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General information
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Study points: 5.00
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Language: English
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Category:
Lectures
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Duration:
26.0 hours
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Periodicity:
Taught in the first semester
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POC:
POC Antropologie
Taught by
De Boeck Filip
Van Wolputte Steven
Content
This course will focus on the following topics:
1) processes of state collapse and civil conflict;
2) the problem of violence as a consequence of state collapse or civil conflict;
3) strategies of survival, resistance and resiliency as responses to the state crisis;
4) local mechanisms for resolving emerging conflicts
1) Processes of state collapse and civil conflict: Today, many people in Africa, Asia, Latin-America, Eastern- Europe or the Balkan live in worlds that are falling apart in front of their very eyes. The basis of their social relations is being disrupted, and the shared epistemological truths on which these relations rest do no longer apply. This necessarily imperils people's ability to continue to construct a significant reality: the breaking up of the 'taken-for-granted' quality of a world that goes without
saying for those who experience, live in and belong to it jeopardizes cohesive cultural systems and destroys embodied cultural identities and habituses. How do people cope with the fundamental ruptures in their lives and identities in the face of a collapsing reality that grows more complex, chaotic
and violent every day and that seems to announce the end of social life and the societal fabric as most of us understand it? How can we expand the cultural metalogue in order to understand how people live on a daily basis -individually and collectively- these profound changes in social, cultural, political,
economic, moral and aesthetic patterns?
The course will discuss the disintegration of political and administrative structures and state institutions, and the hiatus between local political structures and an autocratic state control with a dysfunctional economy.
2) Violence as a consequence of the disintegration of the social fabric: Attention will be paid to different kinds of violence, including: covert and subtle forms of social, economic and symbolic violence, maintained in socio-economic and cultural relations that are given form in hegemonic constraints (through a variety of technologies of power deployed by modern states and by enterprises -such as mining companies- and cultural proselytizing agencies -such as missions); intergroup
violence (e.g. pastoralist-agriculturalist disputes related to the control of natural resources); internal violence (e.g. alcoholism, child and spouse abuse, drugs, as a result of cultural disorientation, caused e.g. by state-controlled displacement: Australian Aboriginals, Amerindian reservations); the manifest
brutality of physical forms of violence (in a violent autocratic system with accompanying state repression, or in civil wars: Zaïre, Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Cambodia).
3) Local mechanisms for resolving conflict: Attention will also be given to culture-specific mechanisms for dealing with conflict: through internal mediation (e.g. the role of clan-elders, as in Somalia), external mediation by intermediary local, national or international intermediary institutions (such as missions, NGOs, lobbyist groups and organisations on behalf of indigenous peoples within the boundaries of the modern state), or (the often unsuccessful) mediation by international policy- making
bodies (UN, IMF, FAO...). Finally, we will discuss local conceptualisations of violence, as well as locally constructed concepts that enable to recast and translate externally imposed situations of violence and conflict in comprehensive local terms (e.g. through discourses of witchcraft, or of 'honour').
4) Strategies of survival, resistance and resiliency: What happens if civic culture or civil society has completely collapsed? Will be discussed: various possible sources of resilience, mitigating against a total 'war of each against all'; the different ways in which order, morality, and social control are relegated to local- level village, kinship, and co-operative units; the limitation of social co-operation and control to small pockets of society in the absence of a generalized, overarching civic and political
culture.
Next to strategies of (political and/or armed) resistance, the course will also devote attention to other, innovative, survival strategies used to cope with political and societal crisis. They encompass the construction of an informal gift economy, or allegiance to voluntary associations such as smuggling rings. In addition to these economic survival strategies, cultural survival strategies offer frameworks for conflict resolution, resiliency, moral reinterpretation and social survival and co-operation at the local level. Cultural strategies include indirect protest through popular art, music, ritual and (oral) literature, as well as the continued emergence of voluntary associational groupings, such as new religious (healing) groups and healing churches. When the focus of economic and social interest is localized and problematized by a particular ethnic, religious, or informal economic grouping, new strategies for attaining socio-economic goals and resolving crisis arise.
Course Material
Suggested handbooks: Gledhill, J. 1994 Power and its Disguises. Anthropological
Perspectives on Politics. London/Boulder, Colorado: Pluto Press
Chabal, P. & J.-P. Daloz 1999 L'AFrique est partie! Du désordre comme instrument politique. Paris: Economica.
Vincent, J. (ed), 2002, The Anthropology of Politics. A Reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critique. Oxford: Blackwell.
Course activities
- Students follow the lectures and actively participate in the discussions;
- Students prepare a paper or presentation based on the course’s content.
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B-KUL-S0D66A Political Anthropology
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