Syllabus designed by Ellen Moodie, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL USA.

Course Description

In this course, we will challenge “common-sense” notions about crime, broadly conceived, though the discipline of cultural anthropology. We will compare ideas about and representations of lawbreaking, criminality, criminalization, corruption, misconduct, danger, violence, offense, policing, and justice in several different parts of the world. Our goals in this course include finding ways to understand both how something becomes categorized as criminal and how some populations and certain acts become criminalized.

Through the 15 weeks of the semester you will read, discuss, and write about questions of identity, in/security, and power not only in relation to governance and illegality within states, but also within particular communities. We will focus especially on moments of ambiguity. By the end of the course you should have a sense of how notions of crime and justice can be constructed differently through changing historical, political, and cultural logics, drawing on anthropological theories and methods. You should recognize that there is nothing “natural” about il/legality. You should be able to think critically about public discourses and policies on, and participate in public debates about, crime.

Required Texts

Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Shoshan, Nitzan. The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right- Wing Extremism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

and see "Schedule" below.

Schedule

CLASS SCHEDULE

Week 1

T January 16

Introductions

Th January 18

Anthropological stories

Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989: “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” and section from “After Objectivism”: 1-21 (focus on 1-12) and 62-67.

Week 2

T January 23

Anthropological stories, continued

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” 412-454.

Th January 25

Crime and society

Durkheim, Émile. Émile Durkheim: Selected Writings, edited by Anthony Giddens. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1972. “The Science of Morality” and “Forms of Social Solidarity,” 96-107 and 123-140.

Week 3

T January 30

Crime and society, continued

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926. “Introduction,” “The Automatic Submission to Custom and the Real Problem,” “An Anthropological Definition of the Law,” and “The Law in Breach and the Restoration of Order”: 1-5, 9-16, 55-59, 71-84.

Comaroff, Jean. “The New Anthropology of Crime.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) 33 (1) (May 2010): 133-139.

Th February 1

Film: The Central Park Five. Directed by Ken Burns. Florentine Films/WETA, 2012. See http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/about/overview/

Filipovic, Jill. “The painful lessons of the Central Park Five and the jogger rape case.” The Guardian, October 5, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/05/central-park-five-rape-case

Weiser, Benjamin. “5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case Agree to Settle Suit for $40 million.” New York Times, June 19, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/nyregion/5-exonerated-in-central-park-jogger-case-are-to-settle-suit-for-40-million.html?_r=0

Background: New York Times, “The Central Park Jogger Case.” https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/central-park-jogger-case-1989

Week 4

T February 6

Criminal anthropology

Galliher, John F. “The Willie Horton Fact, Faith, and Commonsense Theory of Crime.” In Criminology as Peacemaking, edited by Harold E. Pepinsky and Richard Quinney, 245-250. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. “Measuring Bodies: Two Case Studies on the Apishness of Undesirables”: 113-145 (focus on 122-145).

Th February 8

Criminalizing race/culture

Murji, Karim. “Wild Life: Constructions and Representations of Yardies.” In Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control, edited by Jeff Ferrell and Neil Websdale, 179-201. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999.

Due: Writing assignment 1: Media and race/class/sex

Week 5

T February 13

Criminalizing race/class

Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009: “Prologue,” “Social Security and the Punitive Upsurge,” and “The Criminalization of Poverty in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” xi-xxiii, 1-37, and 41-75.

Th February 15

Producing delinquency

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977 [1975]: Selections from “Illegalities and Delinquency,” 275-292.

Week 6

T February 20

Gender and law

Film: Thelma and Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1991.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. and Martha Minow. “Outlaw Women: An Essay on ‘Thelma and Louise.’” In Gender, Crime, and Feminism, edited by Ngaire Naffine, 229-244. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vt. Dartmouth Publishing, 1995.

Th February 22

Gender, space/time, and danger

Lamas, Marta. “By Night, a Street Rite: ‘Public’ Women of the Night in the Streets of Mexico City.” In Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America, edited by Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig, 237-253. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Pain, Rachel. “Space, Sexual Violence and Social Control: Integrating Geographical and Feminist Analysis of Women’s Fear of Crime.” Progress in Human Geography 15 (4), 415-431.

Due: Writing assignment 2: Gender and in/security

Week 7

T February 27

Sexual assault on campus

Film: The Hunting Ground. Directed by Kirby Dick. CNN/Artemis Films, 2015.

Th March 1

#MeToo

Slaughter, Jane. “No Casting Couch for Low-Wage Women, but Lots of Sexual Harassment.” LaborNotes, October 13, 2017. http://www.labornotes.org/2017/10/no-casting-couch-low-wage-women-lots

Sexual-harassment

Gilbert, Sophie. “The Movement of #MeToo: How a hashtag got its power.” The Atlantic, October 16, 2017 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/the-movement-of-metoo/542979/

Garcia, Sandra. “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags.” The New York Times, October 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-too movement-tarana-burke.html

Gessen, Masha. “Sex, Consent, and the Dangers of Misplaced Scale.” The New Yorker, November 27, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sexconsent-dangers-of-misplaced-scale

Merkin, Daphne. “Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.” The New York Times, January 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/golden-globes-metoo.html

Donadio, Rachel. “France, Where #MeToo Becomes #PasMoi.” The Atlantic, January 9, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/france-metoo/550124/

Week 8

T March 6

Narrative, self, and crime

Caldeira, Teresa P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000: “Talking of Crime and Ordering the World,” 19-51.

Th March 8

Narrative, self, and crime, continued

Wachs, Eleanor. Crime Victim Stories: New York City’s Urban Folklore. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988: “Introduction,” ix-xx.

Mattingly, Cheryl, Mary Lawlor and Lanita Jacobs-Huey. “Narrating September 11: Race, Gender, and the Play of Cultural Identities.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 743-753 (2002).

Week 9

T March 13

Narrative, self, and crime, continued

Moodie, Ellen. “Adventure Time in San Salvador.” In El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy, 113-139. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Th March 15

Other kinds of crime narratives

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, “Figuring Crime: Quantifacts and the Production of the Un/Real.” Public Culture 18 (1) (2006): 209-240.

Due: Writing assignment 3: Crime story

SPRING BREAK

Week 10

T March 27

Police and policing

Guest speaker: Jeff Martin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Cultures, UIUC.

Martin, Jeff. “Police and Policing.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Forthcoming, draft. (Read sections).

Th March 29

Policing and space

Herbert, Steve. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997: “Territoriality and the Police” and “The Law and Police Territoriality,” 9-58 (focus on 9-23; 32 [starting with “The Research”]-53; and 58 [“Conclusion”]).

Week 11

T April 3

Coetzee, Disgrace, 1-99.

Writing Assignment 4: Policing controversy

Th April 5

Film: Disgrace. Directed by Steve Jacobs. Wild Strawberries/Sherman Pictures, 2008.

Week 12

T April 10

Coetzee, Disgrace, 100-162

Th April 12

Coetzee, Disgrace, 163-220.

Week 13

T April 17

Shoshan, The Management of Hate, 3-54; 55-84.

Th April 19

Shoshan, The Management of Hate, 87-116; 117-140.

Week 14

T April 24

Shoshan, The Management of Hate, 141-168; 169-195.

Th April 26

Shoshan, The Management of Hate, 199-226; 227-259; 261-267.

Week 15

T May 1

Wrap-up

You may download the full syllabus as a PDF below:

ANTH399EMsyllabusfinal2018JanuaryEM Download