DA4780 Political Anthropology: War and Society

War is a generative force in world politics and culture. Events at the frontline can affect life back at the home front. This course explores how cultural narratives of war (war stories) are affected by the events of war and how national/group identities respond to war—especially when things don't go as expected. This class appropriates the globalization concept and redefines it as a general property of the “international,” as relations of interconnection and mutual constitution. It looks at armed force and war through the lens of globalization, arguing that by means of the interconnections it occasions, war is transformative of world politics and of the people and places it reaches out and touches. Throughout, it underlies the interconnection and the play of relations across often widely divergent spaces and populations. In these ways, the course opens up the international as a distinct social space of connection and constitution and anatomizes the place of war and the military in this space. Students will present material on particular regional examples as developed in the course of the class. Prerequisites: None.

Lecture Hours

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Course Learning Outcomes

Broadly speaking, we’ll consider two levels of analysis at work. First are the ways in which localities become interconnected with other localities in and through war, shaping and conditioning one another (e.g., Iraq & the US since 2003). The second level of analysis concerns not relations between localities directly but between localities and the larger context in which they are situated. Interactions between localities form a larger field of relations, which shapes and conditions peoples and territories on a transregional or even global scale (e.g., during the Cold War, Third World leaders could “play” one superpower against the other to gain aid and other support; the new transnational terrorism of the post-9/11 world.)