Government 6202/American Studies 6202/Anthropology 6102

Political Culture

Government 6202/American Studies 6202/Anthropology 6102/ History 6202/Sociology 6200

Spring 2018

Richard Bensel Monday, 5:00-7:00 E-mail: [email protected] Room: White 114

Course Description

This course will explore the relationship between popular belief, political action, and the institutional deployment of social power. The class will be roughly divided into three parts, opening with a discussion of the material foundations of ideation in socio-economic “practice.” The middle section will connect socio-economic practice to political ideation, including symbolism and group identity. The last portion of the course will consider the impact of both culture and political ideation on institutional structure and legitimation. This section will also trace how political regimes can influence, coming full circle, the material foundations of cultural ideation. For our purposes, political culture will usually be viewed as a “spontaneous social formation” beyond the intentional control of any group, class, or institution. The forms that together compose political culture include language, religion, clans, family, patriotism, and class. While all of these are certainly influenced by the exercise of state authority and other organizations, their reproduction through time (including changes in their defining characteristics) depends for the most part on processes and decisions made by numberless, nameless individuals. These individuals, in fact, are often unaware that they are responsible for both maintaining and changing the political culture within which they live. Thus, we are primarily interested in the more popular aspects of political culture whose dynamics lie beyond the intentional design of elites. Seen from this perspective, the notion of an “elite political culture” is a bit of an oxymoron, if that term were to mean a self-conscious and intentionally designed ensemble of meanings and practices oriented toward the maintenance of elite unity and the advancement of elite interests. However, this notion still has utility as a foil for our examination of its opposite, “popular political culture.” For example, when we compare the political cultures of different societies, the variation is much greater among the practices of popular cultures in these societies than it is among their respective political elites. Much of the relatively limited cultural variation among elites is the direct result of contact between elites in different societies. And much of that contact is intentionally designed for that very purpose (e.g., in the sense of formally sponsored and organized cultural exchanges). There is a reason, after all, that most diplomats wear western-style suits in settings where they meet their counterparts from other nations. This convergence on costume not only reflects the western origins of the contemporary world-system (grounded in asymmetric power relations) but also the need for a conventional “dress code” (whatever the costume) that signals a shared set of meanings, symbols, and expectations as a foundation for trans-national diplomacy. For reasons that we hope to uncover during the semester, “popular political culture” is both more internally resilient and autonomous than elite culture while generating practices and beliefs that often become the defining attributes of their distinctive political identities as a people and nation. While states and their elites often strive to shape this popular culture, it is this (always partial) autonomy as a “spontaneous social formation” that most interests us. 2

______Course Requirements:

A research paper will not be required. Instead, seventy-five percent of the course grade will be based on a take-home final conducted as if it were a small version of a doctoral qualifying examination. An additional tem percent will be allocated according to the amount and quality of individual contributions to class discussion. The remainder of the course requirements will be satisfied in the form of short weekly papers (described below).

A student can choose to prepare a research paper of (to be negotiated) length in place of the take-home exam. This research paper should be intended for presentation in a professional forum outside of Cornell and/or publication in a professional journal.

Weekly paper assignments:

There will be weekly paper assignments which will be due by midnight on the Saturday before the class session on Monday. These papers should address five primary questions concerning that week’s reading:

1) In a few sentences, briefly summarize the central argument of each of the readings.

2) At what level and in what way can these arguments be reconciled? By “reconciled,” I mean integrated into a unified theoretical framework.

3) At what level and in what way do these arguments diverge? By “diverge,” I mean where do they begin to rely on different assumptions with respect to, for example, the direction of causality, the relationship between belief and behavior, and/or how society and individuals are interconnected.

4) Which of the theoretical frameworks you have now described is most compatible with your own approach to the study of political culture? Why? You may not have adopted a theoretical approach yet. If that is the case, just explain which of the readings is most intuitively appealing to you.

5) What question would you like posed in class? For example, were there passages in the text that seemed particularly ambiguous, confusing, or controversial?

These weekly papers should not be more than five hundred words (single- spaced, two pages at most). You can, of course, write more than that but you will also have an opportunity to bring up things in class discussion as well.

