ANTH 379 - Power, Resources, Extractivism

This course examines the interplay between power relations and natural resources through key works in anthropology, history, human geography, and political ecology. We will engage with critical scholarship on extractivism and environmental justice to analyze how materials such as minerals, oil, coal, crops, forests, fisheries, land, wind, and solar energy are transformed into sources of economic inequality, ecological degradation, and political domination across multiple spatio-temporal scales. Together, we will denaturalize the concept of resources and investigate how they come into being. In particular, we will explore how the materialities of resources entangle with power relations to participate in colonial processes-past and present-as well as in the production of future imaginaries. Anchored primarily in the Mediterranean region, the course will explore key themes and concepts such as extraction, resource-making, scarcity, property, commons, toxicity, and pollution.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 201 or ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies to the anthropology department’s SETS concentration.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.