240032 SE BM5 Ethnographic reading: Political anthropology (2023W)

During this course, students will be reading selected chapters from Eric Wolf's crucial book "Europe and the People Without History" and writing academic papers about those chapters to obtain deep knowledge about the relationship between anthropological theory and ethnographic research. The course has three learning objectives. First, students gain insight into the relationship between ethnographic descriptions and theoretical discussions in general in anthropology, and in particular in political anthropology. Second, students learn to recognize and evaluate the structure, argumentation, and style of argumentation of ethnographic monographs. Third, students will develop their academic reading and writing skills, especially those necessary to analyze a monograph’s arguments and construct an original idea in response to it, in such a way that the text is of interest to anthropologists and social scientists.