Final exam:

The final exam will have seven questions divided into two parts. Students will answer two questions from each part. The exam will last seventy-two hours with the expectation that students will write for no more than twenty- four hours (roughly the format of the doctoral examinations in the department). There is no minimum or maximum page limit on this exam. Students are expected to draw upon all the readings for the course in answering these questions but are not permitted to bring outside readings into their discussions. 3

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General Theories of Culture

First Session (January 29): Introduction.

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Second Session (February 5): The Social Foundations of Political Culture.

Discussion questions:

Throughout the semester, we will be analyzing political culture along two axes. One axis is structured along a continuum between the "bottom-up" (largely spontaneous) generation of culture and its "top-down" elite/institutional manipulation and construction. The other axis plots the creation of culture from, at one end, materialist origins in social practice and, at the other, idealist social constructions that operate (largely) independently of that practice. As you might expect, these two axes can be combined in several ways and every combination oversimplifies what is a complex political reality. But they are nonetheless useful as devices for grouping together and contrasting the literature we will study. We will start this week with Weber’s notion of “social meaning,” as evidenced in and as a structural frame for social transactions. Weber intended his concept to serve as the micro-foundation for a vast theoretical superstructure encompassing all varieties and aspects of social life, including the origin and operation of institutions, the emergence of political legitimacy, and religious experience. Whether or not he succeeded does not particularly concern us because his concept of “social meaning” so powerfully relates to similar approaches that we will study this semester. We will also examine Weber’s work as an attempt to provide a lexicon and taxonomy for the study of society, as well as sampling his interpretation of religion. With respect to the latter, you might pay particular attention to the relation of religious content and form to (a) Weber’s conception of rationality and (b) his interpretation of the origins of modern capitalism.

Required readings:

Max Weber, Economy and Society, Volume 1, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, ed’s. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 3-90. Richard Swedberg and Ola Agevall, The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Social Sciences, 2016), pp. xi-xv and the entries for “bureaucracy,” “calculation,” “capitalism,” “charisma,” “cultural significance,” “culture,” “domination,” “economic action,” “Economy and Society,” “habitus,” “instrumentally rational action,” “legitimacy,” “meaning,” “orientation to others,” “rationality,” and “social action.” Max Weber, Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), Foreword by Anne Swidler, Chapters 1 through 3, 6, and 14 through 16.

Recommended: 4

On Weber

Max Weber, trans. Talcott Parsons, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). Max Weber, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, Ill.”: Free Press, 1952). Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

On the study of culture generally:

Stephen Skowronek, “The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes: Racism, Liberalism, and the American Political Tradition,” American Political Science Review 100:3 (August 2006): 385-401. Charles Tilly and Robert E. Goodin, "It Depends," Dietrich Rueschemeyer, "Why and How Ideas matter," and Pamela Ballinger, "How to Detect Culture and Its Effects," in Charles Tilly and Robert E. Goodin, ed's., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3-32, 227-51, 341-59. Lisa Wedeen, “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science,” American Political Science Review 96:4 (December 2002): 713-728. William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 152-174.

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Third Session (February 12: Social Reality, Performance, and Practice.

Berger and Luckmann will help us construct a "bottom-up" conception of culture by describing the process through which people come to share a common understanding of the social world. This shared understanding is suspended between individuals and thus dependent on others' comprehension of an individual's action and intention. The resulting "social construction of reality" both enables and limits the range of political possibility when viewed from the vantage point of the individual. Their seminal interpretation of social reality will serve as an anchor for the concept in this and several other sessions in the semester. While Berger and Luckmann are primarily concerned with how people come to receive and internalize a shared understanding of social reality, Goffman focuses on how individuals use that shared understanding as a stage upon which they “perform” before others. In a sense, Goffman invites us to view the social world from the perspective of the sender of meaning, as opposed to the receiver. Somewhat paradoxically, Goffman’s emphasis on “performance” threatens to erase individual identity altogether in that every social situation involves an inauthentic (but not entirely fictitious) representation of self. Here we might ask whether or not Goffman’s notion of performance, with its endless attending adjustments of self-representation as responses to an audience, can also encompass a consistent and independent construction of self-identity. Put another way, is there any space in Goffman’s social world for the expression of an individual identity unmediated by the social expectations and receptivity of an audience? Or are we, in even the privacy of our own minds, simply “performing” before a social world that has so imprinted itself on our psyches that the western notion of a unique individual identity is a bit of a mirage? A shared sense of social reality enables “social practice” in which, as 5 with Goffman, people both perform roles arising from the expectations of others and improvise their performances in pursuit of their personal goals and desires. Much of the conception of social practice that underpins this course was first offered by Pierre Bourdieu. He proposes a “habitus” of lived social experience as both a frame within which people attach meaning to their actions and decisions and a setting in which people make strategic and tactical choices (which are themselves constrained and defined by the habitus). In some ways, this dichotomy sets out a distinction between agency and structure in popular (and political) culture. But, in another way, Bourdieu’s perspective appears to obliterate this distinction altogether. How would you decide between these two interpretations? What are the implications of that choice, in both cases, for causal analysis in social science research?

