Rutgers

Faculty Member, Department of Political Science

Professor and Undergraduate Vice Chair

About

Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach, co-authored by Mike Aronoff, will be published this fall by Berghahn Books (http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=AronoffAnthropology).

“What a welcome book! Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik, two erudite, widely read, and innovative scholars, have provided an insightful and much-needed map that charts the terrain linking politics and culture. This intervention into a long-standing conversation about the boundaries of the ‘political’ will stimulate students for years to come.“ Ed Schatz, University of Toronto.

Book's synopsis: What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that “bridge” both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of “anthropological” concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the “autonomy of the political” assumed by political science to characterize so-called “modern” societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.


The second book project completed this year: Justice, Hegemony and Mobilization: Views from East/Central Europe and Eurasia, co-edited by Amy Linch, Penn State. It is forthcoming from NYU Press. Amy wrote an Introduction and I provided an extensive review of the field of post-communist studies, suggesting that the best work in this area tends to coalesce around a research program I call contextual holism. The lead chapters are written by Tom Wolfe and John Pickles (a critique of many assumptions underpinning “standard” approaches to the region); Alena Ledeneva (a critique of what she calls the “corruption paradigm”); Joanna Regulska and Magda Grabowska (an extensive, critical review of the literature on gender in postcommunism); and Ivan Szelenyi and Katarzyna Wilk (a critical look at the work on post-communist poverty). The project was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in New York.

My attention is now focused on two projects:

"The Logic of Civil Society: Taiwan, South Korea, Poland, Hungary. A comparative study of civil society and protest politics in post-authoritarian/post-communist states" (with Grzegorz Ekiert, Harvard; Yun-han Chu, Academia Sinica, Taipei; Sunhyuk Kim, Korea University, Seoul; Bela Greskovits, CEU, Budapest; and Jason Wittenberg, Berkeley). The data base is constructed. We are writing the country chapters. Presented preliminary results at the 2010 APSA Convention in Washington and at the final meeting of the project in Seoul (January 2012). We are now editing the chapters and aim to have the first draft of the first project book finished by September 2012.

"The politics of memory in post-communist states" (an edited volume, with Michael Bernhard, University of Florida). We are studying the way 1989 is collectively remembered and how this remembering is politicized. Michael and I convened a conference on this topic at the University of Florida, February 4-6, 2011. Another great group of scholars, each providing a chapter on a country from the region. A truly amazing conference - the project will offer many new insights into the politics of memory in the post-communist Europe. We wrote a theoretical chapter and the Polish case study. At the moment we are beginning final editorial work on the rest of the manuscript. We plan to finish during the summer 2012.

Chapters and/or fragments of these projects are available upon request.

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