Seminar: BA: Debt, Obligation, Sacrifice: Economic Anthropology for a Changing World - Details

General information

Course name	Seminar: BA: Debt, Obligation, Sacrifice: Economic Anthropology for a Changing World
Subtitle	Dr. Jagat Sohail
Course number	BA_SE:W/T
Semester	WiSe 2025/26
Current number of participants	14
expected number of participants	40
Home institute	Ethnologie/Kulturvergleichende Soziologie
Courses type	Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Next date	Tuesday, 03.02.2026 12:00 - 14:00, Room: Hörsaal G [Mel]
Lehrsprache(n)	Englisch
SWS	2
ECTS points	5

Lehrende

• Dr. Jagat Sohail

Rooms and times

Hörsaal G [Mel]

Tuesday: 12:00 - 14:00, weekly (13x)

Fields of study

• Lectures and Courses in English (International Studies) > Faculty of Philosophy I
• Philosophische Fakultät I - Sozialwissenschaften und historische Kulturwissenschaften > Institut für Ethnologie und Philosophie > Ethnologie > Bachelor Ethnologie 60/90

Module assignments

• Ethnologie Ethnologie60, Akkreditierungsfassung valid from WS 2019/20 > Pflichtmodule > PHI.07691.01 - Systematische Ethnologie: Wirtschaft/Technologie (SE:W/T) PO2022, valid from SoSe 2023 > LV 1: Kursus (Vorlesung oder Seminar)
• Ethnologie Ethnologie90, Akkreditierungsfassung valid from WS 2019/20 > Pflichtmodule > PHI.07691.01 - Systematische Ethnologie: Wirtschaft/Technologie (SE:W/T) PO2022, valid from SoSe 2023 > LV 1: Kursus (Vorlesung oder Seminar)

Comment/Description

What do we owe to others, and what can others claim from us? What binds us to the people, institutions and projects that make up our worlds? What compels a person to overwork, to repay, to care, to endure – even when doing so brings no relief? The anthropology of ecno-nomic life explores the way that matters of production, consumption, and exchange are al-ways also about fundamentally ethical, moral, and political matters of reciprocity, solidari-ty, hierarchy, and power. In this course, we explore the way that economic relations are never neutral and rational but are instead saturated with moral and affective intensity that both bind and alienate people from others and the world around them. Using theoretical and ethnographic material from across the globe, we examine diverse social phenomenon – from the 2008 financial debt crises, to risk-laden investments made by migrants and refu-gees, and the entanglement of historical guilt and financial indebtedness (Schuld) in the German context – as a way to develop a vocabulary with which to interrogate a rapidly changing world marked by austerity, precarity, global inequality, and the ever looming threat of climate catastrophe. We examine what kinds of subjectivities are produced when the repayment of debts becomes a condition of personhood. We trace how guilt and obliga-tion operate not just as a personal feeling but as a social force – shaping relations between kin, states, institutions, and imagined communities. And we uncover how sacrifice lets us think about the fraught relationship between hope, loss and the existential pursuit of better lives.
Literaturempfeh-lung: No reading is required before the Course. Some optional texts are provided below:

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5.000 Years, Updated and Expan-ded. Melville House, 2014.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. New York:Octagon Press, 1975.
Modulleistung: Essay
Besonderheiten: Der Kurs wird auf Englisch unterrichtet. Alle Studien- und Modulleistungen werden auf Englisch erbracht.