Required readings:

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), Preface and pp. 1-128. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Penguin, 1990), Preface, pp. 13-82. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-95, 159-197.

Recommended:

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), Prefaces and pp. 3-105, 185-209. Michael G. Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Lloyd L. Weinreb, Legal Reason: The Use of Analogy in Legal Argument (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Culture as a Spontaneous Social Formation.

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Fourth Session (February 26): The Emergence and Construction of a Political Imaginary.

Political culture is concerned, above all else, with the generation of collective moral values, popular explanations, and individual social commitments. All these things enter into the production of individual preferences as well as social expectations. How might all of these elements fit into one theoretical framework? Charles Taylor offers us an answer that emphasizes the evolution over time of massive social frames of imagination and interpretation that, in turn, spawn their own revisions over time. While logic plays a large (but not quite all-determining) role in these processes, there is also some room for agency. Is there space for instrumental agents, both individual and collective, in his theoretical framework? Lynn Hunt, on the one hand, presents a plethora of agents who are all, we might say, intending to construct a political imaginary for revolutionary France. However, while they are certainly pursuing a goal, their methods could only be problematically described as “instrumentally rational.” In fact, they simultaneously seem to know what they are doing and to have little or no idea of what might be result of their actions. Geertz, on the other hand, presents us with monarchs and kings who, unlike Hunt’s revolutionaries, are clearly agents who manufacture a political imaginary through their 6 performances. However, we might also contend that they are thoroughly seduced by that political imaginary, so much so that their processions should not be described as “instrumental performances.” One of the fundamental questions that we will address in this and some of the following weeks is whether and how a political imaginary is absolutely necessary to politics and, if so, whether and how we might manipulate its content and influence.

Required readings:

Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 1-196. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), Prefaces and pp. 1-119. Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (N.Y.: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 121-46.

Recommended:

Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, Trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1973), Preface and pp. 379-398. Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 1-12, 169-241, 319-45. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1959).

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Fifth Session (March 5): Material Practice and Political Culture.

One of the major preoccupations in contemporary social science is the tension between “structure” and “agency” in human behavior. On the one hand, structure denotes the constraints within which people make decisions. Very narrow constraints imply that those decisions are predetermined by features of their social and material environment. On the other hand, agency marks out the range of possibilities from which humans actually (and, in some sense, “authentically”) choose. When that range is very wide, humans intentionally and freely determine their destiny. Ultimately, scholarly contention over the relative contributions of structure and agency in human affairs probably turns on whether and how we are willing to entertain “free will” as a meaningful concept. We will only begin to scratch the surface of that debate this week. Geertz’s notion of “common sense,” for example, identifies those interpretive logics of a culture that are so beyond dispute that they are automatically and routinely entrained by events and situations. We can often readily recognize when they are in play when the culture is very different from our own. But can we also do that for our own culture? Geertz’s conception of “deep play” takes this perspective on culture into a particular social situation and suggests, much as Bourdieu might, that the communication of social meaning is both enabled by and constructs individual behavior. Agency in this context appears to be highly constrained. On the one hand, Hayek contends that agency (individualism) should be expanded by, among other things, strengthening skepticism of social norms. On the other hand, his notion of a “spontaneous social order” seems to thickly and completely orient the behavior of individuals toward other members of society in a way that 7 might preclude that skepticism. Hayek, of course, paid far more attention to the “economic market” than to other aspects of culture. However, he also intended his thoughts on the nature of social information and the consequent limits of knowledge to apply to other spontaneous orders such as language, morals, and religion. How could we apply his notions to these other social orders? What does this application tell us about the ability of a “central authority” to manipulate and control political culture? Scott takes us more directly into politics as he constructs a sweeping indictment of the “unnatural” nature of central state planning and the “hubris” of those who believe that they can know and thus realize the needs of the people better than the people, often spontaneously, can do themselves.

