240537 SE The Anthropology of Money, Debt and Finance Capitalism (P4) (2022S)

The course is dedicated to anthropological work that seeks to understand contemporary finance capitalism, its ideology, internal organization and practices as well as its effects on people’s lives in different parts of the globe. In order to do so, the course revisits classic anthropological approaches of researching (forms of) money and economic exchange, such as the ones of Malinowski and Mauss, and considers more recent reflections on the subject, including publications in archaeological anthropology. It proceeds by discussing the phenomenon of debt as crucial component of the anthropology of money and finance paying heed (and tribute) to the pathbreaking work done by David Graeber in this field of research. Then, the course turns to literature on contemporary finance capitalism that was heavily informed and inspired by the so-called global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08. This literature includes ethnographies of stock exchanges and banks, such as the work of Karen Ho and Douglas Holmes, as well as anthropological reflections on the workings of the financial system, as advanced by Arjun Appadurai, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee. As these studies generally have a strong focus on western financial centres and institutions, the course will also consider work on other financial hotspots, such as China as analyzed by Horacio Ortiz, and non-western financial phenomena, such as Islamic finance as it has been explored by scholars like Bill Maurer and Daromir Rudnyckyj. Moreover, the course will analyze the effects of the “digital finance revolution” in various sites, such as Sibel Kusimba has done for Kenya, and will discuss how finance (in all its forms and ramifications) can be constructed as an anthropological object of contemporary research considering its embeddedness, multi-sitedness and fluidity.

After a general introduction into the topic by the lecturer, in the individual sessions of the course the students will present the texts that are on the reading list. 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 particular techniques will be used in order to motivate students to actively take part in the course, such as: 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.