https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/S_PEAKnowledge and understanding.The student has acquired knowledge and understanding of: (1) the key concepts in economics and politics; (2) the ways in which politics and economics locally and globally are intertwined. Application. The student has acquired the competences to: (3) synthesize these key concepts, and to compare them over space and over time in a written argument; (4) apply key concepts from economic and political anthropology to different ethnographic contexts around the globe.This course examines anthropological approaches to the processes of economic and political life in diverse human societies in order to develop a cross-cultural appreciation of the ways economic and political phenomena affect people’s lives around the world. Grounded in the premise that the economic and the political are both conceptually and empirically entwined, this course explores how anthropologists continue to develop new directions and animate our existing understandings and knowledge about economy and politics. The course highlights how the everyday activities may contain inklings about the broader economic and political conditions, bringing the specific into conversations with the general and vice versa. The course will help students become familiar with ethnographic work in political and economic anthropology as well as gain a deeper understanding of concepts such as capitalism, enslavement, market, state, socialism, class and inequality, gender, race, (post)colonialism, development and human rights. This course will answer these and the rest of the questions that students have about politics and economics in the contemporary world and also during the entire human history.Lectures and tutorialsOne mid-term essay and a final exam. Please note: Attending the course’s sessions and reading all the essential readings is absolutely necessary if you wish to pass this course.Tsing, A. (2021). Mushroom at the end of the world. On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (also available in Dutch copy). Other literature to be announced in the course manual (see CANVAS).2nd year bachelor students in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.