Required readings:

Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural System," in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (N.Y.: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 73-93. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), Prefaces, pp. 412- 453. Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 33-91. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 1-146, 309-57.

Recommended:

Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Christina Petsoulas, Hayek’s Liberalism and Its Origins (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1-77. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge, ed., Mary Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1973). Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015). Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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Ideation, Language, and Political Culture

Sixth Session (March 12): State, Society, and Ideological Hegemony.

Discussion questions: 8

Many scholars would contend that the way in which we view the world is unavoidably "ideological" because all social action assumes a vocabulary, a conception of social order, and a causal logic resting upon a particular understanding of human motivation. Because our knowledge of these things is quite contentious and uncertain, we must, in some sense, "choose" the ideological lens through which we construct and then move within the world. However, even though we might say that an individual can choose their ideological lens, we should also recognize that all states more or less attempt to shape that ideological lens for their citizens. And in some instances this attempt becomes so all-encompassing that formal political action and discourse becomes increasingly divorced from what much of the personnel of the state itself considers reality. This, too, is political culture. The first reading focuses on the generation and maintenance of a "state ideology" that governed elite political practice in the Soviet Union during the years following the revolution. Embedded in this state ideology, as you will see, is both an "objective" (meaning depersonalized and generally shared) conception of political reality specifying the duty of the individual in nurturing the revolutionary future and an unavoidably "subjective" personal choices with respect to what that duty entailed in particular situations. Merleau-Ponty wrestled with the resulting tension between an ideological commitment to the certainty of history and the inevitable uncertainty associated with individual action in bringing that history into the present. All states generate ideological justifications for their sovereignty. But exactly how they do this (including whether or not there are a variety of ways of doing this) is unclear. Can we, for example, clearly distinguish between civil society and the state in such a way that we can say that the latter “acts” upon the former (or vice versa)? If so, how does this acting take place? If not, then where does the ideological justification for sovereignty originate and to what does it apply? Gramsci provides some answers to these questions, including the spontaneous (almost unconscious) generation of ideational hegemony. But he also places the Communist Party outside this hegemony in such a way that the party can at least intentionally act within it. What, in his view, are the similarities and differences between the party and the state with respect to the generation of ideational hegemony? With respect to the exploitation of political opportunities within that hegemonic system? I suggest that you read the Anderson volume before engaging the Gramsci texts in order to gain some sense of exactly what was at stake in the Prison Notebooks and how Gramsci’s writings cohere (or not) as single theory.

Required readings:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. John O'Neill, Humanism and Terror: The Communist Problem (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000), Part 1: Terror, pp. 1-98. Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (New York: Verso, 2017), pp. 1-175. Antonio Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935 Ed. D. Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 53-75, 189-274, 323- 378.

Recommended:

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Scribner, 1941). Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, Slavoj Zizek, trans., (London: Verso, 2007). David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 9

2007). Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999). Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, P.S. Falla, trans. (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2005). S.A. Smith, “Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of “Superstitious” Rumors in the People’s Republic of China, 1961-1965,” American Historical Review 111:2 (April 2006): 405-427. Mark Roseman, "National Socialism and the End of Modernity," American Historical Review (June 2011): 688-701. Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2013). Rebecca Slayton, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013).

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Seventh Session (March 19): Theoretical Approaches for Recovering Social and Political Reality from the Archives.

