Course materials are comprised of a monograph, a compilation of texts (compendium) and online articles.
You can buy the required book from Akademika Blindern bookstore, or purchase through online booksellers such as amazon.co.uk. Required book can also be borrowed from the University Library (provided the item is held).
"Kopiutsalget” on the lower level of Akademika Blindern bookstore, sells course materials such as compendia. You will be required to show your UiO student ID and semester card prior to your transaction. If course material is out of stock, please contact the department asap in the semester in order for us to re-order.
If you are away from campus and want to access online articles with UiO subscription, go to Easier off-campus access
SYLLABUS
Monograph
There are five monographs as part of the syllabus. You are expected to read one of these monographs as part of the course. In each case we have selected chapters that are recommended as key extracts to guide your reading. It will help your research proposal and your work if you read across the monographs and read thoroughly from your chosen monograph. These monographs will be referred to across the course when relevant.
@ Bear, L. 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt. Section One – Circuits of State Debt (26 pages), Family Capital, State Pedigree and Limits of Austerity: Public Goods (20 pages) (Total 46 pages).
@ Zaloom, C. 2006. Out of the Pits. Finance from the Floor (15 pages). Materials of the Market (36 pages) (Total 51 pages).
@ Ho, K. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Liquid Lives, Compensation Schemes, and the Making of (Unsustainable) Financial Markets. (46 pages).
@ James, D. 2015. Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration. The History of that House keeps you out: Property and the new entrepreneur. (26 pages). Indebtedness, Consumption and Marriage in the new middle class (24 pages) (Total 50 pages).
@ Rudnycky, D. 2019. Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance. Pious Finance in the Global Islamic City (24 pages), Subjects of Debt, Subjects of Equity (18 pages), An Emergent Geoeconomics (7 pages) (Total 49 pages).
Lecture 1: Creating the Crisis and the financialisation of resources
The global financial crisis of 2008 still hangs over politics and economic debate around the world a decade on. This crisis is often described as being the result of a ‘financialisation’ of the global economy. But what does this mean and how convincing is it as an explanation of the crisis and its aftermath? In this lecture we explore these themes and begin to draw out particularly anthropological contributions.
Tett, G. 2014. Anthropology and the Global Financial Crisis. Kroeber Anthropological Society. [7 pages] ORIA
Pitluck et al. 2018: Finance beyond Function. Three causal explanations for financialization. Economic Anthropology. [20 pages] ORIA
Parkinson, Alexander. 2014. Financialization and Financial Labour: Ethnographies of Finance and ‘Ethnographic Reflections’ on British Retail Stockbroking, Research in Economic Anthropology, 34-157-185. [28 pages] COMPENDIUM
Zaloom, C. 2017. “Finance”, Cultural Anthropology, Series: Household. [2 pages] ORIA
Ho, K. 2015. “Anthropology of Finance”, Elsevier International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 171-176. [5 pages] ORIA
Ho, K. 2018. “Introduction: Interrogating financialization as an analytic”, in Valérie Boussard (ed.) Finance at Work. London: Routledge. [4 pages] eBook
Oritz, H. 2012. “Anthropology of the Financial Crisis”, in J.G. Carrier (ed.) A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. [12 pages] COMPENDIUM
Hart, K. and Oritz, H. 2008. “Anthropology in the Financial Crisis”, Anthropology Today, Vol. 24(6), pp.1-3. [3 pages] jstor.org
Lecture 2: Creating Markets?
Classical approaches in mainstream Economics that tend to assume that ‘markets’ are universal phenomena driven by cross-culturally similar rules and motives explaining have long been countered by critiques from Political Economy and Anthropology. In this lecture we provide an overview of these debates aimed towards giving an overview for students less familiar with these themes and orienting those with deeper background towards the issues raised in the rest of this course.
Geertz, C. 1978. “The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing”, The American Economic Review, 68(2):28-32. [4 pages] jstor.org
Geertz, C. 1963. “The Bazaar Type Economy: The Traditional Pasaar”, chapter in Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns. The University of Chicago Press. [19 pages] COMPENDIUM
Martin, K. 2018. ‘It was Harder Before: We Lived by the Market’: Hopes and Fears of a Market-Free Future in East New Britain”, in H. P. Hahn and G. Schmitz (eds.) Market as Place and Space of Economic Exchange. [10 pages] eBook
Polanyi, K. 1944. “The Self-Regulating Market”, chapter 6 in The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. [10 pages] ORIA
Applbaum, K. 2005 “The Anthropology of Markets”, chapter 17 in J. G. Carrier (ed.) Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. [14 pages] COMPENDIUM
Lecture 3: Bursting the bubble – ethnographies of the housing market crisis
In this lecture we explore a particular example of a domain that was at the centre both of global markets and of local attempts to build livelihoods, families and communities – namely the financialization of the housing market across national borders. We draw extensively on case-studies from the readings listed below and from the monographs for this course.
Stout, Noelle. 2019. “Introduction”, in Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class. The University of California Press: California Series in Public Anthropology. [35 pages] eBook
Palomera, J. 2013. “How did Finance Capital infliltrate the world of the Urban Poor: Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighbourhood”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38(1):218-235. [17 pages] wiley.com
Lecture 4. Ethnographies of Banking and Financial Markets
In this lecture we take financial markets and the banking system as a specific ethnographic examples of the ways in which anthropologists have argued that markets have to be ‘made’ rather than discovered as spontaneously occurring social phenomena. We compare a variety of ethnographic accounts to examine how ideas of the market or culture act to shape the limits of moral obligation and legitimate economic action in a variety of contexts.
