For your assignment, you will write a 4-5 pages long analysis of a theoretical concept (nationalism)which is used both in one of the theoretical texts and in Maple Rasza’s ethnography Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics After Socialism.
The point of this assignment is to explore the relationship between political theory and ethnographic data—your job is to show how abstract ideas fare when they are placed in an actual historical and political context (such as postwar/postsocialist Croatia). Therefore, your paper should come to some kind of a conclusion about the relationship between ethnographic material and the conceptual language that you are analyzing.
Your job is to write several pages explaining where this concept comes from, what it means and what it does, as well as how it helps Razsa make sense of qualitative, ethnographic data. To do so, your paper will need to do the following:
- Define the concept of nationalism and explain how it is used in social and political theory. You need to directly engage with the assigned theoretical readings (from the first half of the class) by referring to specific passages (use parenthetical references). I want to see how well you’ve mastered this material, which is why discussing the readings is a requirement. In addition…
- …to make sense of the concept of nationalism, you will also need to do some additional research; I expect to see 4-5 new scholarly sources (articles or books) in the bibliography for the midterm. You may use other theoretical, philosophical, IR/PoliSci, historical or anthropological texts. For locating appropriate articles and sources, I suggest using sites like JSTOR and AnthroSource. IYou need to directly engage with each and every one of these sources in your analysis.
- Give three examples from Razsa’s ethnography that illustrate how the author(s) mobilize(s) this concept(nationalism) to analyze actual fieldwork-generated material. Pay attention to whether Razsa challenges the dominant use and
