiotics of the human in high frequency trading on Wall Street. Reed College Senior Thesis.
  • Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa. Princeton University Press, 2004.

  • Zaloom, Caitlin. "The Derivative World," The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2010

    ------------------. "The City as Value Locus: Markets, Technologies, and the Problem of Worth," Thomas Bender and Ignacio Farias eds. Urban Assemblages. pp. 251-267, New York: Routledge (2009).

    ------------------. "How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction," Public Culture 21(2): 243-266, Spring 2009.

    ------------------. "Markets and Machines: Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance," American Quarterly 58(3): 815-837, September 2006.
     
    ------------------. "The Discipline of Speculators," Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier eds. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, pp. 253-269, New York: Blackwell, 2005.

    ------------------. "The Productive Life of Risk," Cultural Anthropology 19(3): 365-391, August 2004.

    ------------------. "Time, Space, and Technology in Financial Networks," Manuel Castells ed. The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective, pp. 197-213, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004.

    ------------------. "Ambiguous Numbers: Trading Technologies and Interpretation in Financial Markets," American Ethnologist 30(2): 258-272, May 2003. --- In Frontiers of Capital, Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey (eds.), Durham: Duke University Press (Forthcoming 2006).

Films

Online:

The Shift Movement (Research and Advocacy group spearheaded by Leilani Farha of the film Push to demand fair housing practices internationally as a human right).

Videos:

Wall Street Crash (2008-9)

  • "Inside the Meltdown," Frontline (2009)
  • Inside Job
  • Too Big to Fail
  • The Nation DVD from Zucotti square, NYC, 'trial' of Goldman Sachs, with Cornell West presiding

Full-length Films

Week 6: Development and the Power/Violence of Money (Egypt, Jamaica, India)

Assignments

Tues Oct 3 Problematizing "Development" and "Markets"

  • READ: Escobar, Arturo. 1995. "ch. 2: The Problematization of Poverty: the Tale of Three Worlds and Development," in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton. (34 pages) (ereserve).
  • READ: Julia Elyachar. 2002. Empowerment Money: The World Bank, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Value of Culture in Egypt. Public Culture 4.3: 493-513. (ereserve).

Thurs Oct 5 NGOs, Value and Debt: Microfinance in India

  • READ: Moodie, Megan. 2008. Enter microcredit: A new culture of women’s empowerment in Rajasthan? American Ethnologist, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 454–465 (ereserve) Content Notes: brief mentions of sexual violence and coerced sterilization of women, discussion of practices and ideas of caste hierarchy and discrimination.
  • READ: Kar, Sohini. 2013. Recovering debts: Microfinance loan officers and the work of “proxy-creditors” in India, American Ethnologist, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 480–493 (ereserve)

DUE: Second 400-word Written Blog Post due Sunday Oct 8, midnight, your Moodle blog forum. Delve further into understanding your neighborhood, talk a bit about any research you have done on recent events or patterns you're seeing on the streets, insert photos or videos, discuss at least TWO readings (can include one film) from this or previous weeks, bring in credible news sources.

DUE: Comments (can be audio or video) on Blog Post 2 due Monday Oct 9, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle blog forum

Further Reading

Markets, value, exchange

  • Michel CalIon (1998) "Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics" The Laws o/the Market,
  • Julia Elyachar. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham : Duke University Press.
  • Fine, Ben. 1998. "the Triumph of Economics; Or 'Rationality' Can be Dangerous to Your Reasoning," in Carrier and Miller, eds., Virtualism: a New Political Economy. Oxford: Berg.

  • Marie-France Garcia-Parpet "The Social Construction of a Perfect Market: The Strawberry Auction at Fontaines-En-Sologne" in CalIon et al. Do Economists Make Markets?, pp. 20-53

  • Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: the First 5000 Years.

  • ------------------. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value : the false coin of our own dreams. New York : Palgrave. (bookstore)

  • Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma "Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity" Public Culture, Winter 2002; 14: pp. 191 - 213

  • Timothy Mitchell (2002) "The Market's Place" in Rule of Experts: Egypt, TechnoPolitics, Modernity, pp. 244-271

  • -------------------.  "The Properties of Markets" in CalIon et al. Do Economists Make Markets? pp.244-275

    Anthropology, Modernity and Development

  • Bennett 1988: "anthropology and development: ambiguous engagement", Development 4: 6-16

  • Cooper, Frederick and Randall Packard, eds. International development and the Social Sciences, California, 1997. [intro and Ferguson articles excerpted in Edelman and Haugurud]

  • Craig and Porter. 2006. Development Beyond Neoliberalism, look at most recent 20 years of dev. theory; show shift from earlier neolib focus on structural adjustment, privatiz., state downsizing to "poverty reduction" and "good governance"; some argue this is major shift: NOT critical of "dev" per se]

  • Eyben, Rosalind. "Development and Anthropology: a View from Inside the Agency," Critique of Anthropology 20(1), 2000. [responding to Gardner and Lewis, a dev. anthro. seeking practical solutions.]

  • Gardner, Katy and David Lewis. Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge. 1997

  • Grillo, R.D. and R. L. Stirrat. Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives.Oxford, 1997.

  • M. Hobart, ed., (Brit. anthro). An Anthropological Critique of Development: the Growth of Ignorance. London: Routledge, 1993
  • Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. America's Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry. Middle East Report (March-April): 18-34.

Links

List of Major Development Organizations

Egypt Maps

Egypt in Revolution (2011-2012)

Grameen Bank and Monsanto (1998)

Debt and New Social Movements (1998-)

Films

(TBA)

Week 7: (Post) Socialisms (USSR, Romania)

Assignments

Tues Oct 10 Statist Times and Postsocialist Enchantments

  • READ: Marx, Karl. “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.” in the Marx-Engels Reader. p. 319-329. (ereserve).
  • READ: Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism? and What Comes Next? Princeton. Reading Guide: SKIM Introduction, READ: Chapters 1 and 7. (ereserve)

Thurs Oct 12 Asynchronous Break day (take time to tour and blog your neighborhood!)

  • DO: Moodle discussion forum: Diamonds in the Dark Film. Facilitator should post a couple questions/openers about the film to this week's discussion forum by 3:10 Thursday. Then by 8 pm Thursday everyone should post at least one 250-word or up to 2 minute audio comment on the film with explicit reference to at least one of the readings from Tuesday. Post an up to 2 minute audio or video comment on your partner's comments.

