Kings and Criminals: Figurations of Sovereignty

ANTHRO 2679 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course starts by asking how anthropology has understood sovereignty, as theoretical object and political process. Its focus then expands to ask what is at stake in asking about how sovereignty is founded, sustained and imagined? How have scholars posed these questions and, in so doing, related their findings both a) to philosophical inquiries into the ontology of politics and b) to colonial and imperial projects? The aim will be not to define sovereignty but to understand its theories and discourses as symptomatic of both constitutive and historical processes of social life. A central concern of the course is how sovereignty is embodied, hence a focus on figuration. Close attention will be paid to the ways in which theorists have grappled with the material worlds of sovereignty – crowns, ritual, flesh and so on – in part to enable students to construct a methodological toolkit to apprehend and analyze sovereign forms.