Senior Seminar - Summer 2008

5810-001 - Communitarianism

Communitarianism is a loose, sometimes contradictory assemblage of political thought seeking to counteract the decline of associational life and the corrosive effects of individualism in America. Since this is a political theory course, we will focus on theoretical debate, but not exclusively. We will also explore other sides of the issue of community in America, namely some policy and history.

5810-002 - Genocide

Our major goal is to begin to build an analytical framework for grasping the dynamics of the politics of identity (ethnic, national and religious), drawing broadly upon comparative and historical materials. Our first goal is to introduce three different approaches (primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism) that inform contemporary studies on nationalism.

Our methodology is to draw together useful concepts for the exploration of our topic; here we will consider the features of different types of identities, their patterns of evolution and transformation, their instrumental and primordial dimensions. We then turn to the relationship and interaction of cultural pluralism with the other major fault line of civil society such as religion. We will examine how national mythologies create imagined communities, such as "nations," "ethnic groups," and "communal religions," and use myth and historical narrative to represent them.

By drawing broadly on a conception of culture as a system of meaning, this course will analyze how social boundaries, definitions, and formations become meaningful categories for understanding and constituting ideas and social actions.

This course explores how narratives of nations and nationalism link past, present, and future. How do national discourses and other collective symbolic texts influence the meaning, construction, and occupation of territories? Is the nation a form of political organization, political philosophy, or both? Is the nation a recent or ancient phenomenon? What is the relationship between the nation, modernity, and "modernization?" Special attention will be paid to the role of master narratives of the nation and nationalism and how these are employed by different agents; the tension between nation and state; the role of geography, museums, and other forms of intellectual discourse in structuring national identities; and national uses of rituals.