Culture can be interpreted (and implicitly defined) from the “top down” or the “bottom up.” If looked at from the top down, we impose general categories and logical systems that at least go beyond and may even be alien to the experience of the people whose culture we are studying. If viewed from the bottom up, we must rely upon the concepts and logics of the people themselves. In The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg uses the official records of the Inquisition (which imposed their own categories and logics on popular experience and belief) in order to retrieve an otherwise unrecorded and inaccessible cultural world. In effect, we “read through” the Inquisition’s alien accounts to reach the unwritten (and thus largely lost to us) popular culture of the Italian peasantry. Ann Laura Stoler, on the other hand, interrogates the construction of those categories and logics as, for example, products of the anxieties arising out of uncertain knowledge of the colonized people of Indonesia under Dutch administration. While Ginzburg reads through the archives to reach the common people, Stoler reads through the archives to reach the cultural and ideological understandings of the producers of the documents now residing in the archives. As a result, she forces us to reconsider the very notion of “colonial rule” in that the often conventional political economic perspective of well-defined state policy is transformed into a frequently “phantasmal” imagination. Within that imagination, state officials creatively construct a social reality that then becomes the (fictive) object of their policies.

Required readings:

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), Translators’ Note, Preface, and pp. 1-172. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 1-139, 181-234.

Recommended:

Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the 10

Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Steven J. Brams, Biblical Games: Game Theory and the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Daniel N. Posner, “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review 98:4 (November 2004): 529-545. Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock, “History and the `Pre’,” American Historical Review (June 2013), pp. 709-37. Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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Eighth Session (March 26): Religion and Politics.

Religion is one of the most powerful and salient features of almost any political culture. The reason for this salience is, of course, the popular impulse or needs that religion uniquely (or mostly so) satisfies. Because of this deep connection to individual beliefs and needs, religion usually structures and acts upon politics in the modern world, as opposed to the other way around. So the question for this week is: What is the relation between (a) the beliefs and needs satisfied by religion and (b) the influence religion has upon politics and political culture? While we are particularly interested in the direction of the causal arrows that connect religion, culture, and politics, we might also ask whether some forms of religious belief simply rule out certain forms of politics (and vice versa). When people attempt to reconcile religious belief and modern conceptions of society, do their actions reflect: (a) the resiliency of popular culture in the face of state authority; (b) self-interested pursuit of other goals in which religion is clearly secondary or even unimportant; or (c) both of these, in which case the social legitimacy of both the state and the religion are undermined? More fundamentally, how should we understand the relation between (popular) “belief,” (state) “authority,” and socio-political change? Gregory’s Unintended Reformation proposes at least three different things: (a) a theory of how ideational constructs and beliefs descend from the distant past into the present in ways that we, as inhabitants of the present, do not recognize; (b) a critique of modernity in which modern ideational constructs and beliefs are interpreted as “failing”; and (c) a (modest) prescription for rectifying that failing through reform of the biases and prejudices of academic communities. Among the many questions we might ask of this book, perhaps the most important is whether or not these three things represent logically separable projects.

Required readings:

Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 87-125. 11

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1959), pp.8-213. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 1-73, 298-387.

Recommended:

Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015). Nandini Chatterjee, “Muslim or Christian? Family Quarrels and Religious Diagnosis in a Colonial Court,” American Historical Review (October 2012), pp. 1101-22. Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003). Ludwig Feuerbach, translated by George Eliot, The Essence of Christianity (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989). David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). ______

Collective Identity and the State

Ninth Session (April 9): Identity and Rationality.