Fall Break Oct 16-20

Further Reading

Socialisms and Globalization

  • Thelen vs. Verdery and Dunn on the nature and impact of the anthropology of post-socialism
  1. Thelen T (2011) Shortage, fuzzy property, and other dead ends in the anthropological analysis of (post)socialism. Critique of Anthropology 31(1): 43–61.
  2. Dunn EC and Verdery K (2011) Dead ends in the critique of (post)socialist anthropology:reply to Thelen. Critique of Anthropology 31(2): 251–255.
  3. Thelen, T. (2012). Economic concepts, common grounds and 'new' diversity in the Anthropology of post-socialism: Reply to Dunn and Verdery, Critique of Anthropology 2012 32: 87
  • Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak. American Stiob: Or, What Late Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal About Contemporary Political Culture in the West
    Cultural Anthropology May 2010, Vol. 25, No. 2: 179-221.

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” In Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: The New Press, 1998, (on decline of socialist France, calls for role of intellectuals, genuine debate)

  • Collier in Collier and Ong; neolib budgets in Russia, Global Assemblages. (bookstore, book reserve)

  • Ferguson, James. 2006. De-Moralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism, and the Moral Politics of Structural Adjustment," in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke. (bookstore, book reserve)

  • Humphrey, Caroline. 2003. "Rethinking Infrastructure: Siberian Cities and the Great Freeze of January 2001," in Schneider, Jane and Ida Susser, eds. 2003. Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. Berg.

  • -----------------------. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism [Heldt Prize] (2002)  (ed. with Katherine Verdery)

  • ---------------------. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy (2004) ·  (ed. with Catherine Alexander and Victor Buchli)

  • ---------------------. Urban Life in Post-Soviet Central Asia (2007)

  • Ong, Aihwa. 2008 : (co-editor Li Zhang), Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press ;
  • -----------------. 2006 : Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press ;
  • -----------------. 1999 : Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Occult Economies
  • Jean and John Comaroff. 1999 "Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony" in American Ethnologist 26 (2) pp: 279-295.
  • ----------------------------. 2000. Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.
  • Max Gluckman. 1959. "The Magic of Despair" in Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa pp. l37-145
  • Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline.
  • Daromir Rudnyckyj. 2009. "Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia" in Cultural Anthropology 24 (1) pp. 104 - 13
  • Taussig, Mick. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism.
  • Max Weber (1930/1992) "The Spirit of Capitalism" in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 47-78

Links

Katherine Verdery

USSR and Romania

Bernie Madoff: Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes, Dec 2008

Films

Online

Pyramid and Ponzi Schemes

1980s-90s U.S. commercials using trope of Russia

In Reed Library

  • The Agony of Reform, Second Episode of Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy by William Cran (6-hour PBS series, first aired 2002). (section on fall of USSR)
  • The Shock Doctrine. 2011. (section on fall of USSR)
  • Diamonds in the Dark (2000).
  • When Propaganda Ruled: Nicolae Ceausescu, King of Communism, by Ben Lewis, 2002 (need to order)
  • Tale from the Golden Age, 2009 (about 1980s Romania)
    "The final fifteen years of the Ceausescu regime were the worst in Romania's history. Nonetheless, the propaganda machine of that time relentlessly referred to that period as the country's 'golden age'. Using the moniker as a starting point, Tales from the Golden Age spins the most popular, comic and bizarre urban legends from that harrowing period into a hilariously surreal omnibus film."

Part III: Subjects

Week 8: Subjects of Fear and Control: Creating the Margins, Creating the Threat (Africa, Europe, United States)

Assignments

  • WATCH Film: Darwin's Nightmare, 2004, Hubert Sauper (Screen via Moodle) **Content Notes: graphic portrayals of children and adults living in stark poverty, some interpersonal violence, and discussion of sexual violence.

Tues Oct 24 Rethinking the Margins: States and Global Shadows

  • READ: Das and Poole. 2004. "State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies." in Das and Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State, SAR Press. (30 pp). (ereserve)
  • READ: Ferguson, James. “Global Shadows: Africa and the World.” In Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp.1-25. (ebook/ereserve.
Assign Second Blog Partners

Thurs Oct 26 Geographies of risk and fear: Securitizing Development at the Margins

  • READ: Anderssen, Ruben. Introduction: Into the Danger Zone and Ch. 5: The Snake Merchants, in No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics, UCalif press, 2019. (50 pp). (ebook/ereserve)

DUE: Third 400-word Written Blog Post due Sunday Oct 29, midnight, your Moodle blog forum. Delve further into understanding your neighborhood, talk a bit about any research you have done on recent events or patterns you're seeing on the streets, insert photos or videos, discuss at least TWO readings (can include one film) from this or previous weeks, bring in credible news sources.

DUE: Comments (can be audio or video) on Blog Post 3 due Monday Oct 30, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle blog forum

Further Reading

  • Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception , translated by K. Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Critique of violence. In Reflections: Essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings , translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books.

  • Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London:Verso.

  • Caldeira, Teresa. “‘I came to sabotage your reasoning!’: Violence and Resignifications of Justice in Brazil.” In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony edited by John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 102-149.

  • Comaroff, Jean and John. “Introduction.” Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp.1-56.

  • Coronil, Fernando and Julie Skurski, eds. 2006. States of Violence. UMich press.

  • Das, Veena. 2007.  Life and Words: violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. California.

  • Das and Poole. 2004. State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. in Das and Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State, SAR Press.

  • de Genova, Nicholas. 2005. Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and Illegality in Mexican Chicago. Duke.

  • ---------------------. 2002. "Migrant 'Illegality' and the Deportability of Everyday Life," Annual Rev of Anthro.

  • Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. California.

  • Jeganathan, Pradeep. 2004. Checkpoint: Anthropology, identity and the State. in Das and Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State, SAR Press. [Sri Lanka, Tamils]

  • Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” In Public Culture, 2003, 15(1):11-40.

  • Nordstrom, Carolyn.  (pp. xv-xxi, pp. 1-24). Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

  • Nordstrom, Carolyn and Antonius Robben, eds. 1995. Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of violence and Survival.

  • Roitman, Janet. “The Garrison-Entrepôt: A Mode of Governing in the Chad Basin.” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp.417-36.

  • Sampson. Trouble Spots: Projects, Bandits and State Fragmentation in Friedman, ed. [overview on NGOs, Mafias and states]

  • Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs- Trafficking Underworld. Ethnography, 2004, 5(1):29-73.

  • Schiller and Fouron. Killing me Softly: Violence, Globalization and the Apparent State, in Friedman, ed. [Haiti]

  • Shaw, Jennifer and Darren Byler. Precarity (curated collection of related articles in Cultural Anthropology Journal, 2016).

