Economic Anthropology

... But their social character did not appear in the form of yarn becoming a universal equivalent exchanged for linen as a universal equivalent, ie, of the two products exchanging for each other as equal and equally valid expressions of the same universal labour-time. ...

Ultimately climate change is the product of consumption; greenhouse gases are produced by making things and energy, moving things, and carrying people around. Simply put, more people are using more energy and creating and using more “stuff” than ever before in the history of the planet. Besides lamenting the passing of low-impact village-level societies, what does anthropology have to say about consumer culture which might actually be useful in thinking our way towards more sustainable levels of consumption? I argue that a drastic re-orientation of the way we teach anthropology is in order; what do we want our students to learn about the world and what kind of skills do they need? The same argument can be made for the public messages we extend in our popular publications.

As a very often repeated observation says, in order to find out what anthropology is, one must see what anthropologists do, and what they do is mainly ethnography. Ethnography can be understood both as a process and as a product. As a process, it is for the anthropologist the same thing laboratory research is for the scientist and survey for the sociologist, the method par excellence. It has to meet three main requirements: long time residence among the members of the studied culture, linguistic proficiency and must be conducted in the form of participant observation. Understood as a product, ethnographic monograph must be holistic and to adopt the emic perspective, as opposed to the etic one.

This article examines the productivity of agriculture at the Postclassic polity of Xaltocan, Mexico. Employing multiple lines of data (remote sensing, artifactual, ecofactual, chronological, demographic, historic, ethnographic, and environmental), it reconstructs the potential productivity of an integrated raised field, chinampa system that surrounded the polity. This exercise reveals that the system was capable of producing a sizeable caloric surplus above the needs of the kingdom's estimated total population and the number of laborers necessary to maintain full production. To situate the processes related to agricultural production, the paper considers how farmers' strategies were articulated with multiple institutions. Increased integration between political, social, and household institutions possibly fostered residents' incorporation into the body politic and provided mechanisms to finance the political economy. Such integration and dependency fractured, however, when Xaltocan was conquered.

ABSTRACT
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden
wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different
sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a
strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in
Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s
mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding
of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis
Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and
of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of
(un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and
pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse
trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined
allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory
allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are
shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis.
Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our)
understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions,
according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology
of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the
microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis.

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

Half of the earth's population experiences menstruation at a certain point in her life. In different cultures, several products are used to manage the menses. In the west, the most known menstrual hygiene products are disposable sanitary pads and tampons. These products are bought in stores and companies such as the Kimberley Clark Company and Carefree profit from these commodities (Radosevic, 2015: 24; Newton: 2016: 172). Advertisements help these companies to sell their products and advertisers play with the feeling of shame in their publicity spots and even have been imposing this feeling upon women during the past centuries (Berkely, 1982; Radosevic, 2015). Further, the medicalization of the phenomenon increases the feeling of necessity of the product. Nonetheless, not only companies, but also many governments profit from the 'insecurities' of women (Lapekas, 2013). Recently, many activists have been questioning the role of the governments in the commodification of menstrual hygiene and the so-called 'tampon tax' (Crawford & Spivack, 2017). Even though many ecological and less expensive reusable menstrual hygiene products are on the market, these are less well-known and not many women use them. Advertisements of these products are less frequent and less visible than those of disposable products on which more is to earn (Bobel, 2006). It becomes clear that menstrual hygiene products are commodified by patriarchal societies. Until today many governments consider menstrual hygiene products as luxury products and many women still buy them, afraid of someone noticing their menses. The female body as well as the feelings of shame of being other than men or of not being hygienic and clean are commodified (Johnston-Robledo & Stubbs, 2012; Radosevic, 2015). Nevertheless, activists try to break taboos, to inform women, and to question policies.

Some of Law and Economics’ basic claims have come to be criticized as a result of empirical findings that question their viability. Particularly, the premise that agents consistently act rationally and with their self-interest in mind seems problematic. What the consequences of the criticism mean for Law and Economics’ tenability depends largely on the questions whether (1) some elements are unassailable to the alternative’s objections and (2) the alternative is a systematic whole. It is argued that Law and Economics may be salvaged, if it is minimized and its ambitions are tempered. This means focusing on the stable, a priori, elements inherent to it.

In documenting the effects of neoliberal policy and economic restructuring, anthropologists reveal much about the pecarity and downward mobility that characterize contemporary life. They have also tended to project their values on those they identify as the victims of these processes.  Anthropology as a whole has been less attentive to working class and poor people whose attitudes and action advance right wing agendas.  Authoritarian populism, European cultural nationalism, Brexit, and of course the election of Donald Trump all derived decisive support from poor and working class communities that stand to gain little from these developments.  This chapter argues for a renewed attention to the corridors of power in which neoliberal policy is authored, as well as its multitude of "enablers" among the disenfranchised working class.

