300097 Ethnic Group, Caste and Nation: Anthropological Perspectives (S) (WiSe 2017/2018)

This series of lectures, I critically introduce various theories as well as ethnographic “realities” on nation, ethnic group, tribe, caste, and indigenous people: the sort of group categories or “imagined communities” whose membership is largely defined by one’s birth or origin. The leitmotif of the lectures is the supposedly problematic proposition “no ethnic group can exist objectively”. In the first lecture I introduce the diversity of what would be called “ethnicity” nowadays, by using various classical ethnographies from Africa, mainland Southeast Asia, Amazonia, and Papua New Guinea. In the second lecture, classic theories on ethnic groups, categories, and boundaries (Barth, Moerman, and Mühlmann among others) are critically reviewed, to introduce the above proposition. In the third lecture I introduce various theorizations of “caste”, from Shrinivas to post-Dumonian ones, to show the continuity between ethnic group or “tribe” and caste. In the fourth lecture I discuss classic theories of nation-state in the 1980s (Gellner and Anderson in particular) and criticism toward them. In the fifth lecture, I deal with the issue of internal diversity within nation-states, partly by comparing the case of two Asian non-post-colonial countries, Japan and Nepal. In the last lecture I introduce several alternative perspectives on what we usually see as “ethnicity” issues (Clastres, Scott, and Viveiros de Castro among others).

1. The diversity of “ethnic” constructions: from classic ethnographies
2. “Ethnic” categories and boundaries: classic theories and its consequences
3. “Caste”: functionalist, structuralist, and post-structuralist theoritizations
4. Theories of “Nation-States”
5. Nation-states, sociocultural diversity, and indigeneity
6. Beyond “ethnic” imagination