Markets and Society: Economic Anthropology Research

Faculty Advisor: Adjunct Professor, Anthropology, Georgetown University

Research Program Introduction

When a country announces new tariffs on imported steel, most people picture the effect showing up somewhere abstract, on a stock ticker or a trade balance sheet. But walk through a factory town where those industries anchor daily life, and the story changes. Job security shifts, family budgets tighten or loosen, entire communities reorganize around what counts as valuable work. An economic policy on paper becomes a lived experience shaped by culture, tradition, and social expectation. This is the space where economic anthropology begins.

This program examines the social and cultural dimensions of economic life. Drawing from economic anthropology, and other related disciplines, it presents students with the diverse ways peoples around the world, and across time, have organized their economies to meet their distinct needs and wants.

Students will walk away with a broader lens for understanding why economies look so different across societies, and the tools to ask sharper questions about the systems shaping their own daily lives. This foundation prepares them to design an original research project grounded in real cultural and economic questions.

At the end of the program, each student will produce a research paper examining a specific economic anthropology situation.

Possible Topics For Final Project:

• Argue that a particular ban on an economic activity should be removed or that one should be imposed.

  • For instance, should sports gambling be legal/prohibited in X country?

• A project comparing an economic phenomenon/behavior in two different contexts from a cultural perspective.

  • For example, comparing a U.S. social media marketplace to one from another country.

• A project that examines how shifting trade policies might be changing economic life in a particular region of the world.

  • For example, what has been the social and cultural impacts of the growth of semiconductor production in Arizona?

• A project that examines contemporary efforts to define what counts as work.

  • For example, a paper looking at recent changes in Bangladesh employment law to include domestic workers.

• A project that traces the development of a concept across time.

  • For example, what are guilds, how have they evolved, and why are some commentators recommending that we return to this model of organizing skilled labor?

• A project describing and comparing recent examples of Indigenous people playing a positive role in shaping how extraction projects on their territories are implemented.

  • For example, the student could focus on lithium mining in Chile and the United States.

• Or other topics in this subject area that you are interested in, and that your professor approves after discussing it with you.

Program Detail

• Cohort size: 3 to 6 students

• Workload: Around 4 to 5 hours per week (including class and homework time)

• Target students: 9 to 12th graders interested in Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, International Relations, Global Studies, Political Science, or other related subject areas.

• Schedule: TBD. Meetings will take place for around one hour per week, with a weekly meeting day and time to be determined a few weeks before the start date.