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Social Theory 2017 Syl
Social Theory 2017 Syl
Social Theory 2017 Syl
250
Social Theory and Analysis
Spring 2017 MIT
Tuesdays 11-2 Room E53-354
Dr. Stefan Helmreich Anthropology
Office: E53-335Q Telephone: 39343
Office hours: TBD email: sgh2@mit.edu
Course Description
This subject presents a survey of social theory from the 17th century to the present. We
focus on the historical contexts out of which theory arises, the utility and limitations of
older theories for present conditions, and the creation of new theory out of contemporary
circumstances. We keep an eye on how theories help us think about science and
technology as infrastructures upon which institutions depend and that in turn shape and
are shaped by social and cultural forms.
Requirements
This is a reading and discussion seminar. Two students are assigned each week to lead
discussion. Everyone else must write a 3-4-page response paper on the readings. These
papers must be circulated to the class by midnight the day before our meeting. Post
them to the subject Stellar site: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/21A/sp17/21A.859/. On the
landing page, on the left, click Forum. This will take you to the forum for 21a.859. Once
there, find (or, if youre first on the site, create) the relevant topic (e.g., THE SOCIAL
CONTRACT AND LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM) and upload (either using NEWTOPIC or
POSTREPLY) a Word, PDF, or text file styled YourLastNameSession#.
ACTIVITIES FRACTIONS
Class Participation one third
Class Discussion Leading one third
Response Papers one third
Response papers may take the following alternative forms:
1) UNDERSTANDING. Select a passage from the reading that strikes you as puzzling.
Rewrite the passage in your own words. Analyze what your version does better and
what it fails to capture of the original. The goal is to identify the stakes of the arguments,
historical or social perspectives of the author, and the degree to which arguments are
specific to their contexts or are generalizable.
2) APPLICATION. Find an item in the newspaper or in a current journal that relates to
the week's reading. Apply the analysis of the week's reading to the item.
3) EXTENSION. Take your own research project, or experiences you have had in a lab
or work or other situation, and apply the week's reading to it; doing this with different
weeks' readings can help you gain multiple perspectives on your own research interests.
Required Texts
Required books as starred [*] below. Open-access books as well as book chapters,
articles, fragments, ephemera on Stellar site:
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/21A/sp17/21A.859/
1
1. February 7
INTRODUCTIONS
2. February 14
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM
Collier, Jane, Bill Maurer, and Liliana Suarez-Navaz. 1995. Sanctioned Identities: Legal
Constructions of Modern Personhood. Identities 2(1-2): 1-16.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762. The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality. Pocket, 5-26, 46-54, 68-71.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Penguin, 1-57, 79-
123, 175-194, 257-278, 307-328.
Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle,
and the Experimental Life. Princeton, 3-26, 80-109.
3. February 28
MARX AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Editorial. 1846. You Cannot Unite Voice of Industry, the Peoples Paper, Organ of the
New England Working Mans Association, May 15: http://library.uml.edu/clh/all/voi05.htm
(for context, look to Dublin, Thomas. 1993. Women at Work: The Transformation of
Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. Columbia, second edition)
I.1 The Two Factors of the Commodity, I.2 The Two-fold Character of the Labour
Embodied in Commodities, I.3 The Form of Value or Exchange-Value, I.4 The
Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, IV The General Formula for
Capital, VI The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power (302-343), XV Machinery
and Modern Industry (403-417), XXVI The Secret of Primitive Accumulation (431-
434)
2
Stallybrass, Peter. 1998. Marxs Coat. In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in
Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer. Routledge, 183-207.
Engels, Friedrich. 1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
excerpted in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (734-759)
Wolf, Eric. 1982. The New Laborers. In Europe and the People without History.
California, 354-383.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. State and Civil Society. In Selections from the Prison
Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated from the Italian by Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International, 206-276.
Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism and The Baptism of
Money and the Secret of Capital. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South
America. North Carolina, 13-38, 126-139.
