Transcript GG lecture 3 web

Grounding the Global:
Anthropological Perspectives
Professor: Ieva Jusionyte
[email protected]
Office Hrs: Weds 10:30-11:30 &
Thurs 2-3pm in Tozzer 216
TF: Shuang Lu
[email protected]
Office Hrs: Tues 2-4 in Tozzer 315
9/21 Lecture outline
Module I: Political Anthropology
Case study: Migration and the U.S.-Mexico border
• Ethnographic study of the state (Trouillot)
• Jason de León’s book Land of Open Graves (Part I)
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Multisited, multispecies ethnography
Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD)
Hybrid collectif,
State of exception & necroviolence
• ”Who is Dayani Cristal” film excerpts
• First written assignment (due Friday, September 30)
Political organization - groups of people that are responsible for
public decision-making and leadership, maintaining social cohesion
and order, protecting group rights and ensuring safety from external
threats:
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Band
Tribe
Chiefdom
State
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“Anthropology may not find the state ready-made, waiting for our
ethnographic gaze in the known sites of national government. Government
institutions and practices are to be studied, of course, and we can deplore
that anthropology has not contributed enough to their study. However, we
may also have to look for state processes and effects in sites less obvious
than those of institutionalized politics and established bureaucracies.” (133)
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“National states are likely to hold on to their power to define political
boundaries. First, in a context marked by the obvious incapacity of national
states to function as cultural containers, the protection of borders becomes
an easy political fiction with which to enlist support from a confused
citizenry. Second, the right to define boundaries remains a fundamental
component of sovereignty to which national governments must cling in an
age in which many state functions are being performed elsewhere.” (133)
From: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close
Encounters of the Deceptive Kind." Current Anthropology 42(1): 125–138, 2001.
United States Army soldiers and Mexican soldiers guarding the international border (International
Street) at Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
"Prevention through deterrence" (PTD)
http://humaneborders.org/news/documents/death_handout_2013_download.pdf
http://www.humaneborders.info/app/map.asp
• State of exception
(Carl Schmidt, Giorgio Agamben)
• Necroviolence
• Hybrid collectif
Next class 
MODULE I
Political Anthropology: Migration and the U.S.-Mexico Border
9/28Borders, Security, Migration
Required reading:
•Jason De León, 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the
Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. (Part II)
Recommended reading:
•Oscar Martínez, 2014. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the
Migrant Trail. New York: Verso. Pp. 49–65.
Q&A with Jason de León (via Skype)