  • Taussig, Michael. Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Links

Giorgio Agamben (1942-)

Africa as Other: Kony 2012

Mobilizing in the face of AIDS

Films

  • Life and Debt

  • Workingman's Death (some of most dangerous jobs, no narration, )

  • Blowing up Paradise

Week 9: Globalization's Others: Asia and the Rise of China (Asia Pacific, SE Asia, China)

Assignments

Tues Oct 31 The Asian Model? The China Model?

  • READ: Ramo, Joshua. "The Beijing Consensus," The Foreign Policy Center, UK, 2004. Reading Guide: pp. 1-13 ONLY (ereserve)
  • READ: Dirlik, Arif. "Beijing Consensus: Beijing "Gongshi." Who Recognizes Whom and to What End?" (online position paper), 2014. (9 pp) (ereserve).
  • READ: Ong, Aihwa. Introduction (25 pp), and ch. 1 "The Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge," (24 pp), Flexible citizenship. 1999. (ebook/ereserve). Reading guide: Introduction (FOCUS: pp 1-8, SKIM: pp. 8-16, FOCUS: pp. 17-14); and Ch. 1 (FOCUS on whole thing).

Thurs Nov 2 The Rise of China-in-Africa

  • READ: Ong, Aihwa. "An Anthropologist at Davos (plus comments and her response)," Current Anthropology Volume 63, Supplement 25, December 2022 (20 pp). (ereserve)

Further Reading

Chinese Attitudes Toward Africans

Castillo, Roberto. “Race” and “racism” in contemporary Africa-China relations research: approaches, controversies and reflections." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Pages 310-336 | Published online: 17 Sep 2020 [draws on Monson and Lan, argues for 'triangulation' and going beyond EuroAmerican notions of race]

Cheng Yinghong. Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception of Africa and Black Peoples Y Cheng - Discourses of Race and Rising China, 2019 - Springer.

Driessen, Miriam. Introduction. 2019. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. (ebook) (26 pp)

Miriam Driessen. Laughing about Corruption in Ethiopian‐Chinese Encounters. 14 October 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13320 In Ethiopia, the growing Chinese presence has inspired lively debate, often with an edge of humor. Corruption is one of the recurring topics in amusing narratives that circulate on and off the Chinese‐run building sites that have emerged across the Ethiopian landscape over the past two decades. While humorous corruption stories hint at the possibility of corruption and introduce the audience to the cultural codes of conduct, corrupt practices, equally aided by laughter, create instances of collaboration and complicity. Corruption in cross‐cultural encounters serves as a lens through which to imagine the Other and evaluate their behavior, and by drawing those complicit in corrupt transactions into shared (im)moral worlds, it generates opportunities for rapprochement. [corruption, humor, encounter, Ethiopia, China]

Johanna Hood. Distancing Disease in the Un-black Han Chinese Politic: Othering Difference in China’s HIV/AIDS Media. Modern China 2013 39: 280 originally published online 26 March 2013.

MD Johnson. Race and racism in the Chinas: Chinese racial attitudes toward Africans and African-Americans - 2007.

Madrid-Morales, D., & Gorfinkel, L. (2018). Narratives of contemporary Africa on China Global Television Network’s documentary series Faces of Africa. Journal of Asian and African Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909618762499

Pfafman et al. 2015. The Politics of Racism: Constructions of African Immigrants in China on ChinaSMACK [simplistic ahistorical analysis of comments translated on Chinasmack; by communications scholars who don't have Chinese; ChinaSmack is sensationalist tabloid; racist comments section]

Simon Shen (a1) A constructed (un)reality on China's re-entry into Africa: the Chinese online community perception of Africa (2006–2008), International Journal of Sociology . Volume 46, 2016 - Issue 2: Migration in the Global South

Sylvanus, Nina. 2013. Chinese Devils, the Global Market, and the Declining Power of Togo’s Nana-Benzes," ASR Forum on Africa and China. African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 1 (April 2013) [rare qualitative, ethnog account, focus on consumption and trade, fielwork 03-04].

Zhang, Chenchen. "Racism and the Belt and Road in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala: What a Controversial Skit Tells Us About Racial and Geopolitical Narratives in China." The Diplomat, February 23, 2018. https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/racism-and-the-belt-and-road-in-cctvs-spring-festival-gala/

Chinese in Africa

Brautigam, D. 2010. The Dragon's Gift.

Jean-Pierre Cabestan. Beijing’s ‘Going Out’ Strategy and Belt and Road Initiative in the Sahel: The Case of China’s Growing Presence in Niger.Contemporary China, 2018. Pages: 1-22 | DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1557948

Jean-Pierre Cabestan. China’s response to the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis: Enhancing Africa’s soft security under Sino-US competition.

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale [online] ISSN 2385-3042 Vol. 52 – Giugno 2016 [print] ISSN 1125-3789 Chinese Volunteering in Africa: Drivers, Issues and Future Prospects.

Antonella Ceccagno, Sofia Graziani, Giese K (2015) Adaptation and learning among Chinese actors in Africa. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 44(1): 3–8.

Jiang Chang & Hailong Ren. How native cultural values influence African journalists’ perceptions of China: in-depth interviews with journalists of Baganda descent in Uganda.

Dittgen, Romain and Anthony Ross."Yellow, Red and Black- Fantasies about China and 'the Chinese' in Contemporary South Africa" (co-authored with Ross Anthony) in- Franck Billé, Sören Urbansky (eds.)- Yellow perils- China Narratives in the Contemporary World, Honolulu - University of Hawai’i Press, 2018, pp. 108-141.

Huynh, Tu and Park, Yoon Jung. intro to special journal issue [nicely frames in increased in-and out-migration to/from China] ‘‘Chineseness’’ through unexplored lenses: Identity-making in China–Africa engagements in the 21st century. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 2018, Vol. 27(1) 3–8.

Huynh, Tu and Park. Introduction: Chinese in Africa. African and Asian Studies 9 (2010) 207-212 [good overview of variety of articles, incl Sautman and yan on Zambia; argue diversity of experience, relies on historical relat btw PRC and African countries; evidence of previous friendship giving way to more negative perceptions with more influx]

Huynh, Park and Chen. Faces of China: New Chinese Migrants in South Africa, 1980s to Present. African and Asian Studies 9 (2010) 286-306

Johan Lagerkvist. Chinese eyes on Africa: Authoritarian flexibility versus democratic governance. Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2009, 119!134 [early overview, takes PRC pov on not imposing dev models on others]

Bruce Larkin, China and Africa 1949-1970.

Monson, James and Stephanie Rupp. 2013. Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research," ASR Forum on Africa and China. African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 1 (April 2013), pp. 21– 44 [Historians and anthros, including former Reed prof Nina Sylvanus]

Goretti L. Nassanga & Sabiti Makara. Chinese J. of Communication Perceptions of Chinese presence in Africa as reflected in the African media: case study of Uganda.

