300652 Anthropology of Globalization (S) (WiSe 2019/2020)

Anthropology of Globalisation (S, MA)
Winter semester 2019, Mondays 14-16
Minh Nguyen

This seminar examines the social and political processes underlying the global circulation of people, ideas, images, values and things. Using ethnographic studies conducted around the world, it focuses on the implications of these processes for the everyday lives of individuals, communities, countries and the world we live in. We shall read and discuss about the entanglement of the local and the global, the connectivity and disjuncture, the frictions and conflicts, the dispossession and displacement, the acceleration of change, the destruction and possibility that are part and parcel of these processes. Topics to be covered will include migration, commodity production, consumption, financialisation, resource extraction, digitalisation, desires and aspirations, commodification of care, and industrial restructuring. We shall also critically reflect on our own experiences with globalisation and its multiple reach into our personal and social lives.

This is a reading intensive seminar that is suitable for students who are able to confidently handle a sizable amount of texts and information each week. It is also a student-directed seminar in which students take a central role in facilitating discussions. This seminar prepares the conceptual grounds for the Lehrforschung Friction/Entanglement/Assemblage in the Study of Globalisation that will take place over summer and winter semesters of 2020. If you are intending to join the Lehrforschung, it is highly recommended that you take this seminar.

Some key works include:
Appadurai, A. 1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Eriksen, T. H. 2016. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change, Pluto Press.
Ferguson, J. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press.
Inda, J. X. and Rosaldo, R, eds. 2008. The Anthropology of Globalization, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Mathews, G, et al., eds. 2012. Globalization from Below: The World's Other Economy. London: Routledge.
Sassen, S. 1999. Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press.
Tsing, A. L. 2011. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton University Press.