Anthropology and Development

GLOBAL STUDIES 4517

What is 'development'? Economic progress for all? A slow and gradual 'improvement' in the human condition? Helping people with 'projects'? Westernization? Modernization? The sorting out of bodies that are useful and can be put to work from those less useful bodies that must be contained, imprisoned, or killed? The militarized accumulation of capital? The commodification of labor? The exhaustion of nature? In this advanced seminar we will consider how anthropologists - as writers, analysts, and theorists - have engaged the theories, meanings, practices, and consequences of (sometimes externally directed) economic and political change. We focus on issues of the contemporary moment: oil; urban poverty and inequality (sex work, migration, water, debt, and cash transfer programs); and cultures of militarism. The course is designed to provide a graduate-level introduction to theory and ethnography based on intensive reading, discussion, critique, and writing, with revision. It is open to advanced undergraduates and fulfills writing-intensive (WI) requirements, as well as capstone requirements for some majors.
Course Attributes: EN S; BU Eth; AS LCD; AS SSC; AS SD I; AS WI I; FA SSC; AR SSC; AS SC

Section 01

Anthropology and Development
INSTRUCTOR: Gustafson
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