Dr Gisa Weszkalnys OLD 6.08

This course is compulsory on the BA in Social Anthropology and BSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

This course examines ‘the economy’ as an object of scholarly analysis and a domain of social action. We start by asking how scholars measured, described, modeled, and predicted its behaviour. What forms do economic institutions take cross-culturally? How were these institutions transformed as a result of their incorporation into a wider capitalist markets, state systems, and development initiatives? For example, we will examine the central place of households within capitalist economies, largely overlooked by mainstream economic analyses, and the role that money can play in both dividing and uniting human societies. The course will familiarise students with fundamental aspects of the field and with core concepts used in economic analysis, such as production, consumption, exchange, property, alienation, scarcity, and value. But we will also try to break open the standard frames of the debate by highlighting, for example, the place of nature in the capitalist expansion, and how economic life is not just life in the ordinary. What progress have anthropologists made in understanding fluctuations, booms and busts? What can ethnography tell us about how people cope with crises, individually and collectively, and what the future may hold? Throughout the course, students will become familiar with the key concepts of economic anthropology with reference to selected ethnography and gain a solid understanding of relevant theoretical debates.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 1 hour of lectures in the ST.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT.

Anthropology students taking this course will submit a tutorial essay for this course to their academic advisers.

Non-Anthropology students taking this course will submit a formative essay to the course teacher.

J.G. Carrier and D. Miller (1998) Virtualism: A New Political Economy. M Sahlins (1974), Stone Age Economics; J Parry and M Bloch (Eds) (1989), Money and the Morality of Exchange; K. Polanyi (1944) The Great Transformation. K Ho (2010) Liquidated: an Ethnography of Wall Street. S. Mintz (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History; E. Shever  (2012) Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina; C.Hann and K.Hart (2011) Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique. This is an indicative reading list: detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

Exam (70%, duration: 2 hours).
Essay (30%, 2500 words) in the LT.