Parks, Brad. "10 Essential Facts About Chinese Aid in Africa," 2015.

PRC State Council White Paper. 2013. Introduction, Sections IV, V, V1, Conclusion. China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation. (online).

Rupp, Stephanie. 2013. Ghana, China, and the Politics of Energy," ASR Forum on Africa and China. African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 1 (April 2013)

Sautman, Barry. Racialization as Agency in Zambia-China Relations [his indvistic, western notion of agency=intentioned action to make change; argues in end that Zambians racializing "the chinese" has distracted their attn from far greater 'forces' of foreign (meaning westerners?) and domestic]

Sautman and Yan. 2020. Article on Chinese migrants, whether they 'self-segregate' [see China Africa podcast about this article; S and Y's methods are capitalist, treat Chinese as individuals, neglect almost completely larger structural issues of PRC dev agendas; see article version of this below]

Sautman and Yan. 2009. African Perspectives on China–Africa Links. [usual polemic against overly simplistic takes by westerners]
Scholars and the international media often allude to a putative “African view” of Africa–China links, constructed from anecdotal evidence. Using random sample and university-based surveys, we elaborate the first empirically based study of what Africans think of their relationships with China. We reach three conclusions. First, African views are not nearly as negative as Western media make out, but are variegated and complex. Second, the survey results are at variance with the dominant Western media representation that only African ruling elites are positive about these links. Third, we find that the dominant variation in African perspectives is by country, compared with variations such as age, education and gender. The differences among countries in attitudes towards China are primarily a function of the extent to which national politicians have elected to raise the “Chinese problem” and, secondarily, the extent of Western media influence in African states.

Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz, ‘‘Performing ‘China in Africa’ for the West: Chinese migrant discourses in Angola’’ in Tu and Park, eds., ‘‘Chineseness’’ through unexplored lenses: Identity-making in China–Africa engagements in the 21st century. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 2018, Vol. 27(1) 3–8 [recent anthro Phd Berkeley; focus on everyday identity-making]

China–Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities
Helen F. Siu and Mike McGovern. Annual Review of Anthropology 2017 46:1, 337-355

Strauss, Julia C. 2013. China and Africa Rebooted: Globalization(s), Simplification(s), and Cross-cutting Dynamics in “South–South” Relations," ASR Forum on Africa and China. African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 1 (April 2013) [nice overview from leading figure, former ed. of China Quarterly, ed. 2009 China AFrica volume, touts ethnography!

The Atlantic article on Chinese merchants in Egypt 2015

The Newsletter 81 Autumn 2018 on African Studies in China (Brown has piece): China Connections
Cheryl M. Schmitz (also author in Huynh et al) The ‘China Connections’ pages are compiled by guest editors from the Asia Research Center at Fudan University and the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai. The contributions for this issue - African Studies in China - were guest edited by Cheryl M. Schmitz from NYU Shanghai. 

Special Issue of Asian Ethnicity on China and Africa, Vol 1, 2019:

Introduction

Chinese in Africa: ‘Chineseness’ and the complexities of identities
Obert Hodzi
Pages: 1-7 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1539826 Original Articles

Nationalism, overseas Chinese state and the construction of ‘Chineseness’ among Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Ghana
Jinpu Wang & Ning Zhan
Pages: 8-29 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1547875

Understanding Chinese immigrants in Africa from the perspective of national identity
Zhihang Wang
Pages: 30-39 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1543542

Chinese and ‘self-segregation’ in Africa
Hairong Yan, Sautman Barry & Yao Lu
Pages: 40-66 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1511370

Gauging the dispositions between indigenes, Chinese and other immigrant traders in Ghana:  towards a more inclusive society
Kwaku Opoku Dankwah & Padmore Adusei Amoah
Pages: 67-84 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1490173

Chinese migrants and the politics of everyday life in Zimbabwe
Simbarashe Gukurume
Pages: 85-102 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1490174

Rational or irrational? Understanding the uptake of ‘made-in-China’ products
Mark Kwaku Mensah Obeng
Pages: 103-127 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1548266

Links

Supchina Post, 2021

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala (春晚 chūnwǎn) comes in for withering criticism nearly every year for poor taste, sexism, and other issues. This year was no different: 

Perpetual misfiring on Africa and blackface

Five minutes into the gala, a group of Chinese actors adorned in blackface makeup and stereotypical African tribal garments appeared on the stage, dancing joyfully in a segment that also featured flamenco performers, belly dancers, and women dressed like Cleopatra in ancient Egypt.

  • In 2018, the Spring Festival Gala was accused of racism for featuring a comedy sketch that included a well-known Chinese actress wearing blackface and a padded outfit, accompanied by a black performer in a monkey costume.
  • Black Livity China, a Beijing-based organization, whose mission is to “document and demystify African and Afro-diasporic experiences both in China and in relation to China,” wrote on Twitter that it was “extremely disappointing” to see the gala once again using offensive caricatures. 

Films

Teboho Edkins’ Days of Cannibalism (in Lesotho, ordered for lib, still in film festivals)

China Africa film cooperation

Chalay Thay Saath [Pakistani film with Chinese romantic lead, man from Canada! a love song for BRI, timed for big PRC project there, race/gender stereotypes] (ordered for lib.)

CCTV BRI documentary (multiple episodes)

CNA (Singapore) documentary The New Silk Road (5 seasons; very pro-PRC, reporter just goes to business parks and PRC museum sites)

Tazara Stories (Monson, dir.), on Chinese work on Tanzanian-Zambia railway in the 1960s-70s (Reed lib has a copy).

New Year Gala blackface skits

A Multimillion dollar industry in racist videos about Black Africans

BBC viral video exposing a Chinese man making racist videos of Malawian children (2020)

"Racist videos about Africans fuel a multimillion dollar industry Chinese industry". rest of world blog, 2022.

"BBC Africa Eye expose: Chinese man extradited to Malawi over racist videos," BBC News, July 2022.

Part IV: Movements

Week 10: Logistics: the Capitalist Science of Moving Things (Oceanic Earth)

Assignments

Tues Nov 7 Logistics: the Capitalist Science of Moving Things

  • READ: Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. Ch. 6 Fantasy in the Hold, The Undercommons. Minor Compositions, 2013. (ereserve). (also available open access online)
  • READ: Cowen, Deborah. Introduction: The Citizenship of Stuff in the Global Social Factory, and Ch. 3 The Labor of Logistics, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. (ereserve).

Thurs Nov 9 Online Workshop: Curating Photo Essays
Please look over these materials (including the guidelines) and post at least ONE question to the Moodle forum for this week about your photo essay ideas by 3 pm Thursday Nov 9.

