Required books are purchased at Akademika bookstore or ordered from online booksellers, such as amazon.co.uk. Required books are also available at the University Library (provided the item is held).
Compendia can be purchased at the “Kopiutsalget” on the lower floor of Akademika bookstore. Valid student ID and semester card must be presented on purchasing compendia. If “Kopiutsalget” has sold out of a compendium please contact the department as early as possible in the semester in order that more may be obtained.
Many of the online articles require that you use a computer within the university network. If outside the university network, open your web browser and go to UiO Network services
Seminar 1: Super-diversity, creolization and conviviality: contemporary perspectives on diversity
Teacher: Thomas Hylland Eriksen
This course explores recent perspectives on cultural dynamics and mixing in complex societies. We will look into the relationship between cultural worlds and social cohesion, ideologies of purity and mixing, and linguistic, social and cultural practices at "cultural crossroads". At the conceptual level, the term cultural creolisation will be given special attention, and it will be related to other concepts dealing with mixing, as well as its critics. Ethnographic cases to be studied include Antwerp, Indonesia, Martinique, London, Navarra and Mauritius
The course will be given in English if there is at least one non-Norwegian speaker in the group; otherwise, the language will be Norwegian.
Syllabus
Books
@ Jan Blommaert: Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes (144 sider)
@ Jacqueline Knörr: Creole identity in postcolonial Indonesia (236 sider)
@ Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham: Encountering Difference (200 sider)
Articles
Steven Vertovec: Super-diversity and its implications, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (2007): 1024-1054.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Creolization in anthropological theory and in Mauritius. In Charles Stewart, ed: Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek, Calif: Left Coast Press. Last ned
Jeremy MacClancy: Down with identity! Long live humanity! In Eriksen and Schober, eds., Identities Destabilised. London: Pluto 2016.
Seminar 2: The anthropology of corruption, crime, and mafia
Teacher: Theodoros Rakopoulos
The contemporary world is dominated with issues of security and transparency. State, market and NGO discourses and practices are increasingly occupied with understanding and isolating such “corrupting” and impure forces for social and economic life. In this nexus, mafias and organized crime groups are both a territorial and a transational force. Be it Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the Yakuza, Mexican or Colombian cartels, the Triads or the “Russian” mafia, such groups exercise a violent, extortive and parasitic enterprise that influences directly or indirectly the lives of millions. While perceived as inherently corrosive and dangerous, the social life of mafias fascinates the popular imagination and imagery, with much literature and visual arts work speculating on the issue.
This course explores precisely the complexity of a phenomenon that is only ostensibly remote and confined in specific sociocultural and geographic circumstances (be those Sicily or Moscow), but is in fact pervasive of global capitalism’s operations. We shall examine the territorial, localized life of organized crime groups, attentive to underline those factors of deep significance to personhood and gender, which make up their ritual life. We shall visit and explain the history of similar but distinctive phenomena (such as banditry), but also make connections to the invisible and international influence of money laundering operations that are driving organized crime today. The centrality of violence will be compared to that of silence, conspiracy and indeed social consent (of persons, but also institutions, such as banks).
Premised on the potential of anthropological critique, the course will problematize the limits of legality and its relation to illegality. It will show how corruption is produced as a power discourse, how crime is a concept central to institutional life, with a stratifying and exploitative life of “its” own. The anthropology of crime and criminalization moves beyond legalistic approaches, in order to provide a fuller understanding of legal systems and their externals, an issue extremely relevant to our lives.
Learning outcomes
- Insight into the social life of crime, criminality and mafias
- Knowledge of aspects of the anthropology of law and the state
- Knowledge of the history and ethnography of organized crime
- Significance of law and its opposites to understand contemporary social life.
Skills
- Familiarity with approaching central phenomena such as criminality and “corruption”
- Appreciating the meanings of transparency, a key feature of public discourse in Scandinavia and Beyond
- Ability to distinguish and understand different phenomena situated outside the Law
- Ability to critically analyze legal systems, legislated social life and its pariahs
- Critical thinking regarding the exoticization of violence, the mafia and “criminal life”
Competencies
- Capability to engage with social scientific debates on crime, corruption and the law, orally and in written
- Critically examine links between different significations of law and legality
- Achieve an independent critical mind concerning the law and legal systems
- Increased ability to reflect critically on issues of corruption
Syllabus
Book
@ Theodoros Rakopoulos, From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated mafia land in Sicily. London and New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Sider: 240
Texts
Introduction
Jane and Peter Schneider, 2008, The anthropology of crime and criminalization, Annual Review of Anthropology, 37:351–73.
