• Understand and apply anthropological theories of value and exchange.
• Understand arguments for the context-dependence of cognitive and ethical systems.
• Understand the promise and constraints of wage labor.
• Understand the relation between states, capitalism, and colonialism.
• Do independent research based on course concepts, texts, and the students’ own research agendas.

Many of us come to universities, at least in part, to answer some of life’s big questions: What does it mean to be human? What makes for a good society? How can I tell if I’ve led a good life?

Sadly, for many students, particularly those in a business school, solutions to those big questions tend to come from either economists themselves or instrumental disciplines that are captured by individualist, economistic thinking. All of this leads to some pretty underwhelming answers: A human is a rational maximizer. A good society is one in which markets and efficiency are prized above all else. You’ve led a good life if you’ve maximized your utility and consumption functions. Humans are essentially insatiable devouring machines; and the pinnacle of societal achievement is greasing the slide on the food-chute. Inspiring. Also, not terribly accurate.

Economic Anthropology generally, and this course specifically offers a contrast to all of this. Over the last century or so, Anthropologists have developed their own discipline, describing how humans create lives and wealth for themselves. For anthropologists, humans are never individuals. Rather they exist insofar as they have family and friends, enemies and cosmologies, insofar as people have context. Humans measure their worth against this larger social universe. This course, as an introduction to economic anthropology, will show students how anthropologists know all this.

The course will proceed in five parts. Broadly speaking it will introduce a set of basic ideas for understanding how humans lead their lives (exchange and value theories). Then the course will spend most of it’s time seeing how these theories work at different scales of analysis, starting in the individual’s head and talking about cognitive processes, and ultimately working our way up to global economic and political systems. Here follows a more specific explanation:

First, the course will start off arguing that “the economy” does not exist. Given that, a different way of understanding the common areas of concern encompassed by “economic” analysis is necessary. In turn, the course will then present anthropological theories of exchange and value, theories which will be the course’s through-line (or red thread). Second, the course will focus on individuals and their understanding of the world looking at numeracy, ethics, and rationality in a cross-cultural context. Third, the course will look at work, the way it’s gendered, the way it’s raced, the way it’s compensated, and the way people’s work makes and remakes the social world, one day at a time. Fourth, the course will talk about big systems and processes: capitalism, empires, colonialism. The idea with these big systems is to give some larger historical context to the lives that humans lead, as well as some insight as to where these systems come from and how they might go away. Finally, the course will end by arguing that friendship or affinity, and everyday communism seem to be true human universals around which people might build a better world. Again, the idea with all this is that the course will show that theories of value and exchange are relevant at whatever scale of analysis, from individual brains, up to big bad world systems.

Across the three central topics, students will have the opportunity to conduct independent research projects of their own choosing which will draw on ideas from the course. This, coupled with reading responses, and a final research paper will make for this course’s individually completed, written, home examination packet.

The main discipline for this course is Anthropology.

Reading list will be available on Canvas