ANT 217: Anthropology of Law
This is an introductory course on anthropology and law. The course is designed to introduce the key concepts, issues, and methods of legal anthropology as a specific field of study in relation to the larger history of the discipline. The course explores how anthropological works understand and examine the legal and social orders, political and normative authorities, frames of rights, regimes of crime and punishment, and forms of justice-seeking.
ANT 216: Racketeers, Smugglers, and Pirates: Anthropology of Illegality
This course explores anthropological approaches to the study of illegal activities, economies, and networks. Going beyond the state-imposed categories of legality, it examines how the binaries of legal/illegal, formal/informal, official/unofficial, licit/illicit and private/public are contingently produced, experienced and challenged by various actors. By exploring ‘illegal yet legitimate’ activities and structures, we discuss multiple moralities, inequalities, precarities, and forms of politics that illegalities rely on, enable, and also contest. The course brings together recent ethnographies of racketeering, mafia and anti-mafia movements, drug cartels, piracy as well as human and contraband smuggling.
ANT 209: War, Trade, Aid: Anthropology of Global Intervention
The course explores various forms of interventions into human life and society. These interventions range from humanitarian war to political regime change, humanitarian aid schemes, as well as transnational regimes of legal and illegal trade. While these interventions differ in the kind, scale, and scope of their operations as well as material and ideological aspirations, the course examines how they have in common and contingently enable each other. It first overviews conceptualizations of humanitarian intervention and looks at certain humanitarian aid schemes. It then unpacks the ways in which international military intervention is justified through international law as well as particular cultural and moral discourses. Finally, it explores transnational regimes of legal and illegal trade and how transnational trade can be thought of as certain forms of global intervention.
ANT 352: Protest, Power and Authority: Topics in Political Anthropology
This course explores ethnographically the social and cultural practices through which the exercise of power is legitimized, authorized, and contested, examining such topics as street politics, collective action, resistance movements, alter-globalization mobilization and digital protest. We first overview different conceptualizations of power, authority and politics. We look at the ways in which particular concepts – such as hegemony, symbolic capital, subjectivity, discipline or governmentality– have been developed to understand and do politics. We then focus on ethnographic case studies to examine how different articulations of power and authority make specific forms of political protest possible (or impossible) on the ground.
ANT 6064: Evidence and Uncertainty: The Politics of Law and Science
This graduate seminar explores the production and politics of legal evidence, scientific proof, and uncertainty. It unpacks the ways in which technical-scientific knowledge production processes are mobilized within the legal field, and enable certain legal and political outcomes while making others impossible. Drawing on the fields of political and legal anthropology, science and technology studies (STS) and critical human geography, it brings foundational texts investigating epistemological and ontological conditions of evidence, certainty, and uncertainty together with the recent ethnographies of legal and technoscientific controversies.
ANT 6150: Proposing Ethnographic Research
This graduate seminar aims to assist doctoral students to develop proposals for their dissertation research and for grants. Throughout the seminar, the participants will be guided step by step to produce effective proposals for anthropological fieldwork. The seminar is designed as an intensive writing workshop that is based on sharing one’s work in a timely manner, and also on peer discussion.