Popular Movements and the Crowd: Religion, Culture, and Society

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Level: 
Master's
CEU credits: 
2
ECTS credits: 
4
Academic year: 
2009/2010
Semester: 
Winter
Start and end dates: 
8 Aug 2009
Co-hosting Unit(s) [if applicable]: 
Department of History
Religious Studies Program
Stream/Track/Specialization/Core Area: 
Culture, Religion and Intellectual History in a Comparative Perspective
CEU Instructor(s): 
Nadia Al-Bagdadi
Additional information: 
Aim of the course The course seeks to introduce students a) to the comparative study of the popular movements psychology of the crowd and cognate formations around the Mediterranean basin. It seeks less to provide a historical overview then an introduction to methodological and theoretical concepts based on historical materials dealing with examples from the histories of the Mediterranean and of Europe as well as with theoretical approaches as proposed by Emile Durkheim or Elias Canetti.
Learning Outcomes: 
Students will learn to discern between a history of events and structures of a long duree on the one hand, and between psychological patterns and symbolical action as elementary forms of societal organization.
Assessment : 
Class attendance and reading of weekly assigned material is mandatory. Mid-Term is based on a class presentation, final paper consists in a research paper agreed upon 3 weeks before the end of term. Mid-Term is 25%, Final paper 60%, and participation 15%.
Full description: 

Syllabus

                                         I. Spectres of the crowd

1.Week

Introduction to the seminar

• Timothy Garton Ash, ‘1989’, in New York Review of Books, Nov.5, 2009, pp. 4-8. [savepdf]

2. Week

Icons of the crowd

• Sequences from the film: Sergei Eisenstein, October. (1927).

• Sequences of the film: Fritz Land, Metropolis (1927).

• Anton Kaes, ‘Movies and Masses’, in Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, Crowds, Stanford 2006, chap.7.[savepdf]

3. Week

Crowds , packs and the social animal

• Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power. Transl. from the German by Carol Stewart, 1962, chapter: ‘The Crowd’, pp. 15-25 and 67-73 and chapter: ‘The Pack and Religion’, pp. 127-58.  [savepdf] [savepdf]

4. Week

The city and the crowd

• Edgar Alan Poe, The man of the Crowd. Electronic version: http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=PoeCrow.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all

• Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, New York, London, 1974, (chapter 10: ‘Collective Personality’), pp. 219-40. [savepdf]

 

Part II. Classical approaches to the crowd and popular movements

5.Week

Apocalyptic visions of the mass and modernity

• Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Macmillan, 1896, pp. 13-34, 155-65. [savepdf] [savepdf]

• George Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in revolutionary France, introduced by George Rudé ; translated from the French by Joan White. London 1973, pp. 9-13, 137-148. [savepdf]

• Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History. London 1984, (chap. 2: ‘ Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre at the Rue Saint-Séverin’,) pp. 79-104. [savepdf]

6. Week

The crowd in history: theoretical and methodological problems

• Robert Holton, The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and Method, Social History, vol. 3,2 (1978) p. 219-233. [savepdf]

• George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964, pp. 3-19214-37. [savepdf]

7. Week

Ritual – the political and the religious,1

• Steven Lukes, Political ritual and societal integrations, Sociology IX, 2 (1975) 289-308. [savepdf]

• Steven Lukes, Emile Durkeim. His life and work: A historical and critical study. London 1973, 1992,pp. 450-74 [savepdf]

• Optional: Emile Durkeim, Elementary Forms of religious Life. Translation by K. Fields, Ne York, 1995. [not in reader]

8.Week

Ritual – the political and the religious, 2

• René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore and London, 1972, (chapter 2: ‘The Sacrifice Crisis’), pp. 39-67. [savepdf]

• E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries. Manchester 1959, pp. 13-30 [savepdf]; 30-56 [savepdf] 

Part II – Comparative Perspectives

9. Week

Popular religious movements in history: Typologies of pre-modern movements?

• ‘Futuwwa’ – Claude Cahen, article in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition. [savepdf]

• Susanna Elm, Captive Crowds: Pilgrims and Martyrs, in J.Th. Schnapp and M. Tiews, Crowds, Stanford UP, 2006, chap.6. [savepdf]

10. Week

Perceptions of violent riots and mobs: French history

• Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in sixteenth-century France’, Past and Present LIX 1975, pp, 51-90. (or in Society and Culture in Early Modern France p.152-187) [savepdf]; [savepdf]

• Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-century France’, in Past and Present, L (1971), 41-75. [savepdf]

• Optional: Charles Tilly, The Contentious French. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

11.Week

Perceptions of violent riots and mobs: Arab history

• Kamal Salibi, ‘The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus’, in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, the Nineteenth Century, edited by William Polk and Richard Chambers, Chicago and London, 1968, pp.185-202. [savepdf]

• James Grehan, ‘Street Violence and Social Imagination in Late-Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus (ca. 1500-1800)’, IJMES 35 (2003) 215-236.      [savepdf]

• Optional: Andre Raymond, Urban Networks and Popular Movements in Cairo and Aleppo (End of 18th-Beginning of 19th Centuries, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Urbanism in Islam (Tokyo, 1989, 2: 219-71. [savepdf]

12. Week

Revolutionary crowds – the case of the Islamic revolution

• Sequences from BBC documentary of the Islamic Revolution.

• Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Crowd in the Iranian Politics, 1905-1953’, Past and Present 41 (1968) 184-210. [savepdf]

• Optional: Asef Bayat, 'Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution: Comparing Islamist Activism in Iran and Egypt', Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1) (Spring 1997). [savepdf]

Final Discussion