Letizia Paoli, The paradoxes of organized crime, Crime, Law & Social Change 37: 51–97, 2002.
Corruption
Tone Kristin Sissener, 2001. Anthropological perspectives on corruption, CMI Working papers.
Akhil Gupta, 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined, American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 375-402.
Entrepreneurship
Sanchez, Andrew. 2010. Capitalism, Violence and The State: Crime, Corruption and Entrepreneurship in an Indian Company Town. Journal of Legal Anthropology (2010) Vol. 1, No.2:165-188
Michael J. Watts, 2016. The mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860–1960; a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs, by Anton Blok, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 67–91.
Nancy Ries, 2010, Business, Taxes and Corruption in Russia.auburn.edu
Gender
Jane Schneider (2006) Women In The Mob, Global Crime, 7:1, 125-131.
Lilith Mahmud, 2012. In the name of transparency: Gender, terrorism and masonic conspiracies in Italy. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4, p. 1177–1208.
The social crime
Anton Blok, 1972, The peasant and the brigand: Social banditry reconsidered, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 494-503.
Paul Sant-Cassia, 1993,Banditry, Myth, and Terror in Cyprus and Other Mediterranean Societies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 773-795.
Gift and sociality
James Diego Vigil, 2003. Urban Violence and street gangs, Annual Review of Anthropology, 32: 225-242.
Pipyrou, Stavroula. 2014. Altruism and Sacrifice: Mafia Free Gift Giving in South Italy. Anthropological Forum, 24(4): 412-426.
Ritual and accumulation
Nancy Triolo, 1993. Mediterranean exotica and the mafia “Other”, or problems of representation in Pitrè’s text. Cultural Anthropology 8(3): 306-316.
Jane and Jean Comaroff. 1999. Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony, American Ethnologist, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 279-303.
Deborah Puccio-Den 2001. The Ethnologist and the Magistrate: Giovanni Falcone’s Investigation into the Sicilian Mafia, Ethnologie française, /1 (Vol. 31) pp. 15-27.
Violence and consensus
Vesco, Antonio. 2017. The cultural foundations of political support in eastern Sicily: Mafia clans, political power and the Lombardo case. Modern Italy, Vol. 22, No. 1, 55–70.
Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2015. Which community for cooperatives? Peasant mobilizations, the Mafia, and the problem of community participation in Sicilian co-ops, Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 71 (2015): 57–70.
Time and consumption
Jason Pine, Economy of speed: The new narco-capitalism, Public Culture 19(2): 357-366.
Andrew Walsh, 2003. "Hot Money" and Daring Consumption in a Northern Malagasy Sapphire-Mining Town. American Ethnologist, Vol. 30, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 290-305.
Mafia and antimafia
Jane and Peter Schneider, Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily Author(s): Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 4, 501-520.
Theodoros Rakopoulos, From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated mafia land in Sicily. London and New York: Berghahn, pp. 1-83 and 122-141.
Renate Siebert, 2000. Mafia and antimafia: Concepts and individuals. ecpr.eu.filestore
Seminar 3: Recent anthropological approaches to the present past
Teacher: Paul Wenzel Geissler
Any ethnographic field can - and maybe should - be unfolded to reveal layers of pastness (and futurity). With inspiration from contemporary anthropological and neighbouring humanities, and literature and film, we will look at anthropological research – including your master’s projects - with a particular focus on the past and its presence.
Anthropology has been interested in history for some decades. 1980s anthropology had shown that (contrary to structural-functionalist presentism) any anthropological field is historically constituted, that the ethnographic present made up of pasts (and futures)(e.g. Johannes Fabian, Eric Wolf). The current ‘crisis of time’ that some thinkers consider characteristic of the 21st-century (e.g. Francois Hartog, Byung-Chul Han) has further stirred the anthropological fascination with history, and more fundamentally, time and temporality.
The discovery of historicity and the past took anthropologists in diverse directions: the anthropology of history (e.g. Charles Stewart, Eric Hirsch) thus reflects on different ways of reckoning historicity; historical anthropology took the ethnographic imagination into the past (e.g., the Comaroffs); and ‘memory studies’ – deeply rooted in older philosophical and psychological literature – focused on narratives, individual cognition and collective processes of remembrance, opening its own subfield of social and cultural inquiry.