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

Racist Incentives in American Government Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil spill served as opportunities to shed light on how the United States reacted to costly catastrophic disasters. The results which clearly showed, that systematic racial oppression still exists in the United States. When studies began to show that people failed to react to systematic racism, scholars and professionals began to examine race, racism, and racial inequality. wonder why people were turning a blind eye. On closer examination, racism in the U.S exposed both conscious and unconscious forms understood on several levels of perception. Since the beginning of American slavery, racism has evolved into new forms that guarantee marginalization of black people in the U.S. These two events allow for fine resolution of these forms to be teased out. Using class resources, arguments could be made that evidence supports the contention that the slowed response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was linked to U.S social policy. The texts and videos provided by Dr. Christine A. Mcdonnell provided an in-depth look into the racist qualities of American politics and culture. Race as a biological construct has long affirmed that racist tendencies are excusable. Current genetic testing has confirmed otherwise, proving that we indeed share 99.9% of our DNA and that phenotypes, a set of observable characteristics of an individual, are what separate us visibly. Phenotypes occur for three reasons; Random mutations, introduction of new genes through conquest or trade, and environmental adaption. In the film, " Understanding Race, " (Daushtun, 1999) The Island of Redheads demonstrated that when gene variation becomes isolated by proximity, " isolated gene pools, " represented groups of people bound by location and intermarriage over time will begin to look alike. This film debunks the concept of race and the island of redheads represents groups of people having similar phenotypes not different races.

Este artículo pretende valorar tres conceptos claves para la economía antigua: valor, prestigio e intercambio. La utilización de los métodos que sirven para dar a conocer el valor socioeconómico de los ítems encontrados en yacimientos arqueológicos depende del enfoque teórico que uno escoge para investigar el pasado. En el presente trabajo se analizan los principales problemas relacionados con estos
métodos (el índice de diversidad, el número total de los objetos, la inversión del trabajo) y, por otra parte, se investiga los mecanismos que influyen a la creación del valor.

The use of coastal sand as building material or market commodity is a common practice on Wallis Island. Today, with the current threats posed by climate change, this practice increases the dangers associated with rising sea levels. Thus it is important to investigate the complex interplay between motivations, perceptions of need and risk, time scale and public acceptance that underlie sand mining. Political power dynamics and traditional land tenure are the two key factors that determine the future of this issue.

In this paper, I address cross-ethnic and transnational economic transactions between traders of different nationality in Bolivia and Chile. Their interactions over time have prepared the way for Bolivian traders to directly engage with Chinese factories and for Chinese transnational companies to become interested in the Bolivian market. I argue for seeing the distribution network of consumer electronics into Bolivia as a dynamic regional economy. This regional exchange system has provided extraordinary opportunities of upward mobility for some Bolivian traders who have used credit from providers as a source with which to upscale business. The tracking of this cultural economic world between the Pacific-port town of Iquique and Highland Bolivia aims at historicising our understanding of popular commerce as it becomes increasingly connected to China-centred international markets, commodity chains and corporations. Such a narrative that looks at different moments of time in a spatially extended trade network enables us to apprehend changes in commercial dynamics and power relations among the actors involved. It sheds new light on popular commerce in the Andes as existent research focuses on persistent economic and cultural patterns instead of addressing transformations.

It has been almost two decades since conditional cash transfer programs first appeared on the agendas of multilateral agencies and politicians. Latin America has often been used as a testing ground for these programs, which consist of transfers of money to subsections of the population upon meeting certain conditions, such as sending their children to school or having them vaccinated. Money from the Government in Latin America takes a comparative view of the effects of this regular transfer of money, which comes with obligations, on rural communities.

Drawing on a variety of data, taken from different disciplinary perspectives, these chapters help to build an understanding of the place of conditional cash transfer programsin rural families and households, in individuals’ aspirations and visions, in communities’ relationships to urban areas, and in the overall character of these rural societies.

With case studies from Chile, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, this book will interest scholars and researchers of Latin American anthropology, sociology, development, economics and politics.

Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process that results from individual experimentation involving random or very loosely guided trial-and-error alterations to existing cultural elements. Alternatively, they have focused on individual experimentation via decision rules and different heuristics with already existing, potentially innovative cultural elements whose emergence is left unexplained. Based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with a number of business innovation consultancy groups in the United States, I theorize institutionalized innovation as a new engine of cultural evolution that might be unique to complex industrial societies characterized by intense intragroup competition that puts pressure on constant innovation. This engine might be responsible for a faster pace of cultural evolution. At stake is a systematic strategy of purposeful innovation that is neither entirely random nor entirely calculation based. Rather, it is based in the rationalized and rule-governed production of what I call “structured contingency,” and it is capable of being applied to products and services across different business domains, including to itself.

