Anthropology of Money

general courses

Knowledge of English on the B2 level, both written and oral.

Perhaps, each and every action of our everyday lives has as an economic aspect. How we manage our households, what we buy, how we use our time… The course aims at grasping how people use material world to provide for their living and maintain their social groups. How their economic actions are embedded in non-economic factors: values, ethnicity, religious beliefs, etc. Starting from classical case studies and theories, we will investigate a range of topics: work, production, debt, and – first of all – money. Money – be it a note, a plastic card, or a series of digits encoded on our bank account – serves as a key pointer to crucial factor of our social life: how we understand value and what we do with it.

The course will embrace perspectives of different disciplines: social anthropology, philosophy, economics and history.

We are going to start with classical case studies of economic anthropology: the Kula system of Trobriand Islands and the Potlach at Northwestern coast of Canada. Those examples gave rise to big anthropological theories of value, gift giving, and reciprocity and in general sparked an assumption that those allegedly primitive people in remote places of the world are not that different from allegedly civilized Europeans. Then, we will pass to philosophical foundations of thinking on economic action and money – ranging from Aristotle, through John Locke and Karl Marx, to Georg Simmel. Lastly, we are going to discuss several situations of functioning money and money-like objects in order to understand various contexts of our social life in modern capitalism, such as mortgages or commoditization of love and body. What do we value? What are the origins of money? How does money relate people to each other? And why it drives all of us so crazy? These are some questions we are going to tackle during the course.

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. (1986) The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carrier, James, ed. (2006) A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Edward Elgar.

Carrier, James (1995): Gifts and Commodities. Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700. London, New York: Routledge.

Graeber, David (2011):. Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville Press.

Graeber, David (2001): Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave.

Halter, Marilyn (2000) Shopping for Identity. The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York: Shocken.

Hart, Keith (2001): Money in an Unequal World. New York: Texere.

Humphrey, Caroline and S. Hugh-Jones, eds (1992): Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1984 [1922]): Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.

Marx, Karl (1996 [1867]): Capital. Volume I (vol. 35 of Collected Works): Moscow, London, and New York: Progress Publishers, Lawrence and Wishart, and International Publishers. (Book One: The Process of Production of Capital. Part I: Commodities and Money. Chapter 1: Commodities. Subchapter 1, 2 and 4).

Mauss, Marcel (1967 [1925]): The gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. New York: Norton.

Meillassoux, Claude (1981): Maidens, Meal and Money. Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parry, Jonathan and Maurice Bloch, eds. (1989): Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Polanyi, Karl (1957) “The economy as instituted process.” In Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, edited by K. Polanyi, C. M. Arensberg, and H. W. Pearson. New York: The Free Press. 243–270.

Rogers, Douglas. "Moonshine, money, and the politics of liquidity in rural Russia." American Ethnologist 32.1 (2005): 63-81.

Shell, Marc (1982) Money, Language, and Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Simmel, Georg (1978[1900]) The philosophy of money. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Zelizer, Viviana (1994) The social meaning of money. New York: Basic Books.

a. Knowledge:

An alumni:

- Understands the relationships between the various dimensions of social change (especially with regard to various aspects of modernization and globalization) (K_W02).

- Knows the advanced methods of analysis and interpretation used in anthropological research (K_W08).

b. Skills:

An alumni:

- Is able to select and make a critical assessment of information coming from various sources, of primary and secondary nature (K_U01).

- uses interdisciplinary methods and interpretation tools for analysis of different phenomena of the culture (K_U04).

c. Social competences:

An alumni:

- respects principles of tolerance and demonstrates a sensitivity in viewing cultural differences while discussing with partners (K_K05)

- 10 in-class quizzes (80%). The questions in quizzes will pertain to assigned readings and will be signalized to students in advance.

- active participation in the class discussions (20%).

Absences:

- It is possible to have 2 absences;

- In case of 3 or 4 absences, it is possible to make up for them after consultation;

- In case of 5 absences there is no possibility for obtaining course credit.