Economic Anthropology最新文献

{"title":"Unnatural Causes: Cryptocurrencies, Carbon Credits, and the rise of Neoliberalism from Below","authors":"Riccardo De Cristano, Alexander Paulsson","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70041","url":null,"abstract":"Klima is a carbon‐backed cryptocurrency running as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). In 2021, it had accumulated 9 million metric tons of digital carbon credits and reached a market value of more than US$1 billion. In 2023, its treasury stored twice as many carbon credits, but its spot price was a tiny fraction compared to 2021. Building on prior scholarship at the intersection of carbon markets and cryptocurrencies, we probe the devices employed by Klima during its rise and fall and how this cryptocurrency also sought to create its own carbon market. Unlike earlier studies of carbon markets and cryptocurrencies, we explore KlimaDAO's internal dynamics as it tried to create a new connection to existing carbon markets through a two‐year‐long digital ethnography, showing how the project and its investors embraced speculative reasoning fueled by what we term a neoliberal logic. This rhetoric sustained the project's growth and exacerbated the losses. Finally, we recognize it as the main driver of KlimaDAO's viability. Our conclusions speak to the broader critical debates about the politics of green finance and how climate mitigation has emerged as a vector to attract small investors and blockchain enthusiasts rather than impacting climate change.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"140 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147719843","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":"Symbols of Climate Action: Audit Labor and the Production of Carbon Credits","authors":"Diego Silva Garzón","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.70040","url":null,"abstract":"Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) are promoted as tools for financing climate mitigation, yet their effectiveness and credibility remain contested. This article examines how carbon credits are produced and destabilized as symbols of climate action, emphasizing the forms of ecological and audit labor that sustain their legitimacy. Based on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 30 interviews in Colombia, I trace the trajectory of a carbon credit from its production through local farming and auditing practices to its circulation at a chocolate fair in Paris. Drawing on Kockelman's semiotic ontology of the commodity, I show that credits acquire value only by establishing a credible equivalence between ecological practices and their symbolic representation. However, the audit labor of measuring, verifying, and certifying often outweighs or appropriates ecological labor, producing credibility rather than mitigation. When this gap becomes visible, the market responds not by aligning more closely with ecological practices but by multiplying layers of verification—an “audit spiral” that sustains credibility while deepening opacity.","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"135 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147655728","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":"10.1002/sea2.70012","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 <i>trust</i> (but in which case) that is very ephemeral, and the moral imperative is to take advantage of that trust in a strategic way.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.70012","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":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trust in the Trustless: Chronotopes of Currency in Adult Industry Crypto","authors":"Esra Soraya Padgett","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70022","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70022","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Disillusioned by decades of financial discrimination, from the closing of bank accounts to banning by payment processors and exclusion from mortgages, LLCs, and lines of credit, sex workers find themselves in need of an alternative means of transaction. One possible alternative is cryptocurrency, where a shared sense of distrust in financial institutions has created an alliance between two industries seeking financial autonomy and a way around financial exclusion. For many blockchain developers, the goal is <i>trustlessness</i>: the ability of a financial system to operate free of actors whose actions cannot be foreseen or controlled. However, even the sex workers implementing blockchain technology remain skeptical of trustlessness, particularly any system's or application's ability to sustain autonomy from the economic regulations that have impacted their livelihood. Building on ethnographic data, the article explores the analytic utility of <i>trust</i> for understanding the contradictions that inhere in illiberal economies and offers the conceptual framework of <i>chronotopes of currency</i>, an approach to monetary circulation that considers temporal and spatial scalability.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145808058","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":"A crisis of authenticity: Becoming entrepreneurial and the quest for “cultural appropriateness” among the Mapuche","authors":"Marcelo González Gálvez,&nbsp;Fernanda Gallegos,&nbsp;Valentina Turén,&nbsp;Constanza Quezada","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12332","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12332","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Based on multisite ethnographic work between 2018 and 2020, this article examines entrepreneurship promotion policies developed by the Chilean state directed at Mapuche people. We direct attention to how the notion of authenticity works as a hinge between Mapuche people, historical heritage, nongovernmental organizations, and public policymakers in their promotion of microentrepreneurship as a form of overcoming poverty and achieving full inclusion of Indigenous people in Chilean society. The negotiation processes concerning authenticity bring together people's aspiration to become entrepreneurs as authentic Mapuche and those seeking to initiate a “proper Mapuche business.” Authenticity, its recognition and contestation, appears as a central tenet in the formation of a particular entrepreneurial self that combines entrepreneurs' aspirations for a better life with a simultaneous seeking of an appropriate sense of being Mapuche, with acknowledgment from others. In the process, the meaning of authenticity goes beyond a primordialist understanding of the term, acquiring polysemy and affecting the arena of Indigenous entrepreneurship, as other aspects of contemporary Mapuche lives.