This course aims to introduce students to the lively debates about debt and neoliberalism in current political and economic anthropology, seeking to develop a perspective that draws on insights from both subfields instead of keeping them separate. Other relevant contemporary issues, such as financialisation, globalisation, development, and the changing forms and roles of the “state” and “civil society”, will be discussed in relation to the central themes of debt and neoliberalism as well as in their own right. We will seek to trace and engage critically with a diversity of theoretical and analytical approaches. The countries of former Yugoslavia, in which these issues manifest in a setting of extensive and tension-ridden political, economic and social transformations, will provide the major empirical reference. However, examples from a broad range of other settings are also to be discussed to achieve a global perspective.
