Prof Deborah James

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, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Melbourne) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

This course explores the limits and potentials of contemporary ('late-stage') global capitalism. We all know that we live in a global economy, but how has this come into being? What are its political, social and cultural consequences? Why does the global economy produce inequality for many and abundance for some? What might its futures be? We will answer these questions in relation to classic themes of production, social reproduction, redistribution, circulation and consumption. By taking an anthropological approach we will move away from an economic or deterministic theory of capitalism. Instead we will explore the significance of mutuality, kinship and community, affect, ethics and culture for an understanding of capitalism. Our theoretical approaches will be expanded to explore the emerging anthropology of some of the following: infrastructures, the commodification of intimacy and care, 'affective' economies and hope, digital interactions, financialisation and debt, and anthropological views on welfare. We will examine global capitalism from the perspective of global elites, the middle classes and the precarious poor. The course will demonstrate that globalisation does not have a single logic nor is it a towering force. Instead, our focus on ethnography takes us inside the local processes behind accumulation. At the end of the course we will have a better understanding of recent global changes, as well as a set of theoretical tools that can help us to rethink approaches to capitalism in general.

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

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected. This course has a reading week in Week 6 of WT.

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

Altenried, Moritz. 2022. The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Bear, Laura. 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River. Stanford University Press.

Chong, Kimberly. 2018. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Durham: Duke University Press.

James, Deborah. 2015. Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, Chicago University Press

Stout, N. 2019. Dispossessed: how predatory bureaucracy foreclosed on the American Middle Class. University of California Press.

Tsing, A. 2009. Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148–176.

Upadhyay, Carol. 2015. Re-engineering India: Work, Capital and Class in an Offshore Economy, Oxford University Press.

Yanagisako, S. and L. Rofel. 2019. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: a collaborative ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion, Duke University Press.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the spring exam period.