450A.  ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM

Professor Andrew Orta Office: 391 Davenport Hall; PH: 244-7108

andyorta@uiuc.edu

This course will examine ethnic and national identities, their interactions, and the implications for them and of them within increasingly translocal, transnational, and global frames of action and identity.  Our readings on ethnicity and nationalism will build upon fundamental anthropological understandings of social groups, of symbols and categories, of culture as a shared system, and of the linkages of culture, agency, and the various forms of power in human social groupings.  At the same time, the cases we will examine suggest the inadequacy of the concepts of ethnicity and nationalism and challenge us to develop a more subtle understanding of such identities in differing and shifting historical contexts.  Our readings and discussions will move between detailed case studies and more comparative and theoretical treatments of these topics.