Anthropology 236 - ECONOMY, ECOLOGY & SOCIETY

This course concerns the cultural evolution of human society, looking at changes in social organization and technological complexity from our origin as nomadic foragers to current configurations of centralized industrialized states. This course examines issues of economy (production, exchange, consumption) and ecology (human-resource interaction, adaptation and competition for resources), and looks in particular at the development and spread of capitalist relations and effect on marginal and disempowered peoples. Topics include the evolution of human society (family level groups, local level groups and regional polities), life in subsistence-based economies, the role of surplus and the rise of political states and class inequalities, and the rise of capitalism and its contribution to globalization in the modern world system. We conclude the course with a discussion of the ecological impacts of industrial capitalism including overexploitation, human induced climate change and the environmental effects of war.

Not open to first-years