Anthropology of Millennial Capitalism

Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroffs have recently characterized the contemporary capitalism as 145millennial146 capitalism and it is 147millennial148 in at least two senses: one, it speaks to the state of capitalism at the turn of the millennium, and two, it refers to the immense hopes and aspirations it has raised, which are almost millenarian and magical in their nature. In this course, we will investigate these two aspects of contemporary capitalism. We will look at how these millenarian movements and accompanying occult economies are sustained by contemporary capitalism in different national contexts, and what are its conditions of possibility. In the process, we will inevitably engage the role of media in producing different regimes of visibility and invisibility, of transparency and occlusion. Apart from using anthropological works we will take recourse to psychoanalytical and post- structuralist writings to understand the contemporary capitalist moment.