VALUE, OBJECTS, AND MEANING

This course explores how anthropologists have engaged with the question of value as means of understanding and comparing human social engagement with the creation, circulation, and consumption of objects and ideas. In doing so, this course will read classical anthropological texts concerned with exchange, social meaning and action and consider a variety of topics of anthropological interest such as gifts, commodities, capitalism, inequality, and the relationships between humans and nonhumans of many kinds. The course traces how questions and arguments that emerged out of earlier debates in “economic” anthropology were taken up and altered in later conversations about the analytical importance and utility of material and semiotic approaches. In doing so, the course explores what these genealogies might say about the possibility of, and the potential usefulness or desirability of, a contemporary or future-looking anthropology of value.