The basic unit in rational choice theory is the “preference” defined as a relation between two or more alternatives. When an individual chooses one of these alternatives, the individual is said to have expressed a “preference” for that alternative (thereby establishing the relation between the two or more alternatives that were available to the individual). Preference relations held by individuals are subsequently analyzed as they are played out in institutionally-structured games, ultimately producing collective outcomes in the form of laws, public policies, and so forth. The origin of those preferences is usually unaddressed or assumed in rational choice theory. Another, not incompatible, approach to politics is “path dependence” in which individual expectations drive most of the action. There individuals expect, everything else being equal, that the vast bulk of a political setting to be more or less identical with the last time they entered it. This political setting is comprised of things like the stability of a regime, the most intensely-held preferences of political actors, and the social allocation of power. These expectations, in the first instance, dramatically narrow the range of options that individuals regard as feasible and they discard the rest (often those other options do not even occur to them). As Michael Chwe, one of the two authors we read this week would hasten to point out, individual expectations are shaped by an acute awareness of the expectations of other individuals. But, here too, the origin of preferences lies largely outside the political model. Kalyvas, on the other hand, gives us a very complex model in which political preferences in a civil war are very malleable and are shaped by the tactical decisions of the contending forces. They are, however, emphatically rational in the sense that civilians (and part-time partisans) constantly evaluate the relative strength and intentions of the contenders before deciding to cooperate or resist their demands. No one, not even (evidently) 12 the commanders of the contending forces, have ethical or ideological commitments that stand in the way of or otherwise shape these evaluations. What we want to do this week is to explore the ways in which the origins of individual preferences, the sequencing of political action (e.g., the creation and presentation of choices), and the characteristics of a political setting (e.g., the management of an internet system) can be combined. Political culture is concerned, above all else, with the generation of moral values, popular explanations, and individual social commitments. All these things go into the production of preferences as well as expectations. How might all of these elements fit into one theoretical framework?

Required readings:

Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), Preface and pp. 3-99. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1-145. David Skarbek, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Acknowledgments and pp. 1-168. Charles Efferson, et al., “Female Genital Cutting Is not a Social Coordination Norm,” Science 349:6255 (September 25, 2015): 1446-7.

Recommended:

Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread—The Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2014). Andrew Curry, “Seeking the Roots of Ritual,” Science (January 18, 2008): 278-80. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, "Foundations of Societal Inequality," Science 326 (October 30, 2009): 678-9. ______

Tenth Session (April 16): War, Violence, and Political Culture.

Many, if not most, theories of international relations and political behavior suggest that violence is a strategy that peoples and nations choose after rationally calculating the advantages and disadvantages of other alternatives. From this perspective, political culture is a means through which that choice is socially implemented through the enforcement of conformity and the suppression of dissent. However, we could also view political culture as the primary reason why these strategic calculations are performed in that, for one thing, a political culture determines the normative values that attend the evaluation of competing alternatives. But even more than that, political culture may often be seen as overriding strategic calculation altogether. For example, there are four cultural formations that have been responsible, in one sense or another, for most political violence over the last two and half centuries: religion, ethnicity, nationalism, and political ideation/ideology. To be sure, political leaders can invoke these cultural formations in order to mobilize a state and nation behind a calculated choice to use violence to achieve a political end. But, even in those instances, the spontaneous elements that make those formations useful for that purpose also make them largely uncontrollable. One of the most important theoretical problems in the study of 13 political culture is how we might explain the emergence of a deep emotional commitment to a “nation” and a “people.” These commitments clearly drive much political action and belief and yet remain outside most contemporary political analysis. The major exception is the study of nationalism, where the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, nationalism is often treated as a “given” in political action, a factor whose origins are not investigated. On the other hand, nationalism is also considered a social construction that then can be intentionally deployed. What are the limits of this intentionality? Put another way, how much of nationalist feeling is a spontaneous (meaning outside intentional design) product of popular political culture? And how much of nationalist feeling is, in fact, generated by hostility between competing political cultures (as opposed to an indigenous generation of collective identity)? This week we address these issues within three radically differing levels of analysis: global civilizations; the material origins of nationalism; and popular political identity.

Required readings:

Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), Preface and pp. 19-121, 301-21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 2006), Preface and pp. 1-229. Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1-71, 175-212.

Recommended:

Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F., Anthea Bell trans., (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2009). Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2010). Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1997). Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). David D. Laitin, Nations, States, and Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). ______

Eleventh Session (April 23): Ideology and Imperialism.

