Entry requirements

A Bachelor's degree, equivalent to a Swedish Kandidatexamen, from an internationally recognised university.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students should acquire an overview of key concepts and debates on late-/post-socialist marketisation and the major aspects of livelihood change engendered by this complex transformation in contemporary Asia and beyond.

Students should also develop the capacity to 'think anthropologically' when facing and trying to explain a problem/question related to late-/post-socialist transformation, particularly a sensitivity for the factors that have shaped this process in diverse and unexpected ways: local contexts, cultural differences, unique histories, and human agency.

Students should also be able to make use of such knowledge in the construction of their own anthropological questions related to late-/post-socialist changes elsewhere.

Content

This course explores the experiences and diverse livelihood strategies of Asian communities who have negotiated one of the greatest social and economic transformations of the 20th century: the transition from socialist to marketised economic systems in Europe, Asia and Africa. The focus is on Asia, where the marketisation process has played out in ways that are both similar to and at the same time remarkably different from what has been observed in other settings of post-socialist change, notably in Eastern Europe.

We examine what marketisation entails in China, Vietnam, India, Mongolia and beyond, its impact on the lives of Asian communities, and the diverse and creative livelihood strategies they have devised in response to this complex transformation. Students will have the opportunity to look at major aspects of livelihood change, notably in agriculture, land use, trade, and industrial wage employment. The course will also engage with major scholarly debates on marketisation, notably the role of the state, the moral economy-rational peasant question, forms of resistance, and whether marketisation should be perceived as a positive transformation or destructive change.

Instruction

Students are required to attend all lectures and seminars, read the suggested literature before class (a minimum of two articles or book chapters per lecture/seminar), complete seminar assignments and submit the final essay on time. Each week, a student/group of students will take responsibility for preparing the seminar discussion and leading it, building on critical engagement with the literature given for that seminar. The student(s) in charge of the seminar should prepare a one-page handout with discussion points and questions, to be distributed to other students and teacher via email at least 24 hours before the seminar. The teacher will suggest some guiding questions for seminars, yet students are free to formulate their own.

All students are expected to participate actively in seminar discussions (it is expected that everybody says something at a seminar).

One lecture (2x45 minutes) and one seminar (2x45 minutes) per week during 4 weeks.

Assessment

• Individual/group presentation at seminars counts for 30% of the total grade
• A final essay of 1,500 - 2000 words counts for 70% of the total grade

Grading criteria

• For the individual presentation: The capacity to engage with the literature independently and critically, and to prepare and present the presentation in a coherent, clear and innovative way.
• For the final essay: The capacity to engage with the literature independently and critically, to apply theories to analyse practical case studies, and the sophistication and originality of the arguments.