240041 SE BM7 FbSE Economic Anthropology Research Seminar (2024S)

This research seminar is designed as a complement to the lecture course Introduction to Economic Anthropology. It is highly recommended that students have went through that course, or that they have some basic knowledge of economic anthropology from their previous education, though this is not a formal prerequisite for taking this module.

While the word “economy” is often understood as synonymous to capitalist rationality, originally the notion encompasses all the ways through human societies organise fulfilment of their needs in the broadest sense. Such an inclusive focus goes beyond the dogmas of classical economics and holds the potential for exploring how social relations are reproduced in material ways. Economic anthropology has been vital for comparing the “premodern” ways of making a living and contemporary economies, and thus for envisioning new alternative ways of social organisation today.

Out of the four pillars of economy, as commonly envisioned (production, exchange, consumption, and social reproduction), this module follows the dynamics of exchange in particular depth. We will be exploring foundational anthropological concepts in this realm – gifts, commodities, tributes, debts, charity, dependence etc. We will be looking at the way these different ways of exchanging objects create different social relations of dependence as well as into the ways that they sometimes intersect in the so called "flexible capitalism".

This is a research seminar, meant to combine reading and discussion, on the one hand, and students’ progress into small collective research projects on their own. The students are to do small research in Vienna regarding a particularly complex exchange phenomenon – such as charity, activism, soup kitchens, a company etc – and explore them through the lenses of the analytics discusses in the course in the final report. You can also conduct interviews with certain interlocutors on particular topics (i.e. their work and their work collectives).

By the end of the course, students will be able to:
1. Understand the key concepts in economic anthropology pertaining to different logics of exchange
2. Grasp the key approaches, debates and authors in the field
3. Think about economic relations in distinctively anthropological and ethnographic ways
4. Be able to design small research projects in this realm.