CONN 337 | Capitalism and Culture

While Americans have assorted perspectives on capitalism, many students arrive on campus with critical assessments of this socio-economic system. In this course, students will develop a significant scholarly foundation in the history of capitalism, its expansion to global dominance, and in theorists' assessment of its impact. We'll commence this gargantuan task with an anthropological lens attentive to how others in this world have experienced capitalism. But our journey over the semester will immerse students in philosophy, in political economy, in geography, in history, in sociology, in communications, and journalism, in activism, and in a panoply of other fields. In the final accounting, we'll return to anthropology's interdisciplinary lens, concerned as it is with the entire mosaic of human societies, both past and present, their many differences, and the diverse social and cultural forms still extant in the world today. Amidst that diversity, it is certainly the case that capitalism has been the most expansive and most successful socioeconomic model in human history. But amongst other outcomes, it also seems starkly detrimental to the very diversity from which it first arose. An exploration and discussion of those tensions is the crux of this course.