  • READ: Sutherland, Patrick. "The Photo Essay," Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 32, Issue 2, pp. 115–121, 2016 (7 pp). (ereserve).
  • READ/LOOK: Hutchings, Roger. "Auturk's Children," Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 32, Issue 2, p. 103-114. (ereserve).
  • READ: "What Makes a Photo Essay Unforgettable?" Alex Brown, Format, 2018. (online).

Handout/Google Doc: Final Photo Essay guidelines

Further Reading

Tsing, Anna. Supply chain governance, 2009.

Suwandi, Intan. Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019.

Photo Essays

 

http://www.benmurphy.co.uk/homes-of-the-american-dispossessed#1

            -Righteous Dope Fiend

            -Bill Epperidge 1965 https://www.life.com/lifestyle/two-lives-lost-to-heroin-a-harrowing-early-portrait-of-addicts/

 

Short piece in cult anthro online

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-photo-essays-bark

 

Moog. Collaborative visual ethnography in Indonesia Punk

Links

Deborah Cowen

Deborah Cowen (at Univ of Toronto, Dept of Geography and Planning)

Deborah Cowen on Twitter

Deborah Cowen and Funambulist Mag

Fred Moten

Fred Moten (at NYU)

Fred Moten "Blackness and Nonperformance" (talk at Moma, 2015)

Fred Moten's Radical Critique of the Present (The New Yorker, 2018)

Fred Moten gets the Macarthur Genius Award 2020 (video)

Stefano Harney

Stefano Harney (at European Graduate School and Singapore School of Management)

Prosperity Marxism – Episode 10: On THE UNIVERSITY AND THE UNDERCOMMONS with Stefano Harney (Michael Pelias and Peter Bratsis discuss the state of academia with Stefano Harney.  (Video)

Stefano Harney on Speculative Practice in Theory (Youtube)

Stefano Harney on Study (Youtube)

Stefano Harney on Statistical to Logistic Populations (Youtube)

Stefano Harney on Governance (Youtube)

Michael Pelias and Peter Bratsis discuss the state of academia with Stefano Harney.
Michael Pelias and Peter Bratsis discuss the state of academia with Stefano Harney.

The Undercommons

"Wildcat The Totality: Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1) (Audio interview, July 2020)

"Give Your House Away, Constantly: Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 2) (Audio interview, July 2020)

Harney and Moten: The University, last words (Zoom conference with striking grad students in Univ of California system (July 2020)

Zach Ngin. "Flights of Fantasy: On Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons," illustrated blog commentary, (The Indy, Feb 2020)

Sami Cleland. "Book Review of the Undercommons" (good summary), Critique and Praxis 13/13, 2019.

Blu Buchanan and Kush Patel. Dodgy Scholars: Resisting the Neoliberal Academy. (conversation between two self-identified members of the academic undercommons).

Lisa Corrigan. "Review: Decolonizing Philosophy and Rhetoric: Dispatches from the Undercommons." Philosophy & Rhetoric Vol. 52, No. 2 (2019), pp. 163-188.

 

Films

Week 11: Mobile Frontiers: China's Belt and Road (China, Pakistan, Eurasia)

Assignments

Tues Nov 14 Belts and Roads?

  • WATCH/READ: Loh, Peiying. "Understanding the Belt and Road," 2018. (multimodal explainer online).
  • READ: Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira, Galen Murton, Alessandro Rippa, Tyler Harlan, and Yang Yang, “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground,” Political Geography 82, 2020.  (4 pp) (ereserve)
  • READ: Rippa, Alessandro. Intro (25 pp), Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China Amsterdam University Press, 2020. (ebook/ereserve)

Thurs Nov 16 China, Borders and Corridors

  • READ: Rippa, Alessandro. Ch. 5 Control (33 pp), Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China Amsterdam University Press, 2020. (ebook/ereserve)

DUE: Fourth 400-word Written Blog Post due Sunday Nov 19, midnight, your Moodle blog forum. Delve further into understanding your neighborhood, talk a bit about any research you have done on recent events or patterns you're seeing on the streets, insert photos or videos, discuss at least TWO readings (can include one film) from this or previous weeks, bring in credible news sources.

DUE: Comments (can be audio or video) on Blog Post 4 due Monday Nov 20, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle blog forum

Further Reading

Anticipatory Geographies of BRI: 2020 Political Geography special issue on BRI, Oliveria, et al, eds.

Brautigam, D. 2010. The Dragon's Gift.

Jean-Pierre Cabestan. Beijing’s ‘Going Out’ Strategy and Belt and Road Initiative in the Sahel: The Case of China’s Growing Presence in Niger.Contemporary China, 2018. Pages: 1-22 | DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1557948

Wanjing Chen. Railroaded Bodies: Situating Lao/Chinese Construction Workers in the Financial Instabilities of BRI [arguing against simplistic sinophobic responses to Chinese workers abroad]

Freddy, H. J., & Thomas, C. J. (2023). Status Competition: The BRICS’ Quest for Influence in Global Governance. China Report, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00094455231187054

Green C (2014) Outbound China and the global South: New entrepreneurial immigrants in the eastern Caribbean. IDEAZ Journal (Special Issue: From Unipolar to Multipolar: The Remaking of Global Hegemony) 10–12(2012–2014): 24–44.

Huynh, T. Tu and Yoon Jung Park. "Reflections on the Role of Race in China-Africa Relations." New Directions in Africa–China Studies; edited by Chris Alden and Daniel Large. Routledge, 2019. .

Kuehn J, Louie K and Pomfret DM (2013) Diasporic Chineseness After the Rise of China: Communities and Cultural Production. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press.

Lai W and Tan C-B (2010) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill.

Lee, Fiona. "Han Chinese Racism and Malaysian Contexts: Cosmopolitan Racial Formations in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20.2 (2019), 220-237.

Jessica C. Liao. A Good Neighbor of Bad Governance? China’s Energy and Mining Development in Southeast Asia. Contemporary China, 2018. Pages: 1-17 | DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2018.1557947

Made in China issue with articles on BRI, including op-ed: has BRI slowed down? 2021

Amrita Malhi. Race, Debt and Sovereignty – The ‘China Factor’ in Malaysia’s GE14. Pages 717-728 | Published online: 23 Nov 2018.

Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen and Morten Axel Pedersen, Collaborative Damage: an Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization [draws on ethnographic research in both Inner Mongolia and Mozambique; actual ethnography of BRI]

Rippa et al, special issue of journal on political geographies of BRI [ nothing on race ]

Roche, Gerald. 2020. Telling the China story in Australia: Why we need racial literacy - The China Story Blog. (in pdf folder).

