Course content

This course explores globalization from an anthropological perspective, examining how global processes are experienced, represented, and contested in diverse local contexts. Through a combination of theoretical frameworks and ethnographic case studies, students will critically engage with key debates on nationalism, cosmopolitanism, mobility, knowledge regimes, and resistance in the Anthropocene.

Globalization understood as a complex process of global flows of people, ideas, images, information, merchandise, capital and more is not new and can be traced at least to the XVth century. With these processes the world has been undergoing a process of change in which populations become interconnected through myriad economic, ecological, political, and technological relations. Many of them, induced from several centers, especially "the West." Oftentimes, these relations are of unequal character, affecting people’s lives and cultures in often unpredictable ways. What is relatively novel of globalization, however, is the widespread as well as heterogeneous awareness of it.

This course examines how local cultures, ecologies, and people’s lives are being affected by globalization (and crucially how these processes are being represented by them) in multiple and sometimes not necessarily positive ways.

The course is divided in two sections. A first one that focuses on the conceptual and methodological anthropological toolkit, and a second one that focuses on how anthropologists have tackled different aspects of living (and imagining living) in a globalized world.

Learning outcome

The students shall become familiar with of anthropological conceptual and theoretical tools for understanding processes and representations of globalization.

Students shall become familiarized with a wide variety of historical and ethnographic cases that exemplify the possibilities and limits of living in a globalized world.

Knowledge

• The student shall acquire knowledge of central concepts and theories for the anthropological study of globalization.
• The student shall acquire knowledge on anthropological methodological strategies for the study of globalization.
• The student shall acquire knowledge of concrete case studies that exemplify central dynamics of globalization.

Skills and general competences

• Be able to reflect with the use of anthropological theories and concepts on how people respond to and cope with their changing environmental, cultural, and economic predicament that follows from different forms of globalization.
• Be able to develop ethnographically informed methodological strategies for the study of globalization.

Have developed an awareness of the dynamic approaches to differences and similarities in people’s social life under conditions of globalization.

Learning methods and activities

Lectures and seminars.

Please note that lectures and seminars may start prior to the registration deadline.

The course has a compulsory assignment. Each student is expected to give a brief midterm oral presentation of their ongoing work with an individual assignment due at the end of the semester. This presentation will be made in the classroom in front of the class.

The compulsory assignment has to be approved in order to qualify for the exam.

Compulsory assignments

• Plenary presentation of group assignment

Required previous knowledge

Either 60 ECTS in Social Anthropology or a bachelor's degree or equivalent.

Course materials

See reading list available at the beginning of the semester.

Credit reductions