Kings and Criminals: Figurations of Sovereignty

Harvard FAS

This course starts by asking how anthropology has understood sovereignty, as theoretical object and political process. Its focus then expands to ask what is at stake in asking about how sovereignty is founded, sustained and imagined? How have scholars posed these questions and, in so doing, related their findings both a) to philosophical inquiries into the ontology of politics and b) to colonial and imperial projects? The aim will be not to define sovereignty but to understand its theories…