Romero et al, Special Issue of China Information, 2022. China's borderlands in era of Post-globalization

Kanji Sato. Formation of La Raza and the Anti‐Chinese Movement in Mexico, 07 January 2008

Senadjki, A., Awal, I. M., Ogbeibu, S., Nachef, T., & Senadjki, M. (2023). The China Belt and Road Initiative: The Struggles and Opportunities for the SMEs Development of an Emerging Economy. China Report, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00094455231187050

Sheridan, Derek. 2020. The Semiotics of heiren ( 黑人): Discontent, Everyday Knowledge Production, and Discursive Complicity among the Chinese in Tanzania (unpub manuscript).

Tjon Sie Fat PB (2009) Chinese New Migrants in Suriname: The Inevitability of Ethnic Performing. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

South China Morning Post on BRI Projects

Wallenböck, Ute. 2019. “The Cultural and Educational Dimension of the ‘New Silk Road’: The Re-invention of Mongolness at the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies, 11, pp. 31–59.

Sophie Loy-Wilson - 2017. Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China. [spent time growing up in Australian embassy in Beijing; talks of White Australia policies, yellow peril fears].

Szadziewski, Henryk. End of the Road: One Belt, One Road and the Cumulative Economic Marginalization of the Uyghurs   (contributed to Political geog issue?)

Xinman Li, Ying Luo, Shuhui Lai, Taotao Long. Acculturative Stories of International Students from Belt and Road Countries in China [don't address difference/race except lang/culture]

Zhang, Chenchen. "Racism and the Belt and Road in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala: What a Controversial Skit Tells Us About Racial and Geopolitical Narratives in China." The Diplomat, February 23, 2018.

Links

Competing Think Tanks on BRI

The World Bank on BRI: assessing 'risks'

David Dollar 2020. "7 years of BRI," Brookings Institute

Global Roadmap.org [US thinktank anti-China BRI research]

Resources on Global China

Chuangcn.org blog

China Labour Bulletin

New Bloom

China Dialogue

Parasinologie

PRC History Review

China Digital Times  

Sinocism

LabourStart – China

Globalization Monitor

Asia Monitor Resource Center

SACOM

Engage Media

BRI Maps

The People's Map of Global China
[by a group of China scholars; pretty spotty, based on data they could access, doesn't reflect actual numbers of projects]
Their intro: "The People’s Map of Global China tracks China’s complex and rapidly changing international activities by engaging an equally global civil society. Using an interactive, open access, and online ‘map’ format, we collaborate with nongovernmental organisations, journalists, trade unions, academics, and the public at large to provide updated and updatable information on various dimensions of Global China in their localities. The Map consists of profiles of countries and projects, sortable by project parameters, Chinese companies and banks involved, and their social, political, and environmental impacts. This bottom-up, collaborative initiative seeks to provide a platform for the articulation of local voices often marginalised by political and business elites."

Leiden Asia Centre BRI Map
Their intro: "First of all, whereas many maps simply display projects or hubs that label themselves as being part of the BRI, our map focuses on what is actually important for China’s international trade. The “BRI” label has lost some of its significance, since many officials and project developers tend to use this label to increase the status of their projects, even though these projects might not come to full fruition or play a relatively minor role in Chinese international trade flows. Instead, our map displays only the hubs and corridors that are of actual significance to the BRI. Combined with the representation of other focal points of Chinese international trade patterns, and an overview of China’s trade position for every country in the world (in different shades of green), it becomes clear what is really important to the BRI and to China’s international trade."

Merics (Europe China think tank based in Germany) BRI map
Their intro: "MERICS offers a variety of publications to political decision makers, the business community, the media and the general public. Our portfolio includes: comments on current developments as well as analyses and in-depth studies on China. Visualizations, podcasts and mappings complement our analytical work."

Films

CCTV BRI documentary (multiple episodes)

CNA (Singapore) documentary The New Silk Road (5 seasons; very pro-PRC, reporter just goes to business parks and PRC museum sites)

Week 12: Displacements and Differential Mobilities (Mexico, United States)

Assignments

Tues Nov 21 Transnationalizing migrations

  • READ: De Leon, Jason. Introduction, Ch.s 1 and 7. The Land of Open Graves Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. UCalif. Press, 2015. (60 pp) (ebook/ereserve) **Content Notes: Description of graphic violence, dead bodies.                                                                  

 Thurs Nov 23 Thanksgiving!

DUE: Fifth 400-word Written Blog Post due Sunday Nov 26, midnight, your Moodle blog forum. Lay out your design plan for your photo essay, include a diagram or mock-up of it. What story will you tell through your photos? How will you design it to achieve an aesthetic or mood/tone and draw attention of larger audiences? What sources from the course readings will you bring in and explain?

DUE: Comments (can be audio or video) on Blog Post 3 due Monday Nov 27, midnight,  your blog partner's Moodle blog forum. Give your partner feedback on their photo essay design plan, suggest other course readings/theories, offer any tips you might have.

 

Thanksgiving Break Nov 23-24

Further Reading

Immigration and Il/legality: US-Mexico

  • Andreas, Peter. Border Games.

  • de Genova, Nicholas. 2002. "Migrant 'Illegality' and the Deportability of Everyday Life," Annual Rev of Anthro.
  • de Genova, Nicholas. Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and Illegality in Mexican Chicago. Duke.

  • Nuijten, Monique. 2004. Between Fear and Fantasy: Governmentality and the Working of Power in Mexico. Critique of Anthropology  24(2):209-230.
  • Rouse, Roger. 2002(1991). "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," in Inda and Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Blackwell. (ereserve)

Immigration and Il/legality: Elsewhere

  • Fassin, Didier. “Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France.” In Cultural Anthropology, 2005, 20(3): 362-387.

  • Ferme, Mariane. 2004. "Deterritorialized Citizenship and the Resonances of the Sierra Leonean State," in Das and Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State, SAR Press.

  • Ghezzi and Mingione. Beyond the Informal Economy, Friedman ed.

  • Hart 1992, Market and State after the Cold War

  • Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. 2005. Introduction. In Sovereign bodies: Citizens, migrants, and states in the postcolonial world . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

  • Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and exile : violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

  • ----------------. 1996 “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 11(3): 377-404.

  • ----------------.1995 “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995).

  • ----------------.1994 “Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 3(1): 41-68.

  • ----------------.1992 “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 7(1).

  • Ong, Aihwa. 2002 (1999). The Pacific Shuttle: Family, Citizenship, and Capital Circuits, in Inda and Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Blackwell. [from Flexible citizenship, a good multi-sited approach to diaspora]

  • -------------. Flexible Citizenship.

  • -------------. 2003. Buddha is hiding : refugees, citizenship, the new America. Berkeley : University of California Press.

