Introduction
Session 1: Intro: What Is Capitalism? What Is Anthropology? How Can Understanding Capitalism Help Us Better Understand Our Current Historical Moment?
Class discussion suggests what an anthropological take on capitalism might look like, how this approach potentially differs from those of other disciplines, and what it might help us understand about the economic system with which we are all enmeshed.
Session 2: Expanding Inequality and Contemporary Crises
Class discussion focuses on a key topic in debates over contemporary capitalism: expanding economic inequality. What is the evidence for it? What are the various perspectives on how to understand it and its implications? The readings illustrate the two kinds of materials this class will use to approach various topics. Piketty’s overarching theoretical discussion of growing inequality is juxtaposed with an ethnographic example of what growing inequality “felt like” from the point of view of a deindustrializing community.
Session 3: Thinking about Capitalism and Information Ecologies I
Class unit that explores the power of shifting information ecosystems to shape how we are informed - or disinformed - about contemporary capitalism.
In-class viewing: The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski. Color, 94 min. 2020.
Session 4: Thinking about Capitalism and Information Ecologies II
Continued discussion of information ecologies (and the economics underpinning them). Offers practical guidance on how to navigate information sources and determine more trustworthy sources when writing final papers.
Theories of Capitalism
Session 5: Nineteenth-Century Political Economy
Class discussion gives overview of key ideas of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, locating their ideas within their historical time periods and acknowledging the complexity of their ideas in ways that critics and advocates often gloss over. Students are randomly assigned to espouse the ideas of either Adam Smith or Karl Marx in a class debate on the virtues and pitfalls of capitalism.
Session 6: Capitalism and “Culture”
Offers overview of key ideas of well-known sociologists/anthropologists and the ways they sought to address the role of “culture” and belief within economic accounts of capitalism.
Session 7: Debating Capitalism after World War II
Looks at two influential European theorists who experienced both WWI and WWII. Although coming from similar backgrounds, Polanyi and Hayek espoused diametrically opposed understandings of capitalism that would become highly influential after WWII.
Session 8: Globalized Capitalism and Racial Capitalism
Explores additional social theories regarding how to understand capitalism, including the economic dynamics underpinning “globalization” as well as how racial difference has been historically central to the emergence of capitalism.
Session 9: How We Got to the Extremes: From the Precariat to the Superwealthy
Examines yet other contemporary theories of capitalism, including ideas relating to post-structuralism and precarity. Continues to explore the need to think globally through an historical account of “off-shoring.”
Assignment due: Essay 1
An Ethnographic Look: Capitalism and Everyday Life
Session 10: Exploring Social Class in High School
This new unit highlights ethnographic accounts of capitalism. It begins by exploring how social class is embedded in everyday social realities in ways we don’t always examine – including in interactions among teenage girls in a California high school.
In-class viewing: People Like Us: Social Class in America. Directed by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker. Color, 124 min. 2001.
Session 11: From Old to New Money
Discussion of the shifting demographics, cultural lifestyles, and beliefs of the super wealthy as well as the economic transformations underpinning this shift.
Session 12: Race, Class, and Status
Ethnographic account of middle- and upper-middle class suburban Black Americans living outside Washington, D.C. Explores the intersection of class and racial dynamics.
Session 13: Losing Industrial Jobs
Ethnographic accounts of daily life experiences of job loss and growing precarity in former working-class industrial regions in the United States. Considers how experiences of deindustrialization vary between different parts of the world.
Session 14: The Rise of the “Fissured Workplace”
Theoretical account of how and why corporations have “fissured” and what that means for working conditions. Weil’s analysis is juxtaposed with journalistic accounts of the work lives of fast food employees and recent immigrant workers in the United States.
Session 15: Chasing an Innovation Economy: Gig Work, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence
Explores the transformation in the nature of work associated with the rise of the gig economy through ethnographic discussions of AI “ghost workers” in the United States and India as well as of Uber drivers in the United States and Canada.
Assignment due: Essay 2
Capitalism and Its Others
Session 16: Soviet-Style State Socialism
Ethnographic account of how economic life and state surveillance played out in the daily experience of ordinary people in the Soviet Union and its satellites just before its fall.
Assignment due: Final paper topics
Session 17: The Nordic Model
Journalistic account of social and economic policies across differing Nordic countries and how such policies contrast with those elsewhere. Considers how the term “socialism” confusingly gets used to describe vastly different social and economic set-ups.
Session 18: The View from Post-Colonial Regions
Looks at international Marxist movements after decolonization through an ethnographic exploration of the difficult history of the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution. Considers how “Marxism” in the region bore little resemblance to assumptions of either Western supporters or critics, suggesting the importance of deep dives into the histories of particular locations.
Assignment due: Final paper outlines
Session 19: Varieties of “Welfare” States
Explores how the social policies of ‘welfare states’ take different forms among wealthy countries, and how such policies have been impacted by the changing nature of both contemporary capitalism and political movements. Discussion grounded through an ethnographic account of Japan.
Capitalism On the Front Lines
Session 20: Wall Street and Finance Capitalism
Ethnography of the social world of Wall Street investment bankers in the build-up to the financial crisis of 2008.
In-class viewing: Frontline: Inside the Meltdown. Directed by Michael Kirk. Color, 56 min. 2009.
Session 21: The Financial Crisis of 2008
Account by a business journalist trained in ethnography into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and its implications. Provides an account of everyday experiences from a key financial center.
Assignment due: First draft of final paper
Session 22: An Anthropology of Supply Chains
Ethnographic account of supply chains that considers how gourmet mushrooms are picked, circulated, and consumed across the U.S., Japan, and other parts of Asia. Brings environmental questions into discussions of capitalism while also offering alternative ways to conceptualize supply chains.
First drafts of final papers returned for revisions
Session 23: Concluding Conversation: Life out of the Ruins
Concluding discussion that returns to the grounding questions that started the class. Will juxtapose competing historical conceptualizations of capitalism and the ways contemporary capitalism is changing. Will also bridge more abstracted economics discussions and social and cultural accounts of how capitalism plays out in daily life for diverse groups of people.
Sessions 24 and 25: Final Project Oral Presentations
Assignment due: Revised final paper due during session 25
