Fall 2006
Freshman Seminar: Money: Equivalent, Value, and Symbol.

In everyday life, money is rarely seen as problematic. It usually circulates without issue, accumulates without comment, and operates with the “full faith and credit” of the community whose currency it is. It is only when we cross state borders that we have to establish trust in the unfamiliar currency, to recognize its value, and to negotiate its equivalence. By examining various ethnographic and theoretical materials in this course, we will try to understand how people in different societies and in different historical periods rely on money to structure their exchanges and communities.

The course is built around three main clusters that emphasize different aspects of money. We start with exploring different regimes of values, i.e. various social and cultural contexts in which concepts of the good and the desirable are first constructed, and then linked with particular forms of money. Value analysis will allow us to see how money brings desire (“I want this!”) and meaning (“I want this because…”) together, creating a possibility of social exchange (“I want this from you!”).

The second cluster focuses on the details and rituals of such exchanges. We will trace practices in which money establishes equivalence between incompatible values (“This horse is worth $1000. Your time is worth $20 per hour. You would have to work 50 hours to buy this horse.”). Acting as the general equivalent, as a standard measure of things, money “translates” different qualities and quantities into comparable (monetary) units, replacing actual objects with representations in a single metric. What are the principles that different societies use to establish equivalence of values and things? What are the cultural logics that underlie operations of bargaining and exchange? What is the relationship between the object and its (monetary) representation?

The last cluster of problems and texts will help us clarify the symbolic role of money. We explore how this system of equivalences is represented through different social and artistic practices, and how it is transformed into an indicator of non-economic qualities (e.g. power, illness, taste, or race).

Participants of the seminar will write three shorter papers (1500-2000 words), discussing literature for each cluster of the course. For the final paper (2500-3000 words) each student is expected to conduct a brief ethnographic project, exploring a particular aspect of money in real life.

Fall 2006
The Program in European Cultural Studies
Course Title: The Human Face of Soviet Socialism: Everyday Life Under the Soviet Regime

Traditionally, the life in the soviet period is perceived as being polarized between the ideological constraints imposed by the state authorities, on the one hand, and acts of popular resistance by dissidents, on the other. In this course, we will approach soviet life from a different point of view. By looking at everyday practices in socialist countries, we will try to understand how communist ideology was ‘translated’ into the language of material objects, spatial arrangements, and rituals of consumption. As in any act of translation, success of these everyday renditions of the dominant political and economic frameworks involved substitution and adaptation. Ideological slogans and party directives were not just blindly followed; rather they were modified in accordance with people’s habits, life-styles, and expectations. What was lost in these interpretative acts of the “original message”? What was added to it? How was this “message” transformed, adopted and/or subverted? Through reading primary accounts, fiction, film, and academic studies of Soviet daily life we will analyze the cultural logic of socialism that still retains its legacy in a large part of the former Soviet world.