Anthropology 389 - Anthropology of Neoliberalism

Institution:

Reed College

Subject:

Description:

Full course for one semester. Since the early 1970s, and in an accelerated form in the aftermath of the Cold War, neoliberalism rose to global hegemony as an economic program promoting the opening and deregulation of markets, the privatization of public services, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Yet the term neoliberalism often lacks conceptual precision referring sometimes simultaneously to an economic doctrine, a set of governmental techniques and a particular configuration of global capitalism. This course begins with a reading of some of the conceptual and philosophical foundations of the neoliberal turn, focusing in particular on neoliberal conceptions of human nature and sociality. We will then explore the ways in which anthropologists have studied neoliberal reforms and the entanglement of their economic, social and cultural effects. We will focus in particular on how, in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms, new logics of sociality and subjectivity are being produced that destabilize received ideas of the public and the private, the formal and the informal, nature and culture, as well as the secular and the sacred. Readings will include ethnographies of financial markets, the privatization of urban space, the rise of occult and spiritual economies, and new forms of intimacy and desire that have been associated with the rise of neoliberalism. Prerequisite: Anthropology 211. Conference.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.reed.edu

Phone Number:

(503) 771-1112

Regional Accreditation:

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities

Calendar System:

Semester

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