Syllabus
The course is in a hybrid way. It is lectured in Pekařská according to the schedule and at the same time broadcasting and recording. The records will be available in Moodle.
1. Europe after World War II, geopolitical division of the world, postcolonialism and Western political thinking Frankfurt School and its leaders
2. European preindustrial empires and coalitions, the topic of high and low culture, the problem of European urbanization and urban culture in the preindustrial era, the European family, religion in Europe
3. European Unification at the beginning of 1950s: Economic unification and social imaginations.
4. European nationalism - state and nation, national centralization, national boundaries and their overlaps: to what extent the EU is building on European nationalism and in what ways it is trying to overcome it, how nationalism manifests itself in the European Union.
5. The collapse of the Soviet empire, the European Union as a pan-European phenomenon, and attempts in the social sciences to grasp new anthropological research in Europe. An analysis of the thesis that Western Europe experienced the most intense sense of unification at the breakup of the Eastern Block
6. Isolation, borders, and minorities in the European Union.
7. Research by European Institutions and Organizations. Attempts to study the institutions of the European Union and other instruments of power. Development of anthropology of institutions.
8. Examples of European regionalism.
9. Europe in relation to the next world, the theme of colonialism - Shreya Bhardwaj
10. Socialism and postsocialism: the phenomenon of Central and Eastern Europe; issues of material life and emotions.
11. Socialist economy, privatization, and further development in the post-socialist period
12. Language and group identity in European states
Annotation
The course focuses on the phenomenon of European unifications and the formation of political coalitions and clusters in a global context. It shows the inner logic of processes and asks what the project of the European unification was reacting to, what response it had and what objections it was facing to.
The course notes that for social and cultural anthropology, Europe and the European Union are difficult to grasp and provide alternative answers why it is so. The course teaches students about texts on the anthropology of Europe and the European Union and instructs how to work with them.