240516 SE Spirits of Capitalism: Anthropological Investigations into Economic Inequality and Religion (P4) (2020S)

The course is concerned with how anthropologists are investigating religious-cum-spiritual phenomena by linking them to the dominant form of economic organization in the present world, i.e. capitalism. Since the works of Max Weber and Karl Marx are central to these anthropological endeavors, the course starts with a re-reading of Weber’s "disenchantment" and "spirit of capitalism" theses as well as with Marx' understanding of religion as part of what he termed "false consciousness".
Then, the course turns to anthropological research that is based on this classic literature and at the same time goes beyond it, such as Jane Schneider’s inspiring essay "Spirits of Capitalism", in which she questions Weber’s disenchantment thesis (and from which the title of the course is obviously borrowed), and Aihwa Ong’s "Spirits of Resistance", in which she interprets spirit possession among female factory workers in Malaysia not merely as false consciousness but rather as a way to deal with highly gendered power asymmetries in capitalist production. The course also will discuss the notion of "millennial capitalism" introduced by Jean and John Comaroff and especially what they call "occult economies" as being constitutive for how religion is entangled in economic activities in many parts of the world today. Another thought-provoking approach that will be discussed in the course is Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of finance capitalism which relies on religious metaphors to detect the "Ghost in the Financial Machine". Moreover, the reading list of the course consists of ethnographic examples that are to a greater extent (but not exclusively) located in Southeast Asia and deal with a variety of religious phenomena in Islamic and Buddhist societies that experience rapid economic transformation. Among the key authors in this regard are Daromir Rudnyckyj, James Hoesterey, Andrew Alan Johnson, Joshua Comaroff and AbdouMaliq Simone. A major aim of the course is to rethink - on the basis of the discussed literature - the relationship between capitalism and religion from an anthropological perspective as well as to develop a better understanding of both religious and economic phenomena in today’s world.
After a general introduction into the topic by the lecturer, in the individual sessions of the course the students will present the texts that have to be read. For every text, there are at least two discussants that will start the debate. After around one third of the course, the students will submit a brainstorming text that will give them the opportunity to express first ideas about the topic that they have chosen for their seminar paper. This means that in the remaining sessions of the course the conceptualization of their seminar papers will become a recurrent topic. In addition to that, it is planned that the following techniques will be used in order to motivate students to actively take part in the course: discussions in smaller groups; spontaneous taking of notes with the aim to develop arguments further; role-plays in which students will assume different positions in a scholarly debate.