Economic Anthropology最新文献

{"title":"Economy of production: A theory of household labor organization and material reuse","authors":"Maureen S. Meyers","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12320","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12320","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Household economic studies of preindustrial societies have overlooked one very specific and common material aspect: thrift. This article introduces a theory of economic production for household analysis that focuses on the economic use of materials, space, and labor. This framework is especially integral to understanding emergence of hierarchies. In emerging hierarchies, craft production at the household level can play a key part in the accumulation of power because the scale and type of craft production are moderated by the availability and abundance of material, space, and labor. Control of craft production can mean control of material, space, and labor, and thrifty control can increase production; this is key to emerging economies, particularly those located in a frontier area. Because women are often most associated with household labor, examining cultural definitions of thrift and waste provides a more complete understanding of household gender relations and reframes the importance of women's labor. Using an example from a 14th-century Mississippian frontier site in Virginia, I show that women engaged in craft production and that by using materials, space, and labor economically, they increased their power over time. An economy of production theoretical perspective highlights a significant factor, thrift, in household organization and agency.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140557332","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":"Evaluating well-being after compulsory resettlement: Livelihoods, standards of living, and well-being in Manantali, Mali","authors":"Dolores Koenig","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12322","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12322","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Despite efforts to improve outcomes, resettlement projects that aim to improve livelihoods and living standards of the displaced often do not achieve their goals. Could greater attention to the well-being of the affected improve resettlement outcomes? This article considers standards of living and well-being among one resettled group, the Bahingkolu of Manantali, Mali, relocated in the mid-1980s by construction of the Manantali Dam. Anthropological approaches to well-being that include a greater understanding of people's own conceptions of well-being and consider well-being in relationship to their social and physical worlds help elucidate why the Bahinkolu are unsatisfied with their well-being despite higher standards of living. Because they can no longer grow enough for food self-sufficiency, they must encourage family members to work elsewhere, thereby risking the sustainability of the family as a single economic unit. In this context, household heads feel constant anxiety about their ability to maintain a cohesive household. The Bahingkolu publicly maintain that they are “victims of the resettlement” as a strategy to gain more resources for the community. To improve the generally negative consequences of involuntary resettlement, planning should expend more effort to appreciate the conceptions of well-being among the affected.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 2","pages":"210-220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140557305","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":"The moral economy of land markets in the Nicaragua highlands","authors":"Santiago Ripoll","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12313","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12313","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores how small-scale farmers' shared moral understandings of land shape both land sales and land rental markets, in the context of the commoditization of agriculture in Nicaragua. The results here presented are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a subsistence farming community in the highlands of Nicaragua. This research shows that even in relatively commoditized market economies, shared yet contested ideas around the ethics of a community moral economy stall and constrain the local marketization of land. Social relationships, ideas of a sacred origin of land, and expectations about the duties of landholders toward their community peers undermine the capitalist dynamics of supply and demand. This ethical challenge to capitalist market expansion into land markets enables the survival of small-scale subsistence farming. These findings are important, as they show how land markets are shaped by differing perspectives on historical dynamics of land tenure, class differentiation, and the everyday moral economies in which competing ideas of obligation, solidarity, and fair prices are articulated.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140552001","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":"Unlearning hope: White Christian encounters with grace as a logic of exchange","authors":"Christine Jeske","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12321","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12321","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How do humans develop hope in the face of seemingly irreparable harm against each other? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 30 BIPOC Christians and 40 White Christians whom they identified as long-term allies, in this article, I consider how a slim minority of White Christians develop ways of hoping that sustain lasting antiracist engagement. I identify contributing factors to reorientations of hope, focusing on a type of catalytic event that I analyze as a form of exchange. As economic anthropologists from Marcel Mauss to David Graeber have elaborated, structures and moralities of gift giving reveal and define relationships. I extend that theory to argue that experiences of exchange relationships in turn shape the ways people hope. I trace a logic of exchange that interlocutors conceptualized using the term <i>grace</i>, an incongruous, freely given gift that anticipates future relationship in the context of unrepayable debt. As White Christians became highly aware of the systemic and historic immensity of racial injustice, their combined awareness of indebtedness and grace became formative to new kinds of relationship and hope. In response, they imagined and pursued a society in which love and repair across chasms of past harm are not taken for granted but are not impossible.