Weeks, J. 2003. “Organizational Culture”, chapter 1 of Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank. The University of Chicago Press. [26 pages] COMPENDIUM
Tett, G. 2009. “The Derivatives Dream”, chapter 1 of Fool’s Gold. New York/London: Free Press. [20 pages] COMPENDIUM
Ourossoff, A. 2010. “Contingency”, chapter 5 of Wall Street at War: The Secret Struggle for the Global Economy. UK: Polity Press. [29 pages] eBook
Hertz, E. 1998. “First Contact”, chapter 1 of The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge University Press. [13 pages] eBook
Abolafia, M.Y. 1996. “Market Makers on Wall Street”, introduction chapter of Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Harvard University Press. [13 pages] COMPENDIUM
Lecture 5: The Creation of Debt and Credit
The financial crisis was largely described in media and politics as a crisis of debt and credit. Yet often in these discussions the meaning of debt and how it becomes attached or detached from particular persons or groups was left largely unexplored. In this lecture we explore classic and contemporary anthropological explorations of the changing meaning of debt and credit in order to shed light on the processes by which shifting moral and economic obligations shape changing social worlds.
Graeber, D. 2011. “1971-The beginning of something yet to be determined”, chapter 12 of Debt: The First 5 000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Printing. [31 pages] eBook
Bear, L. 2015. “Beyond Economization: State Debt and Labour”, Current Anthropology. [2 pages] culanth.org
Poovey, M. 2013. “Demonizing Debt, Naturalizing Finance”, chapter 3 of P. Y. Paik and M. Wiesner-Hanks (eds.) Debt: Ethics, Environment and the Economy. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. [17 pages] eBook
Peebles, G. 2010. “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt”, Annual Review of Anthropology. [15 pages] LibKey
Gregory, C. On Money Debt and Morality: Some Reflections on the Contribution of Economic Anthropology. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2012) 20, 4 380–396. [16 pages] LibKey
Lecture 6: Debt and social obligation – ethnographic cases
In this lecture we build on the theoretical insights developed in the previous week to explore the impact that ideas of debt and credit have in shaping social possibilities globally. This will lead us back into considerations of issues raised in previous lectures, such as the relationship between household debt and financialized tradeable debt in the economic crash of 2007/8. In addition, ideas of debt and credit can be shown to shape a large number of our most important social institutions, such as corporations, that are formed as entities, through the legal limitation of debt obligations. This analysis of the formation of corporate entities provides the counterpoint to the discussion of the internal life of business entities provided in the companion course for this Political Economic stream of the MA (ANTH4610).
Peebles, G. 2012. Whitewashing and leg-bailing: on the spatiality of debt. Social Anthropology, 20, 4 429–443. [14 pages] wiley.com
Foster, R. 2012 “Big Men and Business: Morality, Debt and Corporation. A perspective by Robert J. Foster”. Social Anthropology, 20(4): 486–490. wiley.com
Martin, K. 2012. “Big men, business debt and the corporation. A perspective by Keir Martin”, Social Anthropology, 20(4): 482–485. wiley.com
Graeber, D. “On Social Currencies and Human Economies: Some notes on the Violence of Equivalence”, Social Anthropology, 20(4): 411-428. [18 pages] wiley.com
Palson, G and E. Paul Durrenberger. 2015. “Introduction: The banality of financial evil”, in Gambling Debt: Iceland’s rise and fall in the financial economy. University Press of Colorado. [18 pages] jstor.org
Han, Clara 2012. “Social Debt, Silent Gift”, chapter 2 in Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press. [38 pages] eBook
Lecture 7: Creating property and resources
The assets owned by businesses and the resources that they extract and use, whether from ‘nature’ or from ‘society’ are likewise often described in terms that suggest that they exist waiting to be used by entrepreneurial individuals or organisations. But, as with the construction of economic value, a large number of social processes have to be negotiated in order for materials or relations to be constructed as a resource or property. In this lecture we explore what anthropology can add to our understanding of these often hidden processes that lay at the heart of contemporary political economies.
Strathern, M 1999. What is Intellectual Property after? The Sociological Review Monograph Series: Actor Network Theory and After, vol 47 issue S1. Edited by John Law & J. Hassard. wiley.com
Verdery, K. 1994. The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania. Slavic Review, 53(4):1071-1109. [38 pages] jstor.org
Li, T.M. 2014. “What is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment”, Transactions, 39: 589–602. Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). [13 pages] wiley.com
Lecture 8: Chains of value: from resource to commodity
As the global financial crisis showed, the most basic necessities of life; a place to live, for example, can be made into resources to be traded globally in a manner that shapes their form and circulation. In this final lecture we explore more generally the ways in which the creation of resources is entangled with chains of circulation and distribution that shapes their nature as resources at different points in the chain and ask how anthropology might begin to ethnographically analyse such chains of value creation. The lecture concludes with a summary of how the different elements of the course are interconnected, and open up space for ethnographic research.
Mintz, S.W. 1985. “Introduction” chapter of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. [16 pages] COMPENDIUM
Tsing, A. 2015. Chapter 4 “Working the Edge” and Chapter 19 “Ordinary Assets” of The Mushroom at the End of the World. [22 pages] eBook
MacCormack, F. 2012. The Reconstitution of Property Relations in New Zealand Fisheries. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 171-201 (31 pages). jstor.org
Sibilia, E. 2018. “Oceanic accumulation: Geographies of speculation, overproduction, and crisis in the global shipping economy”, Invironment and Planning A: Economy and Space 2019, Vol. 51(2) 467–486. [19 pages] sagepub.com