John Kelly

21407/[51800]. Practice of Anthropology: Decolonization, New Nations and Great Traditions. Seeking perspective on contemporary scholarship on nation-states, this course examines American anthropological research on nations and nationalism since World War II: the period of American global dominance. Why was the “new nations” project energetic in the 1960s, followed by increasing regionalism and then the 1980s explosion in “imagination” and “identity” theory? How does scholarship on nations connect to World War II, the Holocaust, decolonization, the Cold War, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the end of the Cold War, and contemporary economic and cultural globalization? Special attention will be given to studies of South Asia and the Pacific.

22705/41800/51900. Seminar: Semiotic Technologies form Sanskrit to Windows. Applying methods currently used in science and technology studies to episodes in the history of efforts to engineer new kinds of language and text, this course puts the history of language and texts into the history of engineering. Reconsidering basic issues about both semiotics and technology, the seminar will search for the best questions for an anthropology of information. Historical episodes examined will include the emergence of Samskrta, "cooked" or "perfected" language, in ancient India, the rise of publishing ("print capitalism" etc.) and telegraph in Europe and empire, and the present confrontation between Windows and Linux. 

23400/32500. Military Theory and Practice. Cultural theorists rarely center their attention on military matters. This course will introduce classic military theories (Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Upton, Lyautey, Mahan, Keegan) and their deployments. It will also consider the impact of new technologies on conditions of possibility for coercion. Particular attention will be given to anti-colonial and counter-insurgency campaign strategies (Gandhi, Fanon, Truman, Rostow) and the rise and style of American power, including new concepts and practices of military intervention (e.g., "compellance" theory) being developed in the contemporary United States.

23700/33700. Capitalism, Colonialism, and Nationalism in the Pacific. This course compares colonial capitalist projects and their dialogic transfor-mations up to present political dilemmas, with special attention to Fiji, New Zealand, and Hawai’i, and a focus on the labor diaspora, the fates of indigenous polities, and tensions in contemporary citizenship. We will compare Wakefield’s “scientific colonization” in New Zealand, Gordon’s social experiments and indentured labor in Fiji, and the plantations, American annexation, tourism and the military in Hawai’i. We will compare the colonial experiences of the Maori, Hawaiians and indigenous Fijians, and also those of the immigrant laborers and their descendants, especially white New Zealanders, the South Asians in Fiji and the Japanese in Hawai’i. General pro-positions about nationalism, capitalism “late” and otherwise, global cultural flows, and postcolonial subject positions will be juxtaposed with contemporary Pacific conflicts.

23710/43710. Decolonization/Pax Americana. Postcolonial theorists have, understandably, focused critical attention on colonial history and culture. But postcolonial predicaments closely relate to the political, economic, and security regime imposed upon the world after World War II by the US-led planners of the "new world order." This course will focus on Pax Americana and what it has meant for decolonization and the economic, cultural and political life of ex-colonies. Leading anticolonial and post colonial theorists (Gandhi, Fanon, Said, Subaltern Studies) will be read in connection with US contemporary and contrapuntal figures (Gandhi with Truman, Fanon with Wendell Willkie). Theorists of empire from Gibbon, Macaulay and Maine to Niall Ferguson and Hart and Negri will be contrasted with and connected to actual theorists and wielders of American power from Mahan and Upton, to Rostow and Kissinger, to Fukuyama, Powell, Haass and Rumsfeld. Particular attention will be given to the planning of the UN and related institutions, and then to institutional developments not anticipated by the planners of Pax Americana, including elite diaspora, peacekeeping missions, "new wars," "strange wars," "leveling crowds," terrorism and political army states, i.e., unanticipated new patterns of migration, military violence, political protest and even foundations of sovereignty. The premise of the course, which might be wrong, is that we are at the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end, of Pax Americana, and in any case that Pax Americana, in theory and reality, currently merits much better focused analysis and criticism than it has received.

43700. Weber, Veblen and Genealogies of Global Capitalism. Two intellectual traditions have dominated discussion of the history of capitalism: classical to neo-classical economics, and Marxism. This course searches for other possibilities. It focuses on critical comparative reading of Thorstein Veblen's theory of the late modern "new order" and Max Weber's comparative sociology, but will also read widely among other authors, including Simmel, Sombart, Mahan, Tolstoy and Gandhi. Questions to engage will include: relations between capital, the state, and military force (between means of production and means of coercion); commerce in Asia before European colonialism and the rise of colonial plantations and monopoly trading companies; types of capital, the rise and spread of joint-stock companies, stock markets, and capitalist corporations; the "new order," decolonization and the nation-state.

51100. Seminar: Colonial Law Givers. European empires enabled administrators to try to realize the dream of law giving, the dream of reliving and extending a core Roman moral-political myth, bringing law, order and civility to barbarian lands. We will examine law giving in European political theory (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Gibbon, Maine, J.W.B. Money) and in colonial practice (Elphinstone, Macaulay, Gordon, Lugard), with emphasis on historically changing enactments of gifts and contracts constituting law, and the consequences of concomitant metabolisms of imputed political credit and debt.

25400/35400. Knowledge and Power. A very large, boundary-crossing literature has developed around searches for general insights into relations between knowledge and power. This course is intended as an introduction, for ad-vanced undergraduates and graduate students, to some recent (and some not so recent) scholarly debates about rationality and hegemony, about dis-course, disciplines, dialogics, and authority, and about the (non)uniqueness of modernity, postmodernity, and science. While designed to engage theoretical literature about knowledge and power from several disciplines: history of science, literary criticism, sociology, and philosophy: the course gives special attention to ethnography, both to ethnographic contri-butions and appropriations of them in these debates and to possible ethno-graphic projects raised by new questions. J. Kelly. Autumn 1994. INACTIVE as of Spr/00

55600. Seminar: Commodity Fetishism. PQ: Consent of instructor. Few arguments in social theory have attracted as much attention as Marx's mock revelation of "the fetishism of the commodity and its secret. Much debate about capitalism, and about the relation between political economy and culture, has involved rereadings and rewritings of Marx's argument. This seminar reconsiders commodities in theory and reality. It seeks not only the secrets of the commodity, but also the limits that scholarly fetishism of the commodity has placed on our studies of the culture and history of capital. The course focuses on the interest in the cultural logic of capitalist societies. J. Kelly. Autumn 1994. INACTIVE as of Spr/00