300631 Money (S) (WiSe 2020/2021)

What is money? What is in money that makes so many of us spend our lives chasing after it? How did it emerge and what is its future? Why is money often seen as the antithesis of love and care?

Such questions will be addressed in this weekly seminar, which explores the social meanings of money in time and place through classical and contemporary texts, largely from anthropology and sociology. Topics covered will include, but are not limited to, the history of money, value, morality of money, debt, and financialisation. The aim is to equip students with understanding of anthropological and sociological perspectives on money and its ramifications in global societies and cultures. This is a reading intensive seminar and you should be prepared to read a significant amount of texts every week before the sessions.

This is part of a series of BA-level seminars on a number of major topics in economic anthropology and sociology that I will offer in successive semesters, including Money, Time, Labour and Commodities (the last topic under the title The Social Life of Global Commodities).

Bibliography

Below are some examples of works that we read in this seminar:

Parry, Jonathan and M. Bloch (eds) 1990. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Zelizer, Viviana. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press