Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: CULTURES OF DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY

Department: Anthropology

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Distribution Group: Distribution Group II

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This country is split between two distinct political worldviews. These worldviews defined how you are supposed to interpret issues ranging from whether health care is a right to how we as a country should treat immigrants. How did we get here? Are the debates we are having the only ways to debate these issues, or do other countries have different kinds of political debates? In this class, we take a broader global view on four ethnographic and philosophical questions central to democracy that is being reconfigured by new forms of autocracy in different countries. These questions are: What does democratic representation involve? How does a nation become and stay democratic? What is a government’s obligations to its citizens? And lastly, what are a citizen’s obligations to their nation – what constitutes a model citizen? In this course, we are going to address all three questions from an ethnographic perspective, exploring the cultural assumptions that underlie different countries’ answers to these questions. We will explore how and when culture matters, asking whether political debates in Chile can ever be same as those in Kazakhstan or in the United States. In addition, we will examine how people discuss politics in the United States to look at what is American about politics here, paying particular attention to the assumptions inherent in public accounts of democracy in media, polling, congressional hearings, and so on. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for ANTH 327 if student has credit for ANTH 527.