ANT 114 CC: POWER AND INEQUALITY

Power and Inequality in a Global World.

Almost half of the world's population lives in poverty. What are the mechanisms of power that reproduce inequality in different settings around the world? Through examining ethnographies of migration from the Middle East to Europe and from south to north in the Americas; systemic racism in the United States; issues of food access and security; and gender disparities in the workplace, students will identify the means by which power is used to create unequal access to resources in different contexts. Why do we have so much poverty on earth? What factors contribute to wealth gaps? How is poverty structuralized and institutionalized? What realities do people living in poverty face, and how do they deal with them? How do intersectional approaches to race, class, and gender apply? Using an anthropological approach, this course investigates how global economic systems reinforce the growing wealth gap and how cultural practices around race, class, and gender are often used to justify and reify unequal distributions. Students will use a variety of anthropological methods such as participant-observation, interviews, and the collection of visual data to gain first-hand knowledge of issues of inequality in our local community.