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Professor Julia Paley

Social Work Office: 3823 School of Social Work Building


Social Work Phone: (734) 615-3367
Anthropology Office: 230D West Hall
Anthropology Phone: (734) 615-0413
e-mail: jpaley@umich.edu
office hours: TBA
and by appointment
When making an appointment, please confirm the location of our meeting
class meetings:
Thursdays 12pm-3pm
Meeting location:
DEMOCRACY: ETHNOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY
SW870.001/ANTHRCUL 658.001
Winter 2007
University of Michigan
As countries throughout the world have undergone transitions to democracy, scholars
have often focused their attention on regime shifts, political parties, and formal
institutions to explain political change. Yet experience in regions as diverse as Africa,
Asia, Latin America, Europe, and countries of the former USSR, tell us that actually
existing democracy is more complex than the creation of government institutions and
more ambiguous than recent celebrations might suggest. As peoples in many parts of the
world live at the intersection of neoliberal economics, development discourses, resurgent
nationalisms, and technocratic states, the time is ripe to explore perspectives on
democracy that derive from anthropological insights and ethnographic research. Such
approaches connect local, national, and international processes; reveal the role of
symbols in creating public meanings; critically examine public discourses; and view
political processes with attention to the forms of power they enact.
This seminar offers new ways of viewing democracy by exploring the intersection of
theoretical currents and ethnographic research. Students will read a series of rich
ethnographic accounts on themes including participation, international aid organizations,
globalization, social movements, and electoral processes. The ethnographies will also
generate discussion about engaged research and the work of indigenous intellectuals. We
will relate these accounts to theoretical currents including governmentality, hegemony,
deliberative democracy, public sphere, civil society, and transnationalism. Readings will
cover many parts of the world, and are intended to interest students working in both the
United States and internationally.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
(1) Class participation. This is a seminar that relies on your active participation.
Please make at least one (and hopefully quite a few) thoughtful comment(s) that
are grounded in the readings and contribute to analysis at each session.

(2) On-line commentary. Please post responses to the readings by Wednesday


evening and come to class having read other students comments. Your
contribution should include reflections on the readings and questions for class
discussion.
(3) Readings. Please do all required reading listed below in time for class
participation and on-line comments.
(4) Facilitating discussion. Each week, one student will be responsible for giving a
short analytic overview of the reading, providing necessary background
information, and raising questions for discussion (total time: 15 minutes). The
following week, the student will post on line a written summary including: his or
her comments, a record of the class discussion, ongoing questions for
deliberation, and a supplementary bibliography.
(5) Written work. A written assignment will be due at the end of the semester. You
have two options: (1) write a paper in which you use course readings to analyze
your own empirical work. Keep in mind that the assignment is primarily about
synthesizing and using theory, not collecting primary data, so this project will
only work if you already have original research materials related to democracy.
(2) If you do not have your own primary data, you can do a take-home exam. The
exam will consist of a set of shorter identification/definition questions, plus a
number of longer essay questions that ask you to synthesize the readings from the
class.
In both assignments, please write in a professional way -- you are honing
your skills in using theory and aiming to create a compelling scholarly account.
Please keep a photocopy of all written work you submit, and please back up your
computer files.
READINGS
Obtaining Texts
Required books are available for purchase at Shaman Drum bookstore, 734-662-7407.
Copies will be on reserve at the School of Social Work library. Articles will be available
on CTools.
Required Books
- Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday
Life
- Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban
Community
- Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy
of Late Colonialism

Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality


Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in PostDictatorship Chile

READING SCHEDULE
1

January 4

Introduction

January 11

Ethnography and Social Theory of Democracy


Required Readings
Overview
Julia Paley, Toward an Anthropology of Democracy
Recommended readings:
- Lawrence Whitehead The Vexed Issue of the Meaning of
Democracy, Journal of Political Ideologies (Vol. 2, No.
2) 1997.
- David Held, Models of Democracy

3 January 18

Public Sphere and Deliberative Democracy


Public Sphere
- Jrgen Habermas, The Public Sphere
- Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy
- Michael C. Dawson, A Black Counterpublic?:
Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black
Politics.
Deliberative Democracy:
- Jrgen Habermas, Deliberative Democracy
- Jane Mansbridge, Using Power/Fighting Power: The
Polity
- Iris Marion Young, Communication and the Other:
Beyond Deliberative Democracy
- Julia Paley, Accountable Democracy: Citizens Impact
on Public Decision Making in Postdictatorship Chile
Recommended:
- Geoff Eley, Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures:
Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century

4 January 25

Hegemony
Readings:
- Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans
Produce Apathy in Everyday Life
- Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to
Cultural Geography (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Culture and Ideology, pages 47-59.
- Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (selections)
Recommended:
- Raymond Williams, Ideology, Hegemony, and
Structures of Feeling from Marxism and Literature

5 February 1

Gender, Race, Ethnicity


Is Multiculturalism a Solution?
Readings:
- Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora
- Elizabeth Povinelli, The State of Shame: Australian
Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous
Citizenship
- Charles Hale, Does Multiculturalism Menace?
Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity
in Guatemala
Recommended:
- Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (selections)

6 February 8

Politics and Identity


Steven Gregory, Black Corona

7 February 15

Governmentality and Social Movements


Required Readings:
- Nikolas Rose, Governing advanced liberal
democracies in Foucault and Political Reason, pp. 37-64.
- Colin Gordon, Governmental Rationality: An
Introduction in The Foucault Effect.
- Susan Brin Hyatt, From Citizen to Volunteer: Neoliberal
Governance and the Erasure of Poverty
- Arjun Appadurai, Deep Democracy: Urban
Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics
Recommended Readings:

- Michel Foucault, Governmentality


- Adrienne S. Chambon, Allan Irving, and Laura Epstein
(eds), Reading Foucault for Social Work
- Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic
Citizens and Other Subjects
- Graham Burchell, Liberal Government and
Techniques of The Self OR Peculiar Interests: Civil
Society and Governing The System of Natural Liberty
8 February 22

Participation and Community Organizations


Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social
Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile

March 1 no class meeting vacation week


9

March 8

Development Agencies, Democracy Promotion, and


Elections
Required Readings:
- Harry G. West and Scott Kloeck-Jenson, Betwixt and
Between: Traditional Authority and Democratic
Decentralization in Post-War Mozambique
- Thomas Carothers, The End of the Transition Paradigm
- Steven Sampson, The Social Life of Projects: Importing
Civil Society to Albania
- Ruth Mandel, Seeding Civil Society
- Andrew Apter, IBB = 419: Nigerian Democracy and
the Politics of Illusion
- Kimberley Coles, Election Day: The Construction of
Democracy through Tecnique
Recommended Readings:
- Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in
the Making of Modern India
- William Miles, Elections in Nigeria: A Grassroots
Perspective
- William Fisher, "Doing Good? The Politics and AntiPolitics of NGO Practices." Annual Review of
Anthropology, Volume 26, 1997

10

March 15

Colonialism and Citizenship


-

Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject:


Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism

11

March 22

The State and Transnationalism


Readings:
- Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (selections)
- Begoa Aretxaga, A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary
Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in
Spain
- James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, Spatializing States:
Toward An Ethnography Of Neoliberal Governmentality
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Anthropology of the State
in the Age of Globalization
- Katherine Verdery, Transnationalism, Nationalism,
Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe Since 1989
- Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the
Global Cultural Economy

12

March 29

Transnationalism
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of
Transnationality

13

April 5

Toward an Anthropology of Democracy revisited


Readings of manuscript forthcoming from School of
American Research Press

14

April 12

Conclusions: Ethnographic Perspectives on Democracy

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