Supplemental
Gandhi. Monhandas K. 1966. Machinery. In Gandhi for 21st century: Man V. Machine,
ed. Anand Hingorani. Bhavan s Book University, 1998, 1-4.
Nkrumah, Kwame. 1967. African Socialism Revisted. Paper read at the Africa Seminar
held in Cairo at the invitation of At-Talia and Problems of Peace and Socialism:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/1967/african-socialism-revisited.htm
Bataille, Georges. 1967. The Meaning of General Economy, and Laws of General
Economy. In The Accursed Share, Volume I: Consumption. Zone, 19-41.
Baines, John M. 1972. Los Siete Ensayos. In Revolution in Peru: Maritegui and the
Myth. Alabama, 79-103.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique
of Political Economy, second edition. Blackwell, 1-23.
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House,
https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf
3
4. March 7 to be re-scheduled for another day in same week
DURKHEIM, MAUSS, COMMUNITIES OF SENTIMENT, NATIONS
Durkheim, Emile. 1893. The Anomic Division of Labor and The Forced Division of
Labor. In The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by W.D Halls. Free Press, 1984,
291-322.
Durkheim, Emile. 1912. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in
Religious Sociology. Free Press, 1995, 1-95, 99-103, 111-113, 231-241.
Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. 1903. The Problem. Primitive Classification.
Translated and edited with an Introduction by Rodney Needham. Chicago, 1963, 3-9.
Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Translated by Jane Guyer. Hau, 2016: http://haubooks.org/the-gift/
Renan, Ernest. 1882. What is a Nation? Translated by Martin Thom. In Nation and
Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha. Routledge, 8-22.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. 1983. Introduction. The Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge, 1-14.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. Whose Imagined Community? In The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, 3-13.
Supplemental
Alatas, Syed Farid 2011. Ibn Khaldn. In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major
Social Theorists: Classical Social Theorists, Vol I, ed. Ritzer, George and Stepinsky,
Jeffrey. Chichester. Wiley & Sons, 12-29.
Comte, August, 1848. A General View of Positivism. Translated from the French by J. H.
Bridges. Stanford, 1-7, 64-81, 227-302.
Layne, Linda. 1999. Foreword (Rayna Rapp) and The Child as Gift. In Transformative
Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture. NYU, xi-xix, 1-27.
Friedland, Roger. 2011. The Institutional Logic of Religious Nationalism: Sex, Violence,
and the Ends of History. Politics, Religion & Ideology 12(1):1-24.
4
5. March 14
WEBER, ARENDT, BUREAUCRACY, STATES
*Weber, Max. 1905. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Wilder, 2009.
Weber, Max. The Nature of Social Action Basic Categories of Social Organization,
Classes, Status Groups, and Parties, The Logic of Historical Explanation, The
Nature of Charismatic Domination, The Development of Bureaucracy and Its Relation
to Law. In Weber: Selections in Translation, edited by W.G. Runciman, Translated by
Eric Matthews. Cambridge, 1998, 7-61, 111-131, 226-250, 341-354.
Arendt, Hannah. 1951. Excerpts from Part Two: Imperialism, Part Three: Totalitarianism.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schoken Books, 123-184, 341-388.
Althusser. Louis. 1970. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated from the French by Ben Brewster. Monthly
Review Press, 1971, 127-186, online: www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70NB.html
*Scott, James. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed, New Edition. Yale, 1-8, 53-83, 87-102, 183-191, 309-357.
Supplemental
Hull, Mathew. 2003. The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad
Bureaucracy. Language and Communication 23: 287-314.
6. March 21
CULTURE, ANTHROPOLOGICALLY
Boas, Franz. 1940. The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology, The
Methods of Ethnology, In Race, Language, Culture. Free Press. 270-289.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. The Structural Study of Myth. Journal of American Folklore
68(270): 428-444, reprinted in Structural Anthropology, Basic Books, 1963.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973 Thick Description, Religion as a Cultural System, Deep Play
In The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic, 3-32, 87-125, 412-453.
