{"title":"Defiant Women of the Sea: Challenging the Gendering of the Spanish Fishery Sector","authors":"Iselin Åsedotter Strønen","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70025","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70025","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Women's role in fisheries has generally been underrecognized, both in science and in society. Engaging with anthropological and interdisciplinary literature on women in fisheries, as well as discussions about gender perspectives in studies of political economy, this article explores how women in the Spanish fishery sector are organizing and strategizing to rectify their historically marginalized position and improve their social and economic rights. Drawing on fieldwork with the Spanish National Association for Women in Fisheries and in fishing communities in northwestern/northern Spain, I explore how the historical insertion of women into fisheries has relegated them to an economically, socially, politically, and symbolically inferior subject position. Furthermore, I examine how this historical marginalization is reproduced, and contested, in a context where public authorities are recognizing and supporting fisherwomen's organizations. The article foregrounds the composite challenges that women face as they endeavor to strengthen and legitimate themselves as fishery workers and how state institutions and legislation at times pose further barriers to their struggles. The analysis thus illuminates how state support is not a panacea for empowering female fishers but rather only a first step toward addressing the compound obstacles to gender equality in the sector.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145812762","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":"We Hear, for You: The Value of Listening to Our Corporate Colleagues","authors":"Jess Beck","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70028","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In his “modest proposal for university reform”, Scroggins (this issue) makes the case that faculty must adapt to the neoliberal reality of higher education by revising their approaches to public scholarship and to pedagogy. I expand on his arguments, focusing on the key role played by university administrators in perfecting the modern university. I also provide a number of suggestions for administrators to more effectively promote the central institutional missions of maximizing profit while minimizing legal liability.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145808074","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 Modest Proposal for University Reform: It's Time We Stop Half-Assing Neoliberalism and Start Whole-Assing It","authors":"Michael Scroggins","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70030","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70030","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For decades, anthropologists have fought against the intrusion of neoliberal policies and norms into the university. We have lost. Today, neoliberal policies are ubiquitous within the university, forming the contours of our professional practice and informing our relationships with colleagues, administrators, and students. Given this reality, this article presents a practical model for university reform and encourages anthropologists to give up our futile resistance to neoliberalism and instead, whole-ass it.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.70030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145796244","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":"An Immodest Rejoinder: Illiberalism and Postliberalism, But Still Neoliberalism","authors":"Michael Scroggins","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70029","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article responds to the claims of Beck and High that the age of neoliberalism has passed and a new age of illiberalism is upon us. Against Beck and High, I argue that illiberalism is not opposed to neoliberalism, but rather accelerates it. In closing, I offer several practical strategies for navigating (thriving, even) in this illiberal, but still neoliberal, political moment.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.70029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145796055","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":"Virtual Pets, Real Precarity: Crypto Gaming as Speculative Labor in Inflation-Ridden Cuba","authors":"Steffen Köhn, Nestor Siré","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70031","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70031","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article examines how <i>Axie Infinity</i>, a play-to-earn crypto game, became a precarious source of income for young Cubans amid an ongoing economic crisis. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, intensified US sanctions, and a destabilizing currency reform, Cuba has faced severe shortages, runaway inflation, and growing social unrest. In this context, <i>Axie Infinity</i> offered an unexpected digital lifeline: Players could earn income by battling and trading blockchain-based assets, gaining rare access to the global crypto economy. Yet participation required significant upfront investment and often depended on exploitative scholarship arrangements that reproduced existing racial, class, and gendered inequalities. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Havana and Matanzas, this study traces how Cuban players navigated complex onboarding processes, technical barriers, and informal exchange networks to transform in-game earnings into usable currency. It argues that play-to-earn games embed financial speculation into everyday life, blurring distinctions between work and play and between formal and informal economies. By combining insights from the anthropology of play and digital labor, the article theorizes serious play as a moralized and monetized practice—one that conceals precarity behind gamified interfaces and reward systems. In doing so, it complicates celebratory narratives about blockchain as a vehicle for financial inclusion and instead reveals how these platforms extend speculative capitalism into new and deeply unequal terrain.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145765155","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":"Was the Inca Economy Based on “Protomoney”? Or, Why Accounting Systems Should Not Be Conflated With Concepts of Exchange Value","authors":"Alf Hornborg","doi":"10.1002/sea2.70020","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The khipu knotted string records in the ancient Andes were accounting systems, but they did not indicate any concepts of commensurability or exchange value. They were not incipient money; instead, monetized commerce appears to have predated the economic organization of the Inca society. The article begins by tracing the emergence of coinage in the Aegean area around 600 <span>bce</span> and reflecting on the subsequent role of money fetishism in Eurasian economic history. As David Graeber has argued, the transformation of accounting systems into inherently valuable artifacts in the Axial Age (800–200 <span>bce</span>) appears to have fundamentally transformed social relations and cosmologies. The dramatic ramifications of coined money are highlighted by the profound differences between premodern civilizations in Eurasia and the Andes. The absence of money in the Inca Empire was a result of an elite power strategy but had the inadvertent effect of promoting local community autonomy. Accounts of the Inca economy that gravitate toward a neoformalist approach are rejected as distortions of its cultural specificity. The article argues for an acknowledgment of the momentous significance of physical money tokens. It discusses the cultural processes by which money can be transformed from an accounting system to an indexical sign attributed with intrinsic exchange value.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.70020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145730967","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}