Economic Anthropology: cross-cultural alternatives to capitalism

We tend to think of economic matters as hard realities, they are after all the systems by which sustenance, production, and wealth are organised in our lives. Yet these material foundations of life have been, and are, radically differently organised in different cultural contexts from the deep past to contemporary times. How should we understand this diversity? What theories of value can illuminate these practices without reducing them to variants of Eurocentric models of exchange, production, consumption and distribution? How might such an expanded sense of economic life reframe the way we understand contemporary arrangements of money, markets, and financial systems in ways do not take their inevitability for granted? This course introduces students to foundational theories and key anthropological cases of human cultural economies. We explore classic ethnography of non-capitalist exchange systems as well as anthropological approaches to exotic financial arrangements spanning crypto to fintech to hedge funds. Through a series of applied projects, the course develops key skills for students to do economic anthropology themselves.