| Holly Hanson |
| 314 Skinner |
| 538-2094 |
| Hhanson@mtholyoke.edu |
| Office Hours: Wednesday 2-4, and by
appt. |
History 301
MONEY IN HISTORY
Money in History, a 300 level colloquium, will explore the process of
commodification of non-market economies. We will look at Andean societies
in the first century after conquest, the creation of industrial
wage-labor in Europe, and the consequences for a number of African
societies of the transition from exchanges based on social relationships
to exchanges based on cash. We will focus on the complexity of these
transformations-the interaction of culture, power, and material resources
in processes of economic and social change. We will read some of the
classic works of economic anthropology and Marxist and feminist analyses
of commodification, and consider how various theories work for our case
histories.
Readings for the course will come out of the following:
- Karen Spaulding, Huarochiri, an Andean society under Inca and
Spanish rule
- Steve Stern, Peru's Indian peoples and the challenge of Spanish
conquest
- Kathryn Burns, "Nuns, Kurakas, and Credit: The Spiritual Economy of
Cuzco"
- William Sewell, Work and revolution in France: the
language of labor from the Old Regime to 1848
- Jane Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social
Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities
- Parker Shipton, Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African
Meanings of Forbidden Commodities
- Holly Hanson, "When the Miles Came: Land and Social Order in
Buganda, 1850-1928
- Marcel Mauss, The Gift
- Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective articles by Sara Berry, Paul Bohannan, Keith
Hart, GiovanniArrighi, Marilyn Strathern, Sharon Hutchinson, and others
We will begin with Mauss, The Gift, with perhaps a little bit of
anthropology critiquing Mauss at that point. (I plan to use Bourdieu and
Strathern, but I may decide to postpone some of that until later on in the
semester.) We will spend about a month on the process of the
commodification of labor in the Andes, and the consequences of the
creation of markets that link Andean societies to Spain. Then we will do a
week on Sewell: exactly how did the social relations of production change
with industrialization: what was happening, slowly, inside the process we
think of as absolute? We will spend a few weeks on West African societies
that in the pre-colonial period had elaborate markets but labor systems
that were not commoditized: for this I will use Paul Bohannan, Jane Guyer,
and Sara Berry. In the East Africa unit, I will use Parker Shipton,
Sharon Hutchinson, and my own work, and there are really interesting
parallels to be drawn with the Andes. I have to figure out how to make
this a 300 level class and not a graduate level one, but somewhere in the
mix we'll be looking at the analytical categories: what aspects of the
historical process get left out by Marxists, feminists, et. al.?
BACK TO HOLLY HANSON'S PAGE
TO HISTORY HOMEPAGE-
APPLICATION FOR 300 LEVEL