Course Details in 2025/26 Session

Module Title	LH Political Anthropology
School	History and Cultures
Department	African Studies & Anthropology
Module Code	09 35014
Module Lead	Marco Di Nunzio
Level	Honours Level
Credits	20
Semester	Semester 2
Pre-requisites
Co-requisites
Restrictions	None
Contact Hours	Lecture-10 hours Seminar-10 hours Guided independent study-180 hours Total: 200 hours
Exclusions
Description	Anthropologists’ examinations of politics have enabled the discipline to go beyond earlier anthropological concerns with order and function to investigate how power and agency shape societies and history. This course explores how anthropologists have discovered politics, examined multiple meanings and categories of the political and sought to make anthropology politically engaged. Students will explore the cultural foundations of politics and develop an appreciation of the contested and shifting boundaries between what is meant to be within and outside the domain of politics. The course will situate anthropological explorations of politics within the spaces of the state, the nation and in relation to multiple ideas of citizenship and subjectivity. Building on this, the course will help students appreciate anthropology’s unique contributions to the study of the interactions between state and non-state actors and how cultural ideas of statehood and government shape imaginations and practices of the political.
Learning Outcomes	By the end of the module students should be able to: Examine and critically evaluate key arguments in political anthropology; Situate ethnographic explorations of meanings and practices of the political in comparative debates about power, agency and history; Analyse and critically assess the cultural foundation of meanings and categories of the political; Describe and analyse how ideas such as statehood, belonging and citizenship shape practices and imaginations of the political.
Assessment	35014-01 : 1500 word written assignment - Essay 1 : Coursework (40%) 35014-02 : 2000 word written assignment - Essay 2 : Coursework (60%)
Assessment Methods & Exceptions	Assessment: 1 x 1500 word written assignment (40%)
Other
Reading List