Learning Outcomes
The aim of the course is to enable students to engage critically with familiar economic discourses and practices that are based on the assumption that there is something natural and therefore inevitable about human decisions and behaviors that seek to maximize gains and profits and minimize losses, expenses, and damages. On a more general epistemological level, the course aims at showing students that the questions anthropologists posit concerning economic matters are in a state of perpetual transformation and to help them understand why and how this happens.
Course Content (Syllabus)
The course introduces students to theories drawing from the work of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber which challenge the universality of the idea according to which society is constituted by self-serving autonomous individuals and to provide them with ethnographic examples illustrating relations of production and exchange in non-capitalist societies. Special emphasis is placed on data and arguments that challenge the common sense notion that the economy always constitutes a distinct sphere of relations and practices, on ethnographic research on the varying ways in which the notion of good is defined and on perspectives revealing the multiple moral connotations attributed to the production, exchange, sharing and production in different social and cultural contexts.
Week #1 Introduction: What is “the economy” all about?
Week #2 Anthropological critiques of modernist assumptions concerning economic rationality
Week #3 What is so original about the “original affluent societies”?
Week #4 The emergence of the market economy and the model of economic rationality
Week #5 The political economy of Karl Marx
Week #6 The social economics of Emile Durkeim and the cultural economics of Max Weber
Week #7 The debate between formalist and substantivist anthropologists over the definition of the economic
Week #8 Production as economic and as cosmological category
Week #9 Anthropological approaches to the division of labor by gender
Week #10 Do gifts and commodities belong to different worlds?
Week #11 Barter and money
Week #12 The personification of objects and the objectification of persons
Week #13 Contemporary consumption practices
Keywords
Market economy, hunting and gathering, modes of production, value, sharing and exchange, gifts / commodities
Course Bibliography (Eudoxus)
Ενδεικτική
Δάλλας, Δημήτρης
2912 Στον Μικρόκοσμο του Mall. Θεσσαλονίκη: Νησίδες.
Godelier, Maurice 1998. Μαρξιστικοί Ορίζοντες στην Κοινωνική Ανθρωπολογία (Τ.Β΄). Αθήνα: Gutenberg.
Godelier, Maurice, 2003. Το Αίνιγμα του Δώρου. Αθήνα: Gutenberg.
Gudeman, Steven, 2009. H Ανθρωπολογία της Οικονομίας: Κοινότητα, Αγορά και Πολιτισμός. Αθήνα: Πολύτροπον.
Κουραβέλος, Θ. (επιμ.), 2009. Κοινωνίες του Μοιράσματος: Οι Σύγχρονοι Απλοί Τροφοσυλλέκτες. Αθήνα: Πολιτειακές Εκδόσεις.
Mauss, Marcel,1979 To Δώρο. Μορφές και Λειτουργίες της Ανταλλαγής. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης.
1979 To Δώρο. Μορφές και Λειτουργίες της Ανταλλαγής. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης.
Narotzky, Susana, 2007 Οικονομική Ανθρωπολογία. Αθήνα: Σαββάλας.
Wilk, Richard και Lisa Cliggett, 2010. Οικονομία και Πολιτισμός. Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Κριτική.
Additional bibliography for study
Selected
Carrier, James (επιμ.),2005. A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Τσέτλχαμ, Η.Β.: Edward Elgar.
Hann, C.M. (επιμ.),1998. Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Κέημπριτζ: Cambridge University Press.
Ingold, Tim, 2000. Perceptions of the Environment. Λονδίνο: Routledge.
Meillasoux, Claude, 1981. Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. Κέημπριτζ: Cambridge University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall, 1972. Stone Age Economics. Σικάγο: Aldine-Atherton.