{"title":"Life is a gift: Value cosmologies in Hollywood cinema","authors":"Stefan Ecks","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12278","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12278","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Is life “priceless,” or can life be bought and sold like a commodity? Anthropological theory has not yet been able to integrate incommensurable value with commensurable value. But such an integrated theory of value exists—not explicitly in theory but implicitly in everyday ethics and fictional narratives. I analyze how the movie <i>Titanic</i>, one of the most commercially valuable artefacts of all time, reveals a comprehensive ideology of how life and material wealth should be valued. <i>Titanic</i> works through key themes in economic anthropology: social inequality, class struggle, gift/commodity distinctions, the meaning of money, and inalienable possessions. <i>Titanic</i> demonstrates that the tension between ethical values and economic value can be resolved when short-term individual gains are transcended by a mutuality of being that reaches beyond death. <i>Titanic</i> proposes that American capitalism can integrate core cultural values with economic freedom and self-realization.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"11 1","pages":"18-26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12278","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43522670","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":"Amplify, decolonize, collaborate, question: Action items for promoting just and antiracist economies: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti-racist economic forms?","authors":"Karla Slocum","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12272","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12272","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"140-142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44287897","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":"Anthropological perspectives on race, nation, economics, and white supremacy: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti-racist economic forms?","authors":"Yolanda T. Moses","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12271","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12271","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"132-134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49633418","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":"Anti-Black racism, anthropology, and reparations: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti-racist economic forms?","authors":"Kenneth M. Williamson","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12273","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12273","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"138-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49039742","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":"Roots and sprouts: Legacies and futures of historic racial economic inequities and models for ways forward: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti-racist economic forms?","authors":"Yolanda Covington-Ward","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12274","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12274","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"143-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46516421","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":"What a difference political economy makes: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti-racist economic forms?","authors":"Micaela di Leonardo","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12270","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12270","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The crises of our times cannot be overstated. We have endemic war, massive displaced populations, pandemics, the disappearance of middle classes globally with the vast increase in hyperwealthy and impoverished populations, environmental catastrophes, and the proliferation of authoritarian—trending fascist—leaders whose policies demonize large swaths of national populations, distracting people from their exploitation by the ruling classes.</p><p>Economic anthropologists, working across intellectual disciplines with other political-economic scholars, have described both these horrifying evolving realities and the ways in which global movements have arisen to combat them. But we need contemporary clarity of analysis to account for the full interdependent set of negative political-economic and cultural shifts so that we may expose them to build a more just and equal global order. And the first necessary analytic move is understanding the rise of global capitalist neoliberalism.</p><p>Neoliberalism is an intellectual/political stance that presumes that capitalist trade “liberalization”—the end of all state regulations on business and, indeed, the end of all state-run business—will lead inevitably to market growth and, ceteris paribus, to optimal social ends. As has now been amply documented, neoliberalism took hold across the globe over the last two generations (Harvey, <span>2005</span>; Went, <span>2000</span>). Globally, neoliberal policies forced the privatization of state-run utilities and services and withdrew support for independent labor organizing/unions, thus backpedaling from welfare state (or semiwelfare, in the US case) provisions and regulations that ameliorated the naked operations of capital and provided widespread social safety nets. In the Global South, neoliberal ideology was implemented through World Bank/International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programs” that demand that states denationalize industries, end protectionist policies that had safeguarded native industries, open their markets to international trade, and ruthlessly cut back social programs. In some cases, as in the People's Republic of China, neoliberal policies stimulated economic growth, but at the cost of increasing inequality and heightened populations in poverty.</p><p>Despite the immense social suffering resulting from its implementation, neoliberal ideology gained enormous purchase worldwide through its celebration of rapid technological change; through the spectacle of new cornucopias of globally traded goods and individualized consumption—furthering the commodification of identity that Marx first analyzed; through faux-populist rebellions against “useless government bureaucracies”; and finally, through neoliberalism's novel melding of neoclassical economic theory with an identity politics reading of civil liberties. That is, neoliberal ideology incorporates the notion of various populations’ civil but not economic rights.</p><p>At the same time, we","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"135-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12270","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45054152","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":"Productivist fiscal deservingness: Entangled understandings of reciprocity and redistribution among German business owners","authors":"Andreas Streinzer, Sylvia Terpe","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12275","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12275","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyzes business owners' complaints about fiscal relations in a specific conjuncture. After decades of radicalizing productivism in Germany, the entrepreneurs' narratives are infused with ideas of an endangered fiscal community. Threats are perceived as coming from the undeserving poor and wealthy people who presumably both trick the system. The pivot of fairness and justice centers on imaginaries of productivist deservingness. The business owners' reactions to those they portray as unproductive or undeserving range from cynical resignation to fantasies of coercion. Critical to understanding why the complaints play out in specific ways is, as we argue, the entanglement of imaginaries of reciprocity in processes of redistribution that accompanied neoliberal welfare retrenchment. We analyze two forms of entangled understandings: solidary redistribution as owing others and fair reciprocity as willingness to perform. Productivist deservingness becomes the central element of bargaining about the legitimacy of tax avoidance, the necessity to enforce the productivity of the poor, and the police as the last barrier against class warfare.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"122-131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12275","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47439368","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":"“Jobbos” and the “wageless life”: Exploring work and responsibility in the anti-fracking movement in Lancashire, United Kingdom","authors":"Sarah G.P. O'Brien","doi":"10.1002/sea2.12276","DOIUrl":"10.1002/sea2.12276","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on ethnographic research at an anti-fracking encampment at Preston New Road (PNR) in Lancashire, England, this article explores activists' perceptions of work and responsibility. I examine their protest activities and explore how work is understood, disrupted, and contested; what this means for my interlocutors' engagement with monetary compensation; and how this is reinforced by the extractive nature of the activity they are contesting. I show how through protesting, monitoring, and maintaining a presence on site, interlocutors worked to ethically and materially disentangle themselves from the reality fueled by hydrocarbon extraction. While paid work was deemed ethically problematic in this context, at stake for my interlocutors was the web of relationships in which financial and practical support was received and shared. By drawing on research on activism and dynamics of prefiguration, I show how the work of activism at PNR was predicated on balancing agency with responsibility in a complex and powerful web of responsible relationships. Reconciling agency and responsibility was integral to the ethical orientations on which the anti-fracking community was built and the realities it aspired to create.</p>","PeriodicalId":45372,"journal":{"name":"Economic Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":"55-64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/sea2.12276","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47721879","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}