Economic Anthropology最新文献

{"title":"Entrepreneurship‐As‐Struggle: The Crises and Politics of Entrepreneurial Becomings","authors":"Grace Mueller, Julia Qermezi Huang, Jacqui Bassett, Paige Chisholm, Hanna Geary","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70018","url":null,"abstract":"Entrepreneurship among marginalized people in Bangladesh involves social, political, and cultural struggle against immediate crises of poverty and enduring crises of class, caste, religious, and gendered exclusions. Drawing on 25 months of ethnographic research among entrepreneurs in rural Bangladesh and the life stories of 137 entrepreneurs, we argue that the aspirations, relationships, and transformations that emerge with these practices reveal an entrepreneurship distinct from the mainstream development ideas so prevalent in the region about individualized market actors. This article calls attention to the specific forms of politics that entrepreneurship‐as‐struggle acquires and explores how entrepreneurs mobilize identity formation, accommodating protest, cultural critique, and solidaristic action through their ventures. Paying heed to such forms of politics in entrepreneurship offers insights into what types of crises entrepreneurship is able to confront and what forms of transformation become possible for entrepreneurs and their communities.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145254521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Space Matters: Marketplace and Interactional Order in the Nepalese “Manpower Bazaar”","authors":"Sandhya A. S.","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70013","url":null,"abstract":"Spatial dynamics of market interactions are underexplored in the sociological study of markets. This ethnographically informed study dives into the intricate workings of a marketplace of migrant recruiters in Nepal, colloquially known as Manpower Bazaar. While spatial clustering of firms is often associated with efficiency or organizational design, this research reveals that their role extends far beyond these aspects. The study underscores the significance of interactional order within marketplaces where designed order is absent. In the early stages of market formation, a marketplace plays a pivotal role in fostering a unique market culture by shaping social norms, facilitating interactions, and standardizing behavior. Furthermore, Manpower Bazaar serves as a site for examining questions related to access, inequalities, uncertainties, and the survival of market actors. Tracing patterns of provisional alliances among competing recruiters, or what I refer to as <jats:italic>fission and fusion</jats:italic> in the market, the study highlights the complexity of the marketplace dynamics, including the consequences of spatially enabled market interactions on nonfirm actors around whom the marketplace is structured—the migrant workers. Reminding how space matters in the study of markets, this article contributes to our understanding of marketplaces, intermediation, and cross‐border migrant labor markets.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"82 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145072671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Short‐Term Sustainability: Neoliberal Philanthropy, Dependency, and Divine Economics in Islamic Zanzibar","authors":"Caitlyn Bolton","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70017","url":null,"abstract":"As the concept of sustainability became mainstream in development discourses from its environmentalist origins, it increasingly came to resemble the unchecked capitalist logics that it was originally meant to critique: Rather than reorganizing the economy, sustainability could be achieved <jats:italic>through</jats:italic> the economy as philanthropy became modeled on venture capitalism. This article traces this neoliberal refashioning of sustainability by charting how one Islamic development organization's funding was cut when its project to develop a preprimary sector in Zanzibar's schools was deemed unsustainable. I term this now‐dominant model of funding <jats:italic>short‐term sustainability</jats:italic> for the way that it narrowly focuses on a temporal frame of only a few years, demanding that projects “sustain” themselves after initial investment through either profit generation or embeddedness in the neoliberal state. In contrast, I chart how another organization redefines sustainability as long‐term relationships of wealth redistribution and care. By modeling funding on the Islamic <jats:italic>waqf</jats:italic> (pious charitable endowment), they center the spiritual and material interdependence of donors and recipients, in contrast to the Euro‐American liberal valuation of independence that undergirds much contemporary sustainability discourse. Closer to its environmentalist origins, sustainability here is premised on humanity's fundamental dependency, thick webs of relationality, and a commitment to mutual flourishing.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145072672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Exploration of Credit/Debt in Impact Investments for Rural Development in Ghana","authors":"Claudia Campisano","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70014","url":null,"abstract":"This article sheds light on processes of credit/debt signification, negotiation, and contestation in rural development projects funded through social and impact investing. It does so by presenting the case of a development project implemented in Ghana by SustAgric‐Africa (SAA), a social enterprise aiming to lift smallholder farmers in rural Africa out of poverty by promoting sustainable agriculture. By looking at discourses and practices around credit/debt, and the role they play in enacting the relationship between service providers and intended beneficiaries, the article contends that the variable geometries in which this dyad manifests and is made sense of are based on differing and sometimes contraposing ethical horizons and worldviews. The article concludes that, on one hand, the neoliberal logic underpinning “impact” and “social” investments' arrangements facilitates hegemonic processes that tend to strengthen actors in more powerful positions, with their ethicomoral worldviews, and reproduce existing unequal patterns of wealth accumulation. On the other hand, however, it also reveals how intended beneficiaries' practices and worldviews open spaces for questioning the ethical and financial logics implicit in development projects like SAA's, potentially disrupting the plans and imaginaries of more powerful actors.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145056747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imperial Policies and Well‐Being in the Prehistoric Andes","authors":"Donna J. Nash","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70016","url":null,"abstract":"At European contact, the Inca dominated the Andes. Some colonial commentators described them as benevolent because of their policies to prevent starvation among cooperative subjects; however, this does not mean that there were no ill effects to the well‐being of conquered groups. Archaeological research focused on well‐being offers new avenues through which to understand the impacts of expansive polities on subject populations. In this article, I propose some ways that archaeologists may assess well‐being in prehistoric societies using relative measures of poverty and social exclusion to establish expectations. This approach is applied to the Inca and Wari Empires and uses archaeological data from human remains, landscapes, and households. Current evidence cannot dispute claims regarding Inca policies that prevented the starvation of subjects but indicates that some people physically suffered due to increased labor demands. Other groups experienced forms of social exclusion and perhaps felt terrorized by the destruction of ancestral remains and the co‐option of sacred sites. The Wari Empire probably pioneered these tactics. Archaeologists, in addition to examining health, can examine the material indicators of imperial policies and consider how a group's cosmology might be used as a means to exert political control when assessing the well‐being of populations in the past.