AP/ANTH 3440 3.00 Governmentality & Development: Selected Cases
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED
This course examines the idea of “development” in the context of European state formation, colonialism and globalization. It examines development in Indonesia or India, for example, through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concepts of “biopower” and “governmentality” with an eye to explaining the “development of underdevelopment.” Governmentality refers to “governmental rationality,” the set of strategies, programs and social technologies by which states aim to structure the possibilities for individual action by managing and disciplining populations and spaces. Such programs are not always coherent, and the assemblages they form have contradictory effects on the ground. This course, for example, may look at the ways in which the colonial Dutch state and subsequent “New Order” government sought to reshape families, improve hygiene and farming, and manage “model villages” with the long term goal of economic “take-off”.