300664 Anthropology of economic life (MA: Soziologie der Globalen Welt) (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

This seminar explores how people create, sustain, and contest systems of economic life. It examines how livelihoods, moral obligations, and power relations are embedded in broader social and political contexts, and how individuals and communities navigate economic systems that both enable and constrain them. Combining classical debates in economic anthropology with contemporary ethnographies of labour, consumption, debt, and digital and informal economies, the course investigates how the very idea of “the economy” is socially produced and morally negotiated. Students will learn to analyse how economic practices are lived and imagined in everyday life, and how they illuminate the entanglements between capitalism, value, and social relations.