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145017153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Having Experience of What to Do to Succeed”: Unsettling Neoliberalism Through the Lived Experiences of Microcredit Trader‐Borrowers in Ibadan","authors":"Olubukola Olayiwola","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70012","url":null,"abstract":"Neoliberal market‐oriented approaches to solving social and economic problems defined as “poverty” have received much attention in anthropology and allied disciplines such as sociology and geography and among development studies scholars and practitioners. Anthropologists have taken up, and often contend with, the paradigmatic discourse of neoliberalism, debating its adequacy as an explanatory framework for understanding the causes and consequences of the political‐economic forces determining the social formations they examine, including those forces resulting in public policies geared toward fighting poverty. This contention is due to anthropology's interests in humans and the dynamics of their relationships with institutions and structures created by them. This contention has made some anthropologists echo their frustration about whether neoliberalism has offered any help at all. Based on ethnographic study conducted in the informal economic sector in Ibadan, southwestern Nigeria, this article offers participants' ideation of “having experience of what to do to succeed” and examines the nature of trust among actors as an alternative perspective of working bottom‐up to explore the nuanced iterative connections between actors at various levels of scale. I argue that “having experience of what to do to succeed” explains how actors at various levels play around the “ephemerality of trust” and “good timing” in achieving their desires for interest‐free microloans and votes needed for electoral success and access to political offices. This idea can bring together the rather mutable and multifaceted, real ways that neoliberalism comes into view. This account shows that Ibadan's manifestation of neoliberalism offers insights into how structural adjustment and neoliberal policies in Nigeria merged with citizens' expectations of politicians in ways that provide a context for the existence of <jats:italic>trust</jats:italic> (but in which case) that is very ephemeral, and the moral imperative is to take advantage of that trust in a strategic way.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144919285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Economic Anthropology","authors":"","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12326","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12326","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12326","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144519795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Understanding Illiberalism Through Economic Practice: Four Cases","authors":"Sarah Muir, Tiana Bakić Hayden","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70009","url":null,"abstract":"This essay introduces a collection of essays on illiberal economies, arenas for paradoxical practices that simultaneously critique but rely upon liberal institutions and norms. Looking across the cases that the essays present, we argue that three themes stand out as especially salient for helping us gain greater analytical purchase on the challenges that contemporary forms of illiberalism pose, both analytically and politically: exclusion and marginalization, affective sociability, and the navigation of contradictions. Taken together, we argue, these three thematics offer avenues for exploring more fully the affordances and limits of contemporary illiberalism, both in its economic guise and more broadly.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Crafting Compliant Data: Enacting Aggregate Spend Transparency in the US Life Science Industry","authors":"Lindsay Poirier","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70010","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70010","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In the early 2010s, the passing of US legislation mandating that health care manufacturers publicly disclose their financial relationships with physicians gave rise to the field of aggregate spend. Within corporate compliance offices in the life sciences, aggregate spend professionals track updates to transparency legislation, develop protocols for reporting data on their company's interactions with and payments to health care providers, and monitor data to assess the company's compliance with relevant laws. Drawing on observations of discourse at professional events, I argue that the labor of producing compliant transparency data defies rationalization even as it seeks to abide by laws and regulations. The article extends anthropological theorizing of compliance by showing how aggregate spend professionals carve out certain agencies to comply in strategic ways. It further contributes to the anthropological understanding of labor in the data economy by showing how the work of these data professionals, while undervalued in the organization, invisibilized by the logics of the transparency program, and often presumed to involve routinized labor, in fact involves considerable care and discernment.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward Platform Capitalism in Agrobiodiversity? Examining the Potential Challenges of E-Commerce Integration in Agrobiodiversity Apps","authors":"Julio Sebastián Zárate Vásquez,&nbsp;Jason A. Delborne","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70006","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In recent years, citizen-driven initiatives have significantly transformed agrobiodiversity monitoring, exemplified by platforms like Wiki Papa and VarScout, which support Andean potato conservation in Peru. Wiki Papa serves as a curated repository documenting local potato varieties, while VarScout enables the collection of on-the-ground potato data from farming fields and Andean households. These platforms integrate citizen science with conservation. Recently, the potential inclusion of e-commerce features in Wiki Papa aims to connect small-scale potato farmers directly with urban consumers, promoting economic growth. However, this integration highlights a paradox: While commercialization can incentivize potato farmers to conserve many local potato varieties, it also introduces challenges, such as market-driven standardization and increased production costs. This study explores the complex interplay between potato commercialization and agrobiodiversity conservation through qualitative research, including interviews and participant observation with key stakeholders. Findings reveal that integrating e-commerce features into digital platforms presents logistical and sociotechnical challenges but also distracts users from discussing data governance issues. Insights from app developers, farmers, and conservationists illuminate the tensions between economic interests and preservation of food heritage. By examining the potential integration of e-commerce into Wiki Papa, this study contributes to discussions on the role of platform science in conservation and niche markets.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.70006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144519862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}