5
Asad, Talal. 1993. Introduction, and The Construction of Religion as an
Anthropological Category. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins, 1-54.
Ortner, Sherry. 1984. Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in
Society and History 26 (1): 126-166.
Clifford, James. 1986. Partial Truths. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. California, 1-26.
Collier, Jane and Sylvia Yanagisako. 1989. Theory in Anthropology Since Feminist
Practice. Critique of Anthropology 9(2): 27-37.
Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1991. Introduction. Of Revelation and Revolution,
Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago, 1-48.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. Future Kinship and the Study of Culture. In Reproducing the
Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies. Routledge, 44-61.
Fischer, Michael M.J. 2007. Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.
Cultural Anthropology 22(1):1-65.
Herzfeld, Michael. 2013. The European Crisis and Cultural Intimacy. Studies in
Ethnicity and Nationalism 13(3):491-497:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sena.12060/full
7. April 4
MEDIATION: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL, CULTURAL STUDIES,
POSTSTRUCTURALISM, SIGNALS
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. 1944. The Concept of Enlightenment, The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Translated by John Cumming. In
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continuum, 1972, 3-42, 120-167.
Benjamin, Walter. 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Translated from the German by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt.
Shocken, 1968, 217-251.
Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. 1971. Introduction, From the Child to the Noble
Savage, from the Noble Savage to the Third World. In How to Read Donald Duck:
Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. International, 11-23, 41-60.
Hall, Stuart. 1981. Notes on Deconstructing the Popular. In Cultural Theory and
Popular Culture : A Reader, second edition, ed. John Storey, Georgia, 1998, 442-453.
Lipsitz, George. 2001. This Aint No Sideshow. In Time Passages: Collective Memory
and American Popular Culture. Minnesota, 3-20.
6
De Saussure, Ferdinand. 1915. Nature of the Linguistic Sign and Immutability and
Mutability of the Sign In Course in General Linguistics. McGraw-Hill, 1959, 65-78.
Derrida, Jacques. 1966. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences, Of Grammatology [excerpt], Diffrance. In Critical Theory Since 1965, ed.
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Florida State, 79-136.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1980. Introduction: Rhizome and 1227: Treatise on
Nomadology: The War Machine. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Translated from the French by Brian Massumi. Minnesota, 1987, 3-25,
351-423.
Supplemental
Parks, Lisa. 2013. Earth Observation and Signal Territories: Studying U.S. Broadcast
Infrastructure through Historical Network Maps, Google Earth, and Fieldwork. Canadian
Journal of Communication 38(3): http://www.cjc-
online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2736
McCosker, Anthony. 2015. Drone Vision, Zones of Protest, and the New Camera
Consciousness. Media Fields Journal 11: http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/drone-
vision-zones-of-protest/
8. April 11
FOUCAULT, BOURDIEU, HARAWAY, BIOPOWER, PRACTICE, CYBORGS
Foucault, Michel. 1966. Las Meninas, The Prose of the World, Classifying. In The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated from the French
Les mots et los choses. Random House, 1970, 3-45, 125-165.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Docile Bodies, Panopticism. Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison. Random House, 135-169, 195-228.
*Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. Translated from the French by
Robert Hurley. Vintage, 1978.
Stoler, Anne. 1995. Placing Race in The History of Sexuality. In Race and the
Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things.
Duke. 19-54.
*Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated from the French by
Richard Nice. Cambridge, 1977.
Beck, Ulrich. 2006. Living in the World Risk Society. Economy and Society 35(3): 329-
345.
7
Supplemental
Ian Hacking. 1982. Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers. Humanities in
Society 5(3-4): 279-295.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated from
the Italian by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, 1998,
https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/biopolitics/HomoSacer.pdf
Spencer, Herbert. 1864. Progress: Its Law and Cause. Illustrations of Universal
Progress. Appleton, 1-16.
