300624 The Social and Political Life of Money (30-M25 Transnationalisierung und Migration) (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

What is money? What is in it that makes so many of us spend our lives chasing after it? How did it emerge and what is its future? What role does money play in how we conduct our social and political lives?

Such questions will be addressed in this weekly seminar, which explores the social and political meanings of money in historical and global societies 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 economies. This is a reading intensive seminar and you should be prepared to read a significant amount of texts every week before the sessions to be able to participate in class discussion.

Literaturangaben

Below are some examples of texts 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