Oct 31, 2024  
2019-20 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
2019-20 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

AN 272 Cultures, Conflict and Power


This course examines how systems of power are established through the imposition and contestation of symbolic practices both within and between cultural groups. Beginning with an examination of how the powerless have historically used deception and feigning deference as a political strategy to confront a sovereign state, central emphasis of the course is on understanding “symbolic violence,” the establishment of a sense of the “natural” to cultural constructions of identity and practice. Utilizing this notion of symbolic violence, the course investigates how the historical formulations of racial, gender and class hierarchies were developed as modern classificatory schemas of identity within the colonial context. The course ends with an ethnographic examination of power within a contemporary ethnographic situation of cultural conflict.