Wiener, Norbert. 1961. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and
the Machine, second edition. MIT Press, 1985, first edition 1948, Introduction, VIII (1-29,
155-165).
Marcus, George and Erkan Saka. 2006. Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society 23(2-
3): 101-106.
9. April 25
FEMINISMS
Jaggar, Alison M. 1983. Feminism as Political Philosophy, and Political Philosophy
and Human Nature. In Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Rowman and Littlefield, 3-
23.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a
Word. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 127-
148.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 110-113.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourse. Boundary 2, 3 (12/13): 333-358.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature. Routledge, 183-202.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought. In Black
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
(Revised 10th Anniv 2nd Edition. Routledge, 1-44.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Introduction, Bodies that Matter. In Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1-16, 27-55.
8
Mahmood, Saba. 2004. The Subject of Freedom. In The Politics of Piety: The Islamic
Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, 1-39.
Supplemental
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1949. Introduction. In The Second Sex. Translated from the
French by H M Parshley, 1972, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-
beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm
Cixous, Helene. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. In New French Feminisms, ed.
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Countrivon. Schoken, 1981, 245-264.
Irigaray, Luce. 1977. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated from the French by
Catherine Porter. In This Sex Which Is Not One. Cornell, 1985, 23-33.
Bordo, Susan. 1987. The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought and the Seventeenth-
Century Flight from the Feminine. In The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism
and Culture. SUNY, 97-118.
10. May 2
COLONIALISM, RACE, POSTCOLONIALISM, DECOLONIALITY
Galeano, Eduardo. 1971. 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane. In Open
Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review
Press, 11-18.
9
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. Of Our Spiritual Strivings, The Dawn of Freedom. The Souls
of Black Folk, with an Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Bantam, 1989, 1-29.
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. The Fact of Blackness. In Black Skins, White Masks. Grove, 109-
140.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation. In Racial Formation in the
United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, Second Edition. Routledge, 53-76.
Harris, Cheryl. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707-1791.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity. In The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard, 1-40.
Sumida, Stephen. 1998. East of California: Points of Origin in Asian American Studies
Journal of Asian American Studies 1.1: 83-100, online at
muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_asian_american_studies/v001/1.1sumida.html
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Illinois, 271-313.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2007. Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality
and the Grammar of De-coloniality. Cultural Studies 21(2-3):449-514.
Supplemental
McClintock, Anne. 1995. The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism. In Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 21-74.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2011. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-
America is Evolving Toward Africa. Paradigm Publishers.
11. May 9
MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY, PUBLICS, GLOBALIZATION
*Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. Blackwell.
Habermas, Jrgen. 1974. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. New German
Critique 3:49-55.
10
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text 25/26: 56-80.
Mannathukkaren, Nissim. 2010. The Poverty of Political Society: Partha Chatterjee and
the People's Plan Campaign in Kerala, India. Third World Quarterly 31(2): 295-314.
Featherstone, Mike. 2006. Genealogies of the Global. Theory, Culture & Society 23(2-
3): 387-392.
Kelty, Christopher, Lilly Irnai, and Nick Seaver, eds. 2012.Clouds and Crowds. Limn 2.
Kelty, Christopher. 2017. Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a
Grammar of Participation. Current Anthropology Volume 58, Supplement 15, February:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/688705
Supplemental
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Preface. In Empire. Harvard, xi-xvii.
Abaza, Mona. 2011. Academic Tourists Sight-Seeing the Arab Spring. AhramOnline,
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/22373.aspx
11
12. May 16 to be re-scheduled for another day in same or ealier week
MULTISPECIES WORLDS, ANTHROPOCENES, CRISIS
*Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso.
Masco, Joseph. 2017. The Crisis in Crisis. Current Anthropology Volume 58,
Supplement 15, February: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/688695
12