CMCL-C 417: Power and Violence: Political Systems in Ethnographic
Perspective
Class Number: 25684

TuTh, 1:00 PM-2:15 PM, TE F258

Fulfills COLL S&H Requirement


Instructor: Jane Goodman
E-Mail: janegood@indiana.edu
Office: Mottier Hall 205
Phone: 855-3232

Different political systems are founded and maintained by varying
combinations of overt violence and more subtle workings of ideas and
ideologies.  Through cross-cultural case studies, the course will
examine how coercion, persuasion, consensus, and dissent operate in
and through the politics and performances of everyday life.  We will
ask: How does domination become internalized, such that people
willingly submit to it and actively reproduce it?  What are some of
the ways that opposition and dissent operate in the everyday lives
of ordinary people?  What constitutes resistance, and in what ways
is it connected to power?  In what ways is power bound up with forms
of knowledge?

During the first half of the course, we engage different approaches
to these questions by social theorists including Marx, Engels,
Bourdieu, and Foucault. We focus our inquiry around issues of
structure and agency, drawing on case studies in Pakistan, Malaysia,
and Western Europe. In the second half of the course, we turn our
attention to how forms of knowledge have been complexly intertwined
with strategies of power. We look at how technologies as diverse as
the census, the museum, soap advertisements, and architectural
styles participated in new ways of imagining inequality, and we
consider the ongoing legacies of these technologies in the
contemporary world – from such seemingly “benign” products as
National Geographic to the devastation of ethnic violence in the
Rwandan genocide.

Readings may include:

Gourevitch, Philip.  1998.  We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We
Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Farrar
Strauss Giroux.

Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins.  1993.  Reading National
Geographic.  Chicago.

Maggi, Wynne. 2001. Our Women Are Free! Gender and Ethnicity in the
Hindukush. Michigan.

Ong, Aihwa.  1987.  Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline:
Factory Women in Malaysia.  SUNY Press.


Students who enrolled in the senior seminar C401 “Identity and
Difference” in Spring 2006 may not take this course.