AP/ANTH 3410 6.00 Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Us and Them
The world of the 21st century is so often thought about, if not arranged, in terms of things called “nations”. And this happens in countless different ways and different levels: the lofty rhetoric of politicians “addressing the nation”, the daily map showing us a “national” weather forecast, the demand that one declare and disclose a nationality in order to cross a border, even the mundane LeafsNation bumper stickers patrolling the city. What exactly does this idea of “nations”, in all these different forms, really mean?
For the anthropologist, this is an important issue of cultural analysis. In this course we think about these ideas of nations and nationalism from a socio-cultural perspective. This means that we think about nations and nationalism not as referring to some natural or self-evident category, but as products of culture and society. Along the way we consider the closely related, but equally cultural, concepts of “ethnicity” and “race”. These three ideas (race, ethnicity, and nationalism) play a central role in understanding the creation and mobilization of group identities in the world today.
Anthropologists study how culture builds national, racial, and ethnic categories, and how meanings, ideas, and expectations get ascribed to such categories. In many contexts, we increasingly find such group identities/categories taking on a polarized “Us” vs. “Them” form. At the same time, we can consider other crucial variations on nationalist ideas, including anticolonial nationalist movements as well as concepts of Indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately this is a course that explores that different ways that people are situated as subjects in the world, socially, culturally, and politically.
Course Director: A. Chaudhuri - akc@yorku.ca