Seminars for the group study of selected topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Before there was money, there was debt. For thousands of years, from the early Vedic hymns in India to contemporary senate hearings in the US, we find people arguing about debt. A central question: What happens when our moral obligations to one another become quantifiable and transferable through money? The answer is debt, and the implications are far reaching. This decal covers a 5,000 year global history through the prism of money and the ethos of debt. We'll discover that money has to do with war, slavery, religion, philosophy, animal sacrifice, honor and degradation, witches, poetry, cults of rational numbers, and, surprisingly, accounting. This course asks the framing question, what is the nature and history of money and debt? We’ll discover that theories of money each come with a creation myth and reflect competing social logics. We’ll find that a history of money is necessarily a history of the powerful moral ethos of debtor and creditor; of the birth of the major world religions; of ancient slavery, warfare, and statecraft; of philosophy, law, and attitudes towards interest; of hierarchy, exchange, capitalism and communism. This interdisciplinary course is a contemplation on the works of social theorists David Graeber and Geoffrey Ingham, through which we’ll delve into philosophers including Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Hindu texts such as the Rig Vedas and the Brahmanas, the Bible, texts of ancient Chinese statecraft, and much more.

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