Lahore University of Management Sciences

POL 3118 - Politics of Culture

Spring 2017-18

Instructor Mohammad Waseem

Email waseem@lums.edu.pk
Office Hours TBA
Credit Hours 4
Number of Lectures per week 2

Course Description:

This course deals with the way culture has moved to the center-stage of both national and
international politics in recent decades. The scope of this course ranges from the way
modernity-tradition dichotomy was employed to explain the Third World to its critique by
Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith and others. The idea is to look at the battle of cultures in
various countries as well as at the global level. The course includes various related fields of
enquiry such as culture and nationalism, ethnicity and education. It includes a study of
Pakistan focusing on historical, territorial, religious, ethnic and linguistic aspects of cultural
politics in the country. The course includes research assignments to prepare students for
serious academic work. Students will be required to make an oral presentation based on their
written work.

Grading:
Class attendance: 10%
Midterm Examination: 20%
Research Assignment: 35%
Final Examination: 35%

Course Objectives
• To expose the students to multidimensional relationship between culture and politics, both
theoretically and empirically;

• To make students understand the that culture is politics by other means, inasmuch as
various contenders for power use cultural symbols to mobilize people on the way to
construction of identity, perpetrate violence and control the political landscape;
• To bring into focus competing interests operating through cultural symbols such as
language, ethnicity and religion.
Session 1: Introduction

Session 2: Politics and Culture

• Lisa Wedeen, 2002. "Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science", American
Political Science Review, Vol. 96, Issue 4, 713-728
• Stephanie Lawson, 1998. "Dogmas of Difference: Culture and Nationalism in Theories of
International Politics", CRISP, Vol. 1, No. 4, 62-92

Session 3: Culture and Political Geography

• Don Mitchell, 2000, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 42-57
• Sallie A. Marston. 2004. "Space, Culture, State: Uneven Developments in Political
Geography", Political Geography, Vol. 23, 1-16

Session 4: The Modernization Theory: Culturist Explanation of Politics

• Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, 2003. "Political Culture and Democracy: Analyzing
Cross-Level Linkages", Comparative Politics, Vol. 36, No. 1, 61-79
• Margaret R. Somers. 1995. "What's Political or Cultural About Political Culture and the
Public Sphere? Towards an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation", Sociological
Theory, Vol. 13, No. 2, 113-144

Session 5: Politics and Religion

• Gerd Baumann. 1998. "Body Politic or Bodies of Culture?: How Nation State Practices Turn
Citizens Into Religious Minorities", Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 10, No. 3,
263-280
• Mansoor Moaddel. 2002. "The Study of Islamic Culture and Politics: An Overview", Annual
Review of Sociology, Vol. 28, 35 9-386

Session 6: Culture and Nationalist Imaginings

• Benedict Anderson, 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London: Verso, 41-79
• Sarah C. Chambers. 2003. "Letters and Salons: Women Reading and Writing the Nation",
in Castro-Klaren and Chasteen, ed. Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the
Nation in Nineteenth Century Latin America, Washington DC: Johns Hopkins Press, 54-83.

Session 7: Culture as Nostalgia

• Raza Rumi. 2013. Delhi by Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveler. New Delhi:
Harper Collins, 246-272.
• Amy Sodaro. 2013. "Memory, History and Nostalgia in Berlin's Jewish Museum",
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 26, No. 1, 77-91

Session 8: Crisis of Belonging

• Shail Mayaram. 1998. "Rethinking Meo Identity: Cultural Faultline, Syncretism, Hybridity
or Liminality?" in Mushirul Hasan, ed. Islam, Communities and the Nation: Muslim Identities
in South Asia and Beyond, New Delhi: Manohar, 283-306

Session 9: Culture and Education

• Pierre Bourdiue. 1973. "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction" in Richard
K. Brown, Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education,
London: Tavistock, 71-83
• K. K. Aziz. 1993. The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks used in Pakistan,
Islamabad: Vanguard, 175-229
Session 10 & 11: Allocation and Discussion of Research Assignments

Session 12: National and Ethnic Cultures

• Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 2005. Culture and Identity: Selected English Writings of Faiz, Sheema
Majeed ed. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 25-48
• Mohammad Waseem. 1998. "Politics of Identity in Pakistan: Patterns of National and Ethnic
Discourse", in Andrew Dobson and Jeffrey Stanyer. Eds. Contemporary Political Studies.
University of Keele, 1-12

