ANTH3400 6.0 The Politics of Recognition: Citizenship and Civil Society
Time: Mon. 11:30-2:30 VH 3009
The idea of civil society has stirred social imaginations and political aspirations across the globe. It has also been the casualty of state responses to the "war on terror". The goal of this course is to examine the nature and the relevance of notions and discourses of civil society and citizenship and the lexicon of related constructs ("moral community", "public sphere", "democracy" and "civility") to contemporary societies.
Some of the questions we will explore include: What are the problems, paradoxes and possibilities presented by the importation of the ideas and practices of civil society and citizenship into different ethnographic contexts? What is the appeal of civil society and who sets the standards? Who is included or excluded and why? What does the language of citizenship really mean in contemporary societies? Through a variety of ethnographic case studies we will analyze the intersections of civil society and citizenship with gender and sexuality, race, religion, ethnicity, nationalism and class.