  • Sassen, Saskia. 1999. "The De Facto Transnationalization of Immigration Policy," In Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press., p. 5-30.

  • -----------------, “Notes on the Incorporation of Third World Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Production.” In Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press, 1999, pp. 111-134.

  • -----------------, the Informal economy. In Globaliz. and its Discontents

  • Ticktin, Miriam.

Links

Jason De León

Ai Weiwei

Nicholas de Genova (controversial American anthropologist of US-Mexico migration politics)

Legal Anthropology

The (racial) politics of Immigration Law: Arizona 2010

The (racial) politics of Immigration: US Census 2010

Films

Online:

In Reed Library:

  • Maquilapolis by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre

  • Maquila a tale of two Mexicos. director: Saul Landau and Sonia Argulo; producer: Saul Landau and George McAlmon ; College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences and Media Vision at California State Polytechnic University.

    Examines the maquiladoras, U.S.-owned export factories employing inexpensive Mexican labor. Covers the displacement of peasant farmers who migrate to northern border cities such as Juarez and Tiajuana, where they endure dangerous working conditions in the maquilas for very low wages. Also examines the environmental disasters generated by these factories and the unsafe living conditions of the workers, which have resulted in a series of brutal rapes and murders of young women employees. Examines the violent rural confrontations between the Mexican Army and Mayan peasant farmers as part of the government's efforts to suppress the rebellion. Features interviews with workers, factory managers, government officials, army officers, indigenous peasants, and economists.

  • Children in no man's land [videorecording] = Niños en tierra de nadie / Impacto Films and Chicken & Egg Pictures present ; in association with the Fledgling Fund ; a film by Anayansi Prado ; produced and directed by Anayansi Prado ; executive producers, Julie Parker Benello, Wendy Ettinger, Judith Helfand Publication [Los Angeles] : Impacto Films ; Harriman, NY : Distributed by New Day Films, c2008

  • The Other Side of Immigration. 2009.

  • Al otro lado [videorecording] = To the other side / Matatena Films, en coproducción con Inova Films ... [et al.] presentan ; guión y dirección, Gustavo Loza ; productores, Gustavo Loza, Luis Granados Publication [United States?] : Unicine, [2007]

  • Miss India Georgia

Women for Sale

  • Sisters and Daughters Betrayed, 1996 (28 min)

    A report on the practice in Southeast Asia of selling women into virtual slavery for prostitution.

  • "Rape is...", 2002, 33 mins

    Featuring Eve Ensler, author and performer of the well-known Vagina Monologues, This half-hour documentary video explores the meaning and consequences of rape. This documentary looks at rape from a global and historical perspective, but focuses mainly on the domestic cultural conditions that make this human rights violation the most underreported crime in America. Considers global sex traffic in women and children.

  • Trading women. director: David A. Feingold; producer: Dean W. Slotar, David A. Feingold

    Narrated by Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie, the documentary investigates the trade in minority girls and women from the hill tribes of Burma, Laos and China, into the Thai sex industry. Filmed on location in China, Thailand and Burma, Trading Women follows the trade of women in all its complexity, entering the worlds of brothel owners, trafficked girls, voluntary sex-workers, corrupt police and anxious politicians. The film also explores the international community's response to the issue

  • Remote sensing. director: Ursula Biemann; producer: Ursula Biemann

    The sex industry has become a business without borders. As sex industries expand, they seek out new global markets, and often new and younger victims. This video essay discusses the routes and reasons women travel across the globe for work in the sex industry.

  • In the name of love. director: Shannon O'Rourke; producer: SOR Productions

    What's motivating the thousands of Russian women who sign up with agencies to meet and marry American men? From the gray skies of St. Petersburg to sunny California ranches, we see the financial and emotional pros and cons of exporting one's heart. The film grapples with the tremendous economic challenges and difficult decisions facing Russian women today.

  • India cabaret. director: Mira Nair; producer: Mira Nair

    This video examines the lives of several cabaret dancers in Bombay, India. A comparison is drawn between their lives and the life of a "virtuous wife". One of the dancers leaves the cabaret life to marry and become "respectable" at the end.

  • Looking for China girl. director: BBC Education & Training; producer: Sophie Todd

    This program raises the question, what happens when women become a rare commodity? China Girl is a documentary that explores China's one child policy which was introduced as a measure to stabilise China's burgeoning population and now has resulted in over 500,000 abortions and many more girls being killed once they have been born. The program looks at the underlying issues, from the increase of professional women in China who have rejected their traditional role, to the overwhelming lack of women in the provinces and why China's crime rate has tripled in the last 20 years, with police struggling with loutish behavior, gangs and the disappearance of young women.

  • Night stop. director: Licinio Azevedo; producer: Licinio Azevedo

    This documentary tells of the lives of eight prostitutes living in northern Mozambique. They reveal their individual stories of pregnancy, the search for a husband, unrequited love, violence and resignation. While the women are aware of the dangers of HIV and AIDS, they continue to have unprotected sex. Also illustrates the world of the truck drivers as they talk among themselves.

  • Sita, a Girl from Jambu = Bichari Sita. director: Kathleen Man; producer: Salmon Pictures

    Reveals how uneducated, rural Nepalese girls are tricked and lured into sexual slavery. Focusing on one girl's journey into the brothels of Mumbai, the film is an adaptation of a street play performed by rural Nepalese girls, whose performance is also featured in the film. This innovative blend of documentary and fiction both expands our notion of cinematic genre and extends the broader social message that people can make a difference in their communities

  • Tokyo girls. director: Penelope Buitenhuis; producer: Gillian Darling Kovanic

    This program explores the phenomenon of attractive women from the West who work as nightclub hostesses in Japan. A cheaper version of the geisha, a hostess is hired to talk and flirt with her customers. Although she is well paid, sex is usually not part of the transaction. The film traces the stories of several Canadian women.

Week 13: Social Movements: The Politics and Possibilities of Hope (Everywhere)

Assignments

Tues Nov 28 (Radical) Hope?

  • Solnit, Rebecca. "‘Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times." The Guardian, 2016. (ereserve)
  • Clitandre, Nadège T. "Notes on Radical Hope or, The Ethical Turn in Anthropology"? in Small Axe, 2021. (13 pp). (ereserve)
  • Lempert, William. Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present, Cultural Anthropology, 2018 (11 pp).  (ereserve)

Thurs Nov 30, Dec 5 Reflections and presentations

  • This is a chance for us to relax and review with a view to sparking inspiration for your final photo essay projects. 
 

DUE:  7-10 Photo, 1500-2500 word Photo Essay reflections on blogs, due Wednesday Dec 13, midnight (InDesign, Word, Powerpoint, Google Doc or Google Slides, placed in your course Google Drive folder.)