Session 13. Politics of Feminism

• Kathleen MC Neil. 2003. "Towards a De-Polarization of Pakistani Women's Movement", in
Charles Kennedy et al. Pakistan at the Millennium, 142-168
• Amrita Chachui, “Forced identities: The State, communalism fundamentalism and Women
in India, in Deniz Kandiyoti ed

Session 14: Culture, Identity and Class

• Arvind-Pal Singh. 1996. "Interrogating Identity: Cultural Translation, Writing and Subaltern
Politics", in Singh and Talbot ed. Punjabi Identity: Continuity and Change,
New Delhi: Manohar, 187-228

Session 15: Mid-term Examination

Session 16: Culture and Nationalism

• John Hutchinson. 2013. "Cultural Nationalism" in John Breuilly, ed. The Oxford Handbook
of History of Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 75-94.
• Miroslav Hrosch. 2007. Comparative Studies in Modern European History: Nations,
Nationalism, Social Change, London: Ashgate Variorum, 67-96

Session 17: Language and Nationalism

• Alain Dieckhoff. 2003. The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of
Modern Israel, 98-127
• Miroslav Hrosch. 2007. Comparative Studies in Modern European History: Nations,
Nationalism, Social Change, London: Ashgate Variorum, 96-107
• Tariq Rehman. 1996. Language and Politics in Pakistan, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 8-
22

Session 18: Culture and Ethnicity

• Susana B.C. Devalle, 1992. Discourses of Ethnicity: Culture and Protest in Jharkand, London:
Sage Publications, Chapter 1
• Anthony D. Smith, 1996. "Culture, Community and Territory: the Politics of Ethnicity and
Nationalism", International Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, 445-458

Session 19: Minority Culture

• Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot. 2013. "Introduction: Muslims of the Indian City.
From Centrality to Marginality", in Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot. eds. Muslims in
Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalization, Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1-22
• Tahir Kamran. 2010. "Community of the Marginalized: State, Society and Punjabi
Christians", South Asian Review, Volume 31, No. 2, 66-84
Session 20: The National Project and the Making of the "Other"
• Ayla Gol. 205. "Imagining the Turkish Nation Through 'Othering' Armenians", Nations and
Nationalism, Vol. 11, No. 1, 121-129
• Sanjay Chattervedi. 2002. "Process of Othering in Case of India and Pakistan", Economic
and Social Geography, Vol. 93, No. 2, 149-159

Session 21: Cultural Styles of Academic Debate

• Johan Galtung. 1981. "Structure, Culture and Intellectual Style: An Essay Comparing
Saxonic, Teutonic, Gallic, and Napponic Approaches", Social Science Information, Vol. 20,
No. 6, 817-856

Session 22: Culture as Resistance

• Honaida Ghanim. 2009. "Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender and Social Change
Among Palestinian Poets in Israel after Nakba", International Journal of Politics, Culture and
Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, Special Issue, 23-39
• Sallie Yea. 1999. "The Culture and Politics of Resistance in South Korea", Futures, Vol. 31,
221-23

Session 23: The Master Narrative

• Jean-Francois Lyotard. 1979. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
Manchester: Manchester University Press
• David Gilmartin. 1998. "Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a
Narrative", The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 4, 1068-1095

Session 24: Presentation of Research Assignments-I

Session 25: Presentation of Research Assignments-II

Session 26: Culture and Diaspora- I

• Tahir Abbas, 2009. "Multiculturalism, Islamophobia and the City", in Virender S. Kalra, ed.
Pakistani Diasporas: Culture, Conflict and Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 285-298
• Avtar Brah, 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York:
Routledge, 178-210.
Session 27: Culture and Diaspora- II
• Tom Villis and Mireille Hibing. 2014. "Islam and Englishness: Issue of Culture and Identity
in the Debates Over Mosque Building in Cambridge", Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 20,
415-437
• Arun Kundnani. 2007. "Integrationism: The Politics of Anti-Muslim Racism", Race
and Class, Vol. 48, No. 4, 24-44

Session 28: Review and Summing up