300136 Anthropology of (Extra) Ordinary Politics (S) (WiSe 2016/2017)

In his book “Anthropology, Politics, and the State” (2007) Jonathan Spencer has raised the question, “what happened to the anthropology of politics?” Although he dates the decline of political anthropology in the 1970s and notes that during the last two decades the sub-discipline seems to be on the road of recovery, nevertheless his question is still pertinent. Thus whereas the problem with classical political anthropology was that it defined politics rather too narrowly – i.e. separating politics from culture, and negating the importance of values in political practice – today the trivialization of power has lead to extremely broad definition of politics, identifying it as everything and everywhere. This raises new dilemmas, because “if everything is ‚political’ what word can we use to mark out that special area of life which people themselves refer to as ‘politics’?” (Spencer, 1997: 13). Spencer’s proposition is simple, we must pay close attention as to what politics is for the people in particular contexts and particular time, and trace its highly volatile manifestations in the sites of the ordinary: „from mass rallies to village arguments, in some cases into houses and families and through the particularity of everyday practices“ (Spencer, 1997: 9). This proposition is not something revolutionary or new, because anthropology was always preoccupied with the mundane and with the everyday claiming that “lives outside of the ordinary, become emptied of experience, lose touch with life” (Das, 2007: 6). However it further begs for a set of questions about: what actually is the ordinary? What constitutes everyday life and everyday politics? More importantly what is the difference between the ordinary and extraordinary? When does the ordinary turn out to be extraordinary and vice versa? Or formulated in a different way how and when does violence interrupt the ordinary, “but is still part of the everyday” (Das, 2007: 7)?
This seminar attempts to find answers to the above posed questions and aims to problematize politics, the ordinary as well as violence, and their mutual relationship. In the first part of the seminar we will examine separately the three main concepts upon which the course is based: politics, everyday and violence. In the second and third sections we will focus at concrete case studies, which highlight both how violence penetrates and destabilizes the everyday but also how people during extraordinary times attempt to assemble a normal flow of life and invest efforts to return to normality.