In Said’s Orientalism “scientific workers” actively translate personal experience into an ideological vision of the world. Would Said grant these “scientific workers” agency (in the sense of being able to act intentionally within and upon a hegemonic culture)? Are their several conceptualizations of agency mutually exclusive? Would those “scientific workers” have claimed that agency, regardless of what Said thought they were doing? Lurking 14 somewhere in Said’s argument is this uncomfortable notion that we can never know, in the practice of daily life, what larger project we are serving even as we attempt to serve no end other than knowing more about the world than we did the day before. Fanon postulated an “authentic identity” that could only be realized when individual consciousness had so thoroughly embraced that identity that it was simply unconsciously inhabited (and that this inhabitation was the very definition of “freedom”). This could only be achieved by the colonized through a rejection of the imperial identity imposed on them. And that rejection could only be achieved by something so cathartic (i.e., violence) that they, first, lose themselves in political action and, then, coming out on the other side, discover (not quite the right word) that they have become their “authentic” (and consequently liberated) selves. This argument reduces individuals associated with the colonizing power to the status of objects who can be instrumentally exploited for this purpose and, in that way, makes “dialogue” with the colonizing power counter-productive. In fact, the possibility of negotiation should be sabotaged as counter-productive. It also reduces the colonized to the status of “psychiatric patients” for whom the shock treatment of violence should be prescribed even if they are opposed to the prescription because they are not capable of judging what is good for them.

Required readings:

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), Preface to 25th anniversary edition, pp. 1-28, 111-97. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), pp. 1-239.

Recommended:

Timothy Mitchell, "Society, Economy, and the State Effect" and Stuart Hall, "Popular Culture and the State," reprinted in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, ed's., Anthropology of the State (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 169-86, 360-80. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy trans. Ben Brewster (1971) in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, ed's., Anthropology of the State (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 86-111. ______

Twelfth Session (April 30): Ideology, Materialism, and the Manufacturing of the Public Sphere.

Arendt’s work is difficult to summarize in a paragraph. However, we are primarily interested in how she characterizes the origin and characteristics of a totalitarian state, on the one hand, and the ideational content and impulse of revolution, on the other. From the first perspective, she can be usefully compared and contrasted with Merleau-Ponty and Gramsci whom we read earlier in the semester. From the second perspective, she usefully provides a foil for the rational choice approaches to understanding social action previously offered by Chwe and Kalyvas. The public sphere was a fundamentally important concept for Arendt. Here, however, we look to 15

Habermas for a theoretical account of its origins in mercantile capitalist relations. Would Arendt accept this account as compatible with her own stress on bourgeois class relations with the state?

Required readings:

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), Prefaces to Parts 1-3 and chapters 5, 6, 8, 9 (pp. 123-84, 222-302). Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), Introduction by Jonathan Schell and chapters 4 and 5 (pp. 132-206). Jurgen Habermas, trans. Thomas Burger, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 1-140.

Recommended:

Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Andrew Lawler, "Beyond the Yellow River: How China Became China," Science 325 (August 21, 2009): 930-43.

______

Thirteenth Session (May 7): The Construction, Interpretation, and Perception of the Architecture of Society.

We began this semester with an examination of the social construction of meaning and reality. We then looked at ideation, the construction of group identity, and cultural formations such as religion and nationalism. In those sessions, we were particularly interested in the relation between structure and agency and the relative autonomy of political culture from elite control (particularly the state). This week we complete the circle by examining how the architecture of the state shapes and otherwise interacts with popular culture. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault examines the relationship between state-organized violence, displays of political authority, and the shared understandings of the people as they react to both violence and these displays. He interprets popular reactions to these things as something that fundamentally changes over time as particular historical contexts compel variation in its manifestation. Taking us in another direction, Disorderly Families analyses the pleas that individuals made to the state asking either for leniency or a redress of injustice with respect to other members of their families. While we are interested in what these pleas can tell us about how they conceived their relationship with the state, we are even more interested in what kinds of things, events, and arguments they believed were relevant in making their 16 case. Each letter, in effect, is an abstracted segment of an individual’s life, processed and presented in a way that the individual (or their letter- writer) believed the state could understand. How did these individuals develop this conception of what the state could understand? What does the “everything left out of the letter” tell us about what the state simply did not want to see in their lives?

Required readings:

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 3-69, 195-228. Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault (edited by Nancy Luxon), Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 1-49, 123-37, 251-73, and sample the letters as you wish…the ones referred to in the text are on pp. 77, 80-2, 90-3, 96-9, 144-6, 147-52, 158-63, 167-9, 178-9, 201-2, 212-4, 216-9, 226-7, and 274).

Recommended:

Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Richard Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Michel Foucault, History of Madness (Routledge, 2009). Mary Gibson, “Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison,” American Historical Review (October 2011), pp. 1040-63. Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1970). Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).