Introduction
Session 1: Intro: What Is Capitalism? What Is Anthropology? How Can Understanding Capitalism Help Us Better Understand Our Current Historical Moment?
No readings assigned.
Session 2: Expanding Inequality and Contemporary Crises
Piketty, Thomas. “Introduction.” In Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Belknap Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780674979857. [Preview with Google Books]
Walley, Christine J. “Deindustrializing Chicago: A Daughter’s Story.” Chapter 6 in The Insecure American: How We Got Here & What We Should Do About It. Edited by Hugh Gusterson & Catherine Besteman. University of California Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780520259713. [Preview with Google Books]
Explore website: Southeast Chicago Archive & Storytelling Project.
Session 3: Thinking about Capitalism and Information Ecologies I
McIntosh, Janet. “The Sinister Signs of QAnon: Interpretive Agency and Paranoid Truths in Alt-right Oracles.” Anthropology Today 38, no. 1 (2012): 8–12.
Rapacioli, Paul. “Christmas Lights, Riots, and the Fall of Utopia,” “Trump, Eisenhower, and the Values of Success,” “Refugees and the Alternative Media,” “Mutation,” “The Psychology and Economics of News,” and “Entering the Media of Post-Truth.” Chapters 1–6 in Good Sweden, Bad Sweden: The Use and Abuse of Swedish Values in a Post-Truth World. Volante, 2018. ISBN: 9789188659231.
Session 4: Thinking about Capitalism and Information Ecologies II
Otis, Cindy L. “How to Spot Fake News Articles,” “73% of People Say They Don’t Understand Polling, and Other Fake Stats,” “Your Eyes Are Lying: Spotting Fake Photos and Videos,” and “Memes Aren’t News and Other Social-Media Tips.” Chapters 17–20 in True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News. Feiwel & Friends, 2020. ISBN: 9781250239495.
Simonite, Tom. “A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary around the World.” Wired, July 11, 2021.
Check out the comparative search engine Search Atlas.
Theories of Capitalism
Session 5: Nineteenth-Century Political Economy
Smith, Adam. “Introduction and Plan of the Work,” “Of the Principle Which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour,” “That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” “Of the Origin and Use of Money,” and “Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or of Their Price in Labour, and Their Price in Money.” Chapters 1–5 in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: A Selected Edition. Edited with an introduction and commentary by Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780192817969.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. International Publishers Co., 2014. ISBN: 9780717802418.
Background reading (not required):
Smith, Adam. “Introduction.” In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: A Selected Edition. Edited with an introduction and commentary by Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780192817969.
Session 6: Capitalism and “Culture”
Weber, Max. “Class, Status, Party.” Chapter 7 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated, edited, with an Introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Routledge, 2009. ISBN: 9780415482691. [Preview with Google Books]
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Chapter 1 in The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Edited by John G. Richardson. Greenwood, 1986. ISBN: 9780313235290.
Ortner, Sherry B. “Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture.” Chapter 9 in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Edited by Richard G. Fox. School of American Research Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780933452787. (You can skip the section called “Point of Entry: Class and Culture in America.”)
Session 7: Debating Capitalism after World War II
Hayek, F.A. “Individualism: True or False.” Chapter 1 in Individualism and Economic Order. University of Chicago Press,1996. ISBN: 9780226320939. [Preview with Google Books]
Polanyi, Karl. “Societies and Economic Systems,” “Evolution of the Market Pattern,” “The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money,” “Market and Man,” and “Freedom in a Complex Society.” Chapters 4–6, 14, and 21 in The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780807056424.
Recommended:
Kuttner, Robert. “The Man From Red Vienna.” New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017.
Rand, Ayn. “What is Capitalism?” Chapter 1 in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Signet, 1986. ISBN: 9780451147950. [Preview with Google Books]
Nasar, Sylvia. “Friedrich von Hayek Dies at 92; An Early Free-Market Economist,” New York Times, March 24, 1992.
Session 8: Globalized Capitalism and Racial Capitalism
Harvey, David. “Fordism” and “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation.” Chapters 8 and 9 in The Condition of Postmodernity. Wiley-Blackwell, 1991. ISBN: 9780631162940.
Virdee, Satnam. “Racialized Capitalism: An Account of Its Contested Origins and Consolidation.” Sociological Review 67, no. 1 (2019): 3–27.
Recommended:
Harvey, David. “Theorizing the Transition.” Chapter 10 in The Condition of Postmodernity. Wiley-Blackwell, 1991. ISBN: 9780631162940.
Session 9: How We Got to the Extremes: From the Precariat to the Superwealthy
Standing, Guy. “The Precariat.” Chapter 1 in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. ISBN: 9781474294164. [Preview with Google Books]
Ogle, Vanessa. “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s.” American History Review 122, no. 5 (2017): 1431–58.
