Anthropology of Money

General data

Course ID:	3700-KON264-AL-OG
Erasmus code / ISCED:	14.0 Kod klasyfikacyjny przedmiotu składa się z trzech do pięciu cyfr, przy czym trzy pierwsze oznaczają klasyfikację dziedziny wg. Listy kodów dziedzin obowiązującej w programie Socrates/Erasmus, czwarta (dotąd na ogół 0) – ewentualne uszczegółowienie informacji o dyscyplinie, piąta – stopień zaawansowania przedmiotu ustalony na podstawie roku studiów, dla którego przedmiot jest przeznaczony. / (0310) Social and behavioural sciences, not further defined The ISCED (International Standard Classification of Education) code has been designed by UNESCO.
Course title:	Anthropology of Money
Name in Polish:	Anthropology of Money
Organizational unit:	Faculty of "Artes Liberales"
Course groups:	(in Polish) Przedmioty ogólnouniwersyteckie wystawiane przez Kolegium Artes Liberales General university courses General university courses in the humanities
ECTS credit allocation (and other scores):	(not available) Basic information on ECTS credits allocation principles: the annual hourly workload of the student’s work required to achieve the expected learning outcomes for a given stage is 1500-1800h, corresponding to 60 ECTS; the student’s weekly hourly workload is 45 h; 1 ECTS point corresponds to 25-30 hours of student work needed to achieve the assumed learning outcomes; weekly student workload necessary to achieve the assumed learning outcomes allows to obtain 1.5 ECTS; work required to pass the course, which has been assigned 3 ECTS, constitutes 10% of the semester student load. view allocation of credits
Language:	English
Type of course:	general courses
Prerequisites (description):	- Knowledge of English on the B2 level, both written and oral. - The class is dedicated for graduate students (II stopień studiów)
Short description:	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.
Full description:	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.
Assessment methods and assessment criteria:	- 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% of the total score). Excellent students might earn extra 5% of points in this respect. Student can miss maximum two classes without justification. Extensive undocumented absenteeism will result in taking down points from participation part and – in case of more than 4 undocumented absences – will lead to failing the class.

This course is not currently offered.

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