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 2","pages":"198-209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140552015","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":"Sanctified suffering and the common good: Translocal health care provisioning in smalltown Senegal","authors":"Benjamin R. Burgen,&nbsp;Meredith G. Marten","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12315","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12315","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Senegal has long relied on local communities to expand health services and improve health outcomes for citizens and is internationally lauded for its effectiveness in promoting good health and facilitating local trust. Here we examine how community health care emerges in Keur Toma, a rural Wolof town in the Senegal River Valley that relies on a global network of labor migrants to fuel its remittance-based economy. Largely through its hometown association and the migrant men abroad who fund it, Keur Toma has built and sustained the local health infrastructure and staffing essential to achieving health care accessibility, providing consistent investment and critical stop-gap funding when government assistance falters. Following Robbins's call for investigating “an anthropology of the good,” we highlight the deeply rooted sense of care and obligation to kin and community that fosters the translocal ties that make Keur Toma's health care possible in the state's absence. We highlight what Ngom calls “sanctified suffering”—which valorizes personal fortitude and the ability to endure hardships for family and community, shaped by traditions of solidarity, mutual aid, and Islamic morality—and its role in migrants' hometown commitments to building stronger communities.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 2","pages":"177-186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140545506","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 an economic anthropology of wisdom","authors":"Kathleen M. Millar","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12312","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12312","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines two values that have long motivated work in economic anthropology: the value of denunciatory critique and the value of thinking otherwise. Through a retrospective analysis of research that I have conducted on consumer debt in Brazil, I offer two different versions of that research based on whether the story is driven by the first value of denunciation or by the second of thinking otherwise. In doing so, I suggest ways to address the limitations of both anthropology focused on denunciatory critique and the more recent development of an “anthropology of the good” by outlining what I call an <i>anthropology of wisdom</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 2","pages":"168-176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12312","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140545482","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":"The value added of solidarity economies: Bureaucratic constructions of value for alternative economic policy in Ecuador","authors":"Alexander D'Aloia","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12318","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12318","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The National Institute of the Popular Solidarity Economy (IEPS) in Ecuador was created to promote an alternative form of economy—the Popular Solidarity Economy (PSE). As a precarious institute with limited funding, IEPS staff worked hard to find alternative ways to support the PSE. In this article, I examine their work through the lens of <i>valor agregado</i> (added value), a commonly used local term for how economic value is created. Government bureaucrats intervened primarily by creating an audience that was interested in the social aspects of the alternative economy. Because <i>valor agregado</i> ambiguously refers to both monetary and social value, it helped the PSE better integrate with the wider economy. With this approach, I offer a potential new path for analyzing government support for alternative economies. By refocusing our attention on key actors' understandings of value creation, anthropologists can sidestep questions of whether alternative economies have been “co-opted” by capitalism and instead examine the necessary interfaces between these alternatives and the mainstream.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12318","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140534137","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":"Liquid homeownership: Navigating future horizons to turn homeownership into assets in Bucharest, Romania","authors":"Alexandra Ciocanel","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12316","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12316","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the financialization and assetization of housing in an Eastern European context by focusing on the specific temporally bounded financial strategies to maintain housing as an asset and vehicle for social reproduction. It proposes the concept of liquid homeownership to account for the varied associations of housing with liquidity and the expectations of future increased exchange value that play an essential role in shaping financial decisions in the present. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bucharest, the article argues that upper-middle-class mortgage borrowers strategize their leveraged housing investment by navigating between two future horizons. To ensure that housing is an asset in the long term, mortgage borrowers prefer to evacuate the long-term of the mortgage contract through medium-term financial strategies of early repayment. Given the importance attributed to future liquidity from homeownership for providing for old age or securing children's future, the article argues that liquid homeownership, at least for ordinary homebuyers, is a reflection less of short-term financial interest and more of a long-term social reproduction need, pointing to the complex intermix of financial calculations and domestic concerns in the context of financialization of housing.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12316","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140533209","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":"The rise and fall of national capitalism","authors":"John Keith Hart","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12310","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For three millennia, there has been a conflict between landed military power (the traditional enforcers, now nation-states) and urban commerce (capitalists, now a lawless global plutocracy). This ancient battle was resumed by the European Renaissance, culminating in industrial revolution around 1800. This seemed at first to be a victory of the money interest over landed power. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the capitalists discovered that they could not manage without crowd control by the traditional enforcers, a compromise between money and landed power (business and government) that unleashed “national capitalism” in political revolutions involving the leading powers of the last century. These generated mass production and consumption at home and a global takeover by European colonial empires, both enabled by a bureaucratic revolution first proposed by Hegel. National capitalism—a merger of industrial capitalism and the “nation” by strong states attempting to modify the former's contradictions through central bureaucracies acting in the interest of the citizen body—became the main form of society after the Second World War, first through developmental states varying from socially responsible capitalism in the United States through social democracy in Europe to communism in the Soviet bloc, with the newly independent former colonies divided between the antagonists in the Cold War. Undermined by financial imperialism in the last four decades, this system is now failing, but humanity is far from achieving a world society to replace it.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 1","pages":"134-144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139473828","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":"Rethinking economic sovereignty","authors":"Leon Wansleben","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12302","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;In his broad and compelling essay “The Rise and Fall of National Capitalism,” Keith Hart offers an alternative interpretation and periodization of global capitalist order that diverges from standard distinctions into prewar, postwar (Keynesian/progressive), and neoliberal eras. Hart's core claim is that, in the Second Industrial Revolution, a strong nexus between mass industrial capitalism and state power was forged. This nexus gradually loosened and now dissolves. Sovereign all-purpose money—money that links the financial sector with public debt and taxation, as well as national payment infrastructures—has been an important building block of “national capitalisms,” and its diminishing role indicates the latter's demise. The essay does not present one concise explanation of this development but rather engages with diverse themes, from neoliberal policies and ideology to “lawless global money circuits” to the power of transnational corporations to the digital revolution to secular stagnation in advanced economies (with a concomitant shift from productivist to rent-extracting capital accumulation). I have difficulties at times following Hart's precise argument with regard to each of the causal drivers. In many cases, the essay relies on explanations developed in more depth elsewhere in the author's work. For these reasons, I take the liberty to focus solely on the main descriptive claim, namely, that we have been living in national capitalisms that are about to disappear, with potentially catastrophic consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A significant first question left unanswered by this essay concerns the linkage between national capitalisms, to the extent that they have come into existence, and the global order. Clearly, Hart sees this order as imperialist, with the United States as the hegemon since the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, as other authors have stressed, global monetary and financial structures, even more so than military and security structures, support this empire. The dollar is by far the globally dominant currency, used not only in most trade but even more so in financial transactions. The collapse of Bretton Woods institutions, and again the financial crisis of 2008, have not challenged but rather reinforced this hegemony. But if we have been living in imperialist global orders all the way through, this raises interesting questions about national capitalism. Clearly American imperialism has supported such capitalisms in some regions and some periods. In particular, dollar hegemony has facilitated the reemergence of national capitalisms in Europe after the Second World War by generating the institutions, necessary demand, and liquidity for capital formation and sustained growth. However, the very same dollar hegemony has undermined or inhibited attempts to build national capitalisms in most of South America and Africa, exposing these countries to resource-extraction logics and to financial cycles that destabilize exchange rates, purchasing","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 1","pages":"148-149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12302","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139473830","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}