Approaches to Capitalism

Well before the 2008 global economic crisis, historians, anthropologists, and economic sociologists worked to reclaim interpretive authority from those who privileged an abstract “market” or “capital” as the agent of social, cultural, and economic change.

These scholars insisted that capitalism has a history that does not unfold uniformly across time and space. Still, the new histories and ethnographies of capitalism remain in a formative stage. This workshop provides clarity to the field by inviting scholars to consider the range of methodological approaches to researching and writing studies of capitalism. Approaches to Capitalism brings together the architects of an emerging subfield to explicate methodological approaches for telling histories and ethnographies of people, space, and resources in the context of capitalism’s development. The goal is to contribute to a larger debate over using capitalism as a synthetic lens to comprehend modern history and anthropology.