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596538","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":"Reorienting transpacific commerce: On the subject of Chinese entrepreneurism in Central America","authors":"Monica DeHart","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12331","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12331","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Over the last 16 years, Central American governments have increasingly embraced diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China to foster economic opportunities and national development. This analysis builds on ethnographic research in Costa Rica and Guatemala to trace the kinds of entrepreneurialism Central American governments are mobilizing to foment these transpacific commercial relations. This article explores those transpacific spaces and subjects deemed valuable for national development. Though a strong tradition of transnational business connects local ethnic Chinese Central Americans with firms in mainland China and Taiwan, these subjects have largely not been protagonists of incipient <i>state-led</i> initiatives. I argue that the racialization of Chinese Central American businesspeople as ethnic entrepreneurs has precluded them from serving as appropriate subjects of national development. Instead, Central American governments have relied on white elites to develop desired commercial relations and class interests in this new era of transpacific relations. As such, I emphasize the racialized and classed underpinnings of entrepreneurial identity, showing how it positions some as always already suspect economic actors, while others are seen as national subjects capable of a process of entrepreneurial becoming.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146136314","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":"Fleeting Wealth: On Gain and Loss of Contemporary Inalienable Possessions","authors":"Brandaan Huigen","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70001","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article explores how diverse South Africans often struggle to keep their inalienable possessions, especially homes, and modern electronics. These items temporarily remain with their owners until being forced into circulation owing to repossession by banks and frequent property thefts. Homes and electronics have become aspirational items for South Africans with democracy that can build social bonds, hierarchies, and the prospects of lasting prosperity. Although people achieve many of these inalienable characteristics for some time, their loss cuts short any wealth generation, leading many into a downward spiral of misfortune. Despite the acute risks, loss does not deter many people from pursuing sustainable wealth. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa and thought on inalienability, I consequently suggest that apart from analyzing wealth accumulation, it is also necessary to understand its erasure and the ebb and flow between these trends. As an increasingly prevalent feature of social and economic life in volatile societies like South Africa, wealth possession is viewed as fleeting: Though often reachable, inalienable possessions briefly remain with individuals and families desperate for upward mobility.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736637","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":"Sharing Debt and Houses: Strategies for Surviving Late Capitalism Among Aging Ghanaian Migrants in Canada","authors":"Cati Coe","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70019","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The appropriation of commodities, or decommodification, occurs alongside processes of commodification as part of the diverse economies coexisting with capitalism. Drawing on research among aging Ghanaian immigrants living in Canada, I examine their attempts to decommodify housing within unaffordable housing markets as part of cultural projects to maintain family unity. This research reveals that the instruments of financial capital used to commodify housing—namely, mortgages—can be used to create shared ownership across the generations that removes housing, at least temporarily, from the market. In addition, I argue that the temporary removal of housing from commercial markets is a response to its commodification and expense, driving families to rely more on one another, creating both family unity and conflict.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.70019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145381622","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":"Constructing Symbolic Value in Marketing Silver Crafts of Iu Mien Entrepreneurs in Thailand","authors":"Urai Yangcheepsutjarit,&nbsp;Prasit Leepreecha","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70011","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70011","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Despite limited power and capital, ethnic entrepreneurs can develop effective marketing strategies. This article examines the marketing approach of two silver craft entrepreneurs from the Iu Mien ethnic group in Thailand's Nan Province. By engaging in cultural activities, such as gifting silver craft products to members of the Thai monarchy, offering a free dual vocational education program at their factory, and positioning their factory as a heritage tourism site, the entrepreneurs of Doi Silver Factory have made their economic objectives less apparent. Moreover, these activities create symbolic value for their enterprise, framing it as an act of “preserving heritage for the nation.” Anyone involved is also positioned as part of this preservation effort. Moving beyond a strictly Marxist interpretation that views this marketing approach as an advanced form of wealth accumulation, we argue that this practice is also a subtle form of ethnopolitics, where the entrepreneurs assert their place as contributors to the safeguarding of cultural heritage in Thailand, in contrast to being stereotyped as threats to national security. Therefore this marketing approach is both economically and socially oriented. This research contributes to the study of marketing strategies in ethnic entrepreneurship. The study is based on fieldwork conducted from 2020 to 2024.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146136204","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":"“If It Is Stocks, It Is Not Supposed to Be a Pyramid Scheme!” Financial Consultants, Illiberal Economies, and State-Led Financialization in Postsocialist Kazakhstan","authors":"Ainur Begim","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70015","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article examines how the formal state-centered economy and the informal economic sphere in Kazakhstan are enmeshed and intertwined. In analyzing these entanglements, I draw on Hayden and Muir's concept of “illiberal economies,” defined as alternative paradoxical spaces that are at once critical of formal economic institutions and also reliant on those institutions for procurement of value. I examine two illiberal economies, a state-led financialization project and a pyramid scheme called “M-Finance,” and demonstrate how the two were guided by similar logics and promoted by the same informal financial actors. I argue that the illiberal economy of M-Finance was at once the product of state-driven financialization and a critique of formal financial and political institutions. It was also a creative space for participants to pursue different forms of value, with financial value as primary. This case demonstrates how mainstream and alternative economies are interconnected and fueled by similar contradictions, aspirations, and imaginations of the future.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146129972","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}