Further Reading

Radical Hope

  • Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard Univ Press, 2008. [Popova review, Brainpickings.org]
    Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story—up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this point—that of a people faced with the end of their way of life—that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’s story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse?

    This is a vulnerability that affects us all—insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions—and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.

  • Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. 2004 [written at outset of Bush's war in Iraq; Guardian Review by the author, 2016]
    Hope is an embrace of the unknown.

    This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.

    It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
  • Diaz, Junot. Under President Trump, Radical Hope is Our Best Weapon, New Yorker, 2018.
  • DeRoberts, Carolina. Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. 2017 [anthology of letters from prominent US writers during the early Trump years]
  • Refusal and Radical Hope. (Conference with Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman), 2018. (Video of the conference)

Witnessing/Rethinking

  • Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London:Verso.

  • Das, Veena. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain” and “Revisiting Trauma, Testimony, and Political Community.” In Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 38-58, 205-221.

  • --------------. 1997. "The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity," in Das, ed., Das, ed. Violence and Subjectivity. California.

  • Farmer, Paul. “Never Again? Reflections on Human Values and Human Rights.” The Tanner Lecture on Human Values delivered at the University of Utah, May 2005.

  •  Fassin, Didier. Ch. 8 Subjectivity Without Subjects: Reinventing the Figure of the Witness, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, UCalpress, 2012

  • Razsa, Maple. “Beyond ’Riot Porn:’ Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Political Subjects,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 79:4, 496-524. 2013.

  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Religion, Politics, Theology: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe.” In Boundary 2, 2007, 34(2): 149-170.

  • Social Movements

  • Albro, Robert. 2005. "The Water is Ours, Carajo! Deep Citizenship in Bolivia's Water War," in Nash, ed. Social Movements: a Reader. Blackwell. (bookstore, book reserve).

  • Ashwin Desai (2002) We Are The Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa.

  • Bello, W. Deglobalization: Ideas for a New Economy. Zed books, 2002

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” and “Neo-liberalism, the Utopia (Becoming Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation.” In Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New York: The New Press, 1998, pp. 1-10, 94-105.

  • Brecher, et all. Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity. South end press, 2000.

  • Chesters, G., and I. Welsh. 2004. Rebel Colours: “Framing” in Global Social Movements. The Sociological Review  52(3)314-335.

  • J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

  • Fisher and Ponniah, eds. Another World is Possible. Zed books, 2003 [intro article on WSF, nice summaries of main issues and debates]

  • Gibler, John. 2006. Scenes from the Oaxaca Rebellion. ZNet Commentaries , 4 August 2006.

  • Giddens, Anthony. 1998. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. London, Polity Press. [Edelman and Haug. say G. does not challenge macroecon. premises of neolib]

  • Giroux, H.A. 2004. “The Politics of Hope in Dangerous Times.” In The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy . Pp. 125-144. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

  • Michael Hardt and Antonion Negri "Alternatives within Empire" in Empire, pp. 44-66 5

  • Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004. Democracy of the Multitude. In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Pp. 328-358. New York: The Penguin Press.

  • Jackson, Jean E., and Kay B. Warren. 2005. Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: Controversies, Ironies, New Directions. Annual Review of Anthropology  34:549-573.

  • Kaplan, R.D. 1997. Was Democracy Just a Moment? The Atlantic Monthly  December: 55-80.

  • Klien, N. 2002. Windows of Descent. In Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. Pp. 3-40. New York: Picador.

  • ---------------. 2002. Windows to Democracy. In Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. Pp. 193-246. New York: Picador.

  • Nash, June. 2005. "Introduction: Social Movements and global Processes," in Nash, ed. Social Movements: a Reader. Blackwell.

  • Stiglitz, Joseph. 2002. Globalization and its Discontents. [Sr. VP at World Bank, beg. 1997-; calls for "globaliz. with a more human face" at the end]

  • Subcomandante Marcos "The Fourth World War Has Begun" Nepantla 2 (3) (first published in 1997)

  • Tsing, Anna. 2005. "A hair in the Flour," "Movements: 'Facilities and Incentives," and "Coda," in Friction : an ethnography of global connection / Princeton,  N.J. : Princeton University Press, pp. 205-244, 269-272.

  • Went, Robert. 2003. Ch. 5 Globalization Under Fire. [leftist econ. view]

  • Wignaraja, P., ed., New Social Movements in the South, Zed Books, 1993.

  • World Social Forum : challenging empires / edited by Jai Sen ... [et al.] New Delhi : Viveka Foundation, 2004  

  • Engaged Anthropology

  • Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

  • Goodale, Mark. 2006. Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights. Current Anthropology 47(3):485-511.

  • Fischer, Michael M. J. “Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.”  Cultural Anthropology, 2007, 22(1):1-65.

  • David Graeber "The Globalization Movement" in Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerug (eds) The Anthropology of Development and Globalization

  • ----------------. Direct Action.

  • Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle. American Anthropologist 108(1):38-51.

  • Nash, ed. Social Movements: An anthro reader

  • Rabinow, Paul. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp.101-128.

  • Rasza, Maple. Toward an Affirmative Ethnography. Anthropology News, September 2012
  • Speed, Shannon. 2006. At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research. American Anthropologist  108(1):66-76.
  • After the 2008 Crash
  • Anthropology News Special Issue on Global Crisis, 2009
  • Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Polity Press.
  • Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: the First 5000 Years.
  • Krugman, Paul. 2009. The Conscience of a Liberal. WW Norton press.
  • Pascal, Ulysses. 2011. Reed College Senior Thesis.
  • Quiggen, John. 2010. Zombie Economics. Princeton Univ Press.
  • Sachs, Jeffrey. 2011. The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. Random House.

Links

The Fourth World War: Debates and Critiques

Protest Globalisms (2008-12)

Regarding the Pain of Others: Shock and Images

Riot Porn and Protest Tourism
[2020: Right-wing and leftist writers accuse their opponents of using 'riot porn']

Films

  • The Fourth World War [conflicts around world, same makers as Zapatistas and This is what Democracy looks like; produced by global network of indyfilmers]

  • Showdown in Seattle (original films from Seattle Indymedia); focus on WTO

  • The Take.

    In the wake of Argentina's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, Latin America's most prosperous middle class finds itself in a ghost town of abandoned factories and mass unemployment. The Forja auto plant lies dormant until its former employees take action. They're part of a daring new movement of workers who are occupying bankrupt businesses and creating jobs in the ruins of the failed system.

  • The Globalisation Tapes (by plantation workers in Indonesia/Sumatra, as resistance to, avail online)

  • Choropampa 2002