Moral Economies

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Intersections of the moral and the economic have long motivated anthropological interests and inquiries. Some have viewed this relation as a binary opposition between the market and the household—drawing a distinction between economic and social/moral spheres of everyday life. Others have focused on how economic practice is shaped by moral norms, while yet others examine how different values or moral and ethical orientations influence how people think about what “the economic” is and should be. This class will begin by examining the foundations of the moral economy as a concept before tracing the ways the concept is taken up across a variety of anthropological and ethnographic writing. Some topics we will cover in the course include spiritual economies, immigration, volunteerism, state-centered social welfare, and a politics of the commons.