More recently, anthropological ‘turns’ - material, ontological, affective, archaeological - led anthropologists across regions and fields to hone in on the physical presence of the past, and the question of how the present is made and remade from the matter of the past. Beyond simple genealogical reference and chronology, this opened for the study of temporal layering, breaks and looping. And it drew attention to past modes of anticipation, past futures discernible from traces; as well as the broader realisation that present matter always is also future past, remains-to be.
Initially, this material-temporal interest found a natural terrain in post-socialist, post-colonial and post-industrial settings, where decline – often in the absence of rebuilding – bared the past-ness of landscapes, architectures and objects. However, once the ethnographic senses are alerted to the ‘scent of time’, the interplay between remains, memories and commemoration, past, present and future can be explored in domains as diverse as left-wing activism or traditional crafts, industrial pollution or the commemoration of the Holocaust. Ethnographic sensitivities are opened to the pasts that – sometimes inchoate and ephemeral, at other times violent or with manipulative force – constitute the present and the social practices that engage past matter and thereby continuously recreate the contemporary.
The aim of the course is to jointly reflect upon the presence of pasts in our fields and lives, and explore relevant methodological skills and theoretical thinking.
Syllabus
Books – await further notice on Required books
@ Teju Cole (2011) Open city, NY, Random House (also in Norwegian).
@ Patrick Mondiani (2014(1997)) Dora Bruder, Berkeley, University of California Press (also Norwegian/ French)
@ Wainaina Binyawanga (2011) One day I will write about this place, London, Granta.
Texts in Readers (kompendium)
Benjamin, Walter: “A Berlin Chronicle”, pp 3-60 in Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings. New York: Schocken books, 1986 [1932].
Geissler, P.W., Kelly, Ann H. and P. Mangesho: “Amani”, pp 106-73 in (eds.) Geissler, P.W., Lachenal, G., Manton, J. and N. Tousignant: Traces of the Future. An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa. Distributed for Intellect Ltd, 2016
Gordillo, Gastón R.: “Introduction”, pp 2-28 in Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press, 2015.
Hunt, N.R., Geissler, P.W., Lachenal, G., Manton, J., N. Tousignant: “Introductions”, pp 9-39 in (eds.) Geissler, P.W., Lachenal, G., Manton, J. and N. Tousignant: Traces of the Future. An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa. Distributed for Intellect Ltd, 2016
Proust, Marcel: “Overture”, pp 3-51 in Marcel Proust: Remembrance of things past : 1. Volume one Swann’s way. Penguin Classics, 1983 [1913].
Stewart, Kathleen: “Prologue and Space of culture”, pp 3-40 in “A space of the side of the road”. Princeton University Press, 1996.
DeSilvey, Caitlin: “Postpreservation: Looking past loss”, pp 1-22 in Curated decay: Heritage beyond saving. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Online artickles
Dawdy, S. L. (2010). "Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity." Current Anthropology 51(6): 761-793.(29)
Edensor, T. (2005). "The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(6): 829-849.(19)
Geissler, P. W. and A. Kelly (2016). "Field station as stage: Re-enacting scientific work and life in Amani, Tanzania." Social Studies of Science 46(6): 912-937.(25)
Geissler, P.W. (2017): “Ethnography as Re-enactment: Performing Temporality in an East African Place of Science”, pp 187-210 in (eds.) Akinori Hamada and Mikako Toda: How Do Biomedicines Shape People’s Lives, Socialities and Landscapes? Senri Ethnological Reports 143.
González‐Ruibal, A. (2006). "The Past is Tomorrow. Towards an Archaeology of the Vanishing Present." Norwegian Archaeological Review 39(2): 110-125.(15)
Harrison, R. and E. Breithoff (2017). "Archaeologies of the Contemporary World." Annual Review of Anthropology 46(1): 203-221.(17)
Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2009). "Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge*." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1): 1-18.(17)
Pétursdóttir, Þóra and Bjørnar Olsen: "Introduction: An archaeology of ruins”, pp 1-29 in Ruin memories: materiality, aesthetics and the archaeology of the recent past. London/New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ebscohost.com
Schwenkel, C. (2013). "Post/socialist affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam." Cultural Anthropology 28(2): 252-277.(25)
Tousignant, N. (2013). "Broken Tempos: Of Means and Memory in a Senegalese University Laboratory." Social Studies of Science 43 (5): 729-753 (21)
Stoler, A. L. (2008). "Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination." Cultural Anthropology 23: 191 - 219.(27)
Films
Patrick Keiller (2010) Robinson in Ruins.
Joshua Oppenheim (2012) The act of killing.
Arnon Goldfinger (2011) Die Wohnung.