Merchants, Chiefs and Spirits

Catalog description

Brokers and intermediaries bring people together for material or symbolic rewards, often overcoming a lack of trust or information between strangers. Brokers have been viewed, over time, with endearment as well as with suspicion, more recently viewed as superfluous middle-men in a supposedly "friction-free" world. Despite several predictions about the end of brokers, they are still present and thriving in different forms and scales. How do we think of brokers in an increasingly (inter)networked, digitized, and automated world? We explore the role of brokers and intermediaries across a range of social, cultural, and political relations and institutions, including gender, media, political rule, public health, infrastructure, and religion. Course readings are drawn from various disciplines and fields, including anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and history, and we consider how inter-disciplinary discussions and debates have approached the concept of mediation over time.