AN357      Half Unit
Economic Anthropology (2): Transformation and Globalisation

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

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 both neo-classical economics and deterministic theories . 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, in particular from the perspective of 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 global changes, as well as a set of theoretical tools that can help us to rethink approaches to capitalism in general.

10 hours of classes and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.
1 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected.

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.

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: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period