300652 Key Themes in Economic Anthropology (S) (SoSe 2022)

This MA seminar uses anthropological approaches to understand economic processes as grounded in both ordinary people’s economic activities and broader political economic and social relations. We will examine some key themes such as gift and commodity exchange, labour and commodity production, money and finance, property relations, consumption, and the gendering of economic activities. A relevant set of theoretical and empirical texts will be devoted to each theme – the empirical texts being ethnographic studies of economic life conducted in historical and contemporary societies around the world. This seminar is based on intensive reading and class discussion and you must read the assigned texts closely to be able to participate in the session. As a rule, there are two required texts for each session.
Your study credit (Studienleistung) will be based on two activities:
1) work in groups or in pairs (depending on the number of students signing up for the class) to trace the people and the social relations that are involved in the raw material production, factory production, and the sale of a common consumer product found in a local supermarket.
2) write up the meanings and implications of 1-2 keywords used in the seminar, such as gift exchange, fair trade, commodity fetish, fictitious commodities, or moral economy for sharing with the class via the ekvv online forum.
In case you would like to write a term paper (Moduleleistung), further instructions will be provided in the course syllabus at the beginning of the semester.

Bibliography

Examples of books that we will read from:
Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]). The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press
Mauss, Marcel (2004[1950]). The Gift. London: Routledge.
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House.
Besky, Sarah. 2013. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press.