An Ethnographic Look: Capitalism and Everyday Life
Session 10: Exploring Social Class in High School
Bettie, Julie. “How Working-Class Chicas Get Working-Class Lives” and “Hard-Living Habitus, Settled-Living Resentment.” Chapters 3 and 4 in Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. University of California Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780520280014. [Preview with Google Books]
Session 11: From Old to New Money
Aldrich, Nelson W., Jr. “The Composition of Old Money” and “Class Acts.” Chapters 2 and 3 in Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America. Allworth, 1997. ISBN: 9781880559642.
Osnos, Evan. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” New Yorker, January 30, 2017.
Session 12: Race, Class, and Status
Lacy, Karyn. “Public Identities: Managing Race in Public Spaces” and “Status-Based Identities: Protecting and Reproducing Middle-Class Status.” Chapters 3 and 4 in Blue Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class. [Preview with Google Books]
Session 13: Losing Industrial Jobs
Walley, Christine J. “It All Came Tumbling Down: My Father and the Demise of Chicago’s Steel Industry.” Chapter 2 in Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780226871806. [Preview with Google Books]
Dudley, Kathryn Marie. “Badges of Ability.” Chapter 8 in The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780226169101. [Preview with Google Books]
Explore website: Southeast Chicago Archive & Storytelling Project (in particular the storyline on the Memorial Day Massacre).
Session 14: The Rise of the “Fissured Workplace”
Weil, David. “Vignettes from the Modern Workplace.” Part 1 in The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 1–28. ISBN: 9780674975446. [Preview with Google Books]
Genoways, Ted. “The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret.” Mother Jones, July/August 2011.
Finnegan, William. “Dignity: Fast Food Workers and a New Form of Labor Activism.” New Yorker, September 8, 2014.
Session 15: Chasing an Innovation Economy: Gig Work, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence
Gray, Mary L., and Siddarth Suri. “Introduction: Ghosts in the Machine” and “Humans in the Loop.” In Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Harper Business, 2019. ISBN: 9781328566249. [Preview with Google Books]
Irani, Lilly. “Justice for ‘Data Janitors’.” Public Books, January 15, 2015.
Recommended:
Rosenblat, Alex. “Introduction: Using an App to Go to Work—Uber as a Symbol of the New Economy,” “Driving as Glamorous Labor: How Uber Uses the Myths of the Sharing Economy,” “Motivations to Drive: How Uber’s System Rewards Full-Time and Recreational Drivers Differently,” and “The Technology Pitch: How Uber Creates Entrepreneurship for the Masses.” In Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. University of California Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780520324800. [Preview with Google Books]
Capitalism and Its Others
Session 16: Soviet-Style State Socialism
Verdery, Katherine. “What Was Socialism, and Why Did It Fall?” and “A Transition from Socialism to Feudalism? Thoughts on the Postsocialist State.” Chapters 1 and 8 in What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton University Press,1996. ISBN: 9780691011325. [Preview with Google Books]
Session 17: The Nordic Model
Partanen, Anu. “In the Land of the Free: Becoming American.” Chapter 1 in The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. Harper Paperbacks, 2017. ISBN: 9780062316554. [Preview with Google Books]
Read two other chapters (your choice) from The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life.
Session 18: The View from Post-Colonial Regions
Donham, Donald L. “The Metanarrative of Modernity in Ethiopia: 1974,” “Revolution within a Revolution: Divine Kings and Zemecha Students in Maale,” and “Marxist Modernism at the Ethiopian Center: Cold War Deterritorializations.” Chapters 1, 2, and 6 in Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780520213296. [Preview with Google Books]
Session 19: Varieties of “Welfare” States
Allison, Anne. “From Lifelong to Liquid Japan” and “Ordinary Refugeeism: Poverty, Precarity, Youth.” Chapters 2 and 3 in Precarious Japan. Duke University Press Books, 2013. ISBN: 9780822355625. [Preview with Google Books]
Capitalism On the Front Lines
Session 20: Wall Street and Finance Capitalism
Ho, Karen.“Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers,” “Wall Street’s Orientation: Exploitation, Empowerment, and the Politics of Hard Work,” and “Liquid Lives, Compensation Schemes, and the Making of (Unsustainable) Financial Markets.” Chapters 1, 2, and 6 in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press Books, 2009. ISBN: 9780822345992. [Preview with Google Books]
Session 21: The Financial Crisis of 2008
Tett, Gillian. “Preface,” “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” “The Derivatives Dream,” “Dangling Around the Regulators,” “The Dream Team,” “The Cuffs Come Off,” and “Merger Mania.” In Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. Free Press, 2009. ISBN: 9781439100752. [Preview with Google Books]
Watch: Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street, Part 1. Directed by Michael Kirk. Color, 59 min. 2012.
Session 22: An Anthropology of Supply Chains
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Selections from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780691220550. [Preview with Google Books]
Session 23: Concluding Conversation: Life out of the Ruins
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Selections from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780691220550. [Preview with Google Books]
Sessions 24 and 25: Final Project Oral Presentations
No readings assigned.
