Social Anthropology in a Transnational World: Global Flows, Local Relations

The course will be based on a close reading/watching of three monographs: A Kalahari Family documentary film by John Marshall and two books: Empire of Necessity by Greg Grandin as well as Evicted by Mathew Desmond. The ideas in these core works will be expanded by a set of additional readings, anchored mainly in anthropological research on the Americas.

The course comprises of four parts: I - Small Places, Big Questions (on research methods and how to tie micro and the macro, the empirical and the theoretical); ; II - Atlantic Connections (on how to move beyond methodological nationalism in do research from a global or trans-national perspective); III - The People Without History (on how to do bottom-up research on oral histories and life trajectories), IV – New Histories of Capitalism (on how to anthropological insights for historical research).

The „People of Puerto Rico Project” (PPPP) became the cornerstone for the way social anthropology is practiced today in the U.S. and in the world at large. Unlike their British counterparts, the first American anthropologists did not have access to a really existing tribal or non-state society, as the Native American communities had been decimated by the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Hence, figures such as Franz Boas based their work on second-hand sources (such as oral histories) and developed cultural anthropology. Anthropology students who went to study Puerto Rico in the 1940s, on the other hand, went to analyze first-hand how US imperialism has produced and maintained a colony in the Caribbean. Two towering figures in US anthropology emerged from this experience: Eric Wolf and Sid Mintz. Both pioneered a bottom-up study of globalization and an analysis of how macro forces (predominantly known as capitalism) shape local realities on the ground. This course will follow in the wake of PPPP and will give students the necessary skills – both methodological and theoretical – for doing social anthropology in the 21st century.

A detailed course schedule (with a week-by-week themes and readings) will be provided a week before the course commences. All the readings will be provided by the instructor.

Basic literature:

Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told : Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Baucom, Ian. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bourgois, Philippe. 2003. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge University Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan. c2009. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press.

Davis, Mike. 2018. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. Verso Books.

Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Evicted : Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Broadway Books.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso.

Grandin, Greg. 2014. The Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty. London: Oneworld.

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated : An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.

Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams : Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Univ of California Press.

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books.

———. 2010. Three Ancient Colonies : Caribbean Themes and Variations. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Raffles, Hugh. 2014. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton University Press.

Sennett, Richard. 1972. The Hidden Injuries of Class. CUP Archive.

Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Wolf, Eric R. 1990. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

By the end of the course, students will have:

- a sound understanding of the research methods in contemporary social anthropology

-in-depth knowledge of anthropological body of research on the Americas

- an command of major theoretical concepts in today's social anthropology

SKILLS.

By the end of the course, students will have:

- developed academic writing skills

- developed critical thinking skills

- developed in-class discussion skills

- developed a skill of an analysis of an academic text

The final grade will comprise of attendance and participatin in class discussions (20%), an in-class presentation of a prescribed texts (30%) and a final research paper (of up to 4 000 words).