«I have a place where I work and a place where I live»: Encounters with flexible families in a globalizing made in italy fast-fashion city

The article analyzes several aspects related to the presence of migrant worker families, primarily from the Chinese province of Zhejiang, in Prato’s industrial district.
The ethnographic research highlights how Chinese families, specifically immigrants working in the fast-fashion manufacturing sector, adjust to recent dynamics of globalization.
The collaborative project innovates an encounter ethnography methodology to understand how families and individuals negotiate the terms of transnational capitalism.
The analysis shows how resources activated through mechanisms of reciprocity are central to sustaining competitiveness and flexibility. The authors explore some of the practices and contexts of urban life, such as those related to the management of time and of children on the part of parents, who often rely on grandparents or relatives living in China to care for their children for long periods. Analysis extends to the restrictive and discriminatory policies adapted by the local government concerning the use of public space in the urban zones, namely those where migrants have settled, as well as the successful challenge to one such policy.

key words:  Globalization, Chinese immigration, Fast fashion, Family firms, Flexible Labor, Encounter ethnography.

Employing Mauss's notion of the fourth obligation, giving to the gods, this article develops a formulation of ritual exchange to examine the interactive nature of ritual practice. As a modality of interaction, ritual exchange is contingent upon enduring normative beliefs, such as perceived obligations to spiritual entities, and the social positions of ritual practitioners. Consequently, ritual exchange evinces not only the material and immaterial nature of sacred beliefs but also the potential flexibility and fungibility of social interaction. By considering a relatively under-utilized form of data to study past ritual, archaeobotanical remains, we employ this perspective to explore the ancient Maya practice of offering foods in several caves in western Belize. These data exhibit complex configurations of commonality and variability, suggesting the potential flexibility and latent fungibility of ritual exchange.Employing Mauss's notion of the fourth obligation, giving to the gods, this article develops a formulation of ritual exchange to examine the interactive nature of ritual practice. As a modality of interaction, ritual exchange is contingent upon enduring normative beliefs, such as perceived obligations to spiritual entities, and the social positions of ritual practitioners. Consequently, ritual exchange evinces not only the material and immaterial nature of sacred beliefs but also the potential flexibility and fungibility of social interaction. By considering a relatively under-utilized form of data to study past ritual, archaeobotanical remains, we employ this perspective to explore the ancient Maya practice of offering foods in several caves in western Belize. These data exhibit complex configurations of commonality and variability, suggesting the potential flexibility and latent fungibility of ritual exchange.RésuméEn recourant à la quatrième obligation selon Mauss (l'offrande aux dieux), l'auteur élabore une formulation des échanges rituels afin d'examiner la nature interactive de la pratique rituelle. En tant que modalité d'interaction, l'échange rituel dépend de la pérennité de croyances normatives, telles que les obligations perçues envers les entités du monde des esprits et le statut social des officiants. En conséquence, l'échange rituel évince non seulement la nature matérielle et immatérielle des croyances sacrées, mais aussi la flexibilité et la fonctionnalité potentielles des interactions sociales. En examinant les vestiges archéobotaniques, données relativement mal utilisées pour étudier les rituels passés, nous appliquons ce point de vue à l'étude des pratiques des anciens Mayas qui déposaient des offrandes de nourriture dans des grottes de l'Ouest du Belize. Ces données font apparaître des configurations complexes de points communs et de variabilité, qui suggèrent une flexibilité potentielle et une fonctionnalité latente des échanges rituels.En recourant à la quatrième obligation selon Mauss (l'offrande aux dieux), l'auteur élabore une formulation des échanges rituels afin d'examiner la nature interactive de la pratique rituelle. En tant que modalité d'interaction, l'échange rituel dépend de la pérennité de croyances normatives, telles que les obligations perçues envers les entités du monde des esprits et le statut social des officiants. En conséquence, l'échange rituel évince non seulement la nature matérielle et immatérielle des croyances sacrées, mais aussi la flexibilité et la fonctionnalité potentielles des interactions sociales. En examinant les vestiges archéobotaniques, données relativement mal utilisées pour étudier les rituels passés, nous appliquons ce point de vue à l'étude des pratiques des anciens Mayas qui déposaient des offrandes de nourriture dans des grottes de l'Ouest du Belize. Ces données font apparaître des configurations complexes de points communs et de variabilité, qui suggèrent une flexibilité potentielle et une fonctionnalité latente des échanges rituels.

"When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the “war on drugs”: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.

In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the “patron saint” of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry."

Much has been learned about calculation, commodification and marketization from the social studies of markets and finance. But what of capitalization? What is distinctive about this mode of valuation and the reality it impels? What does it mean to live under the 'asset condition'? In Capitalization: A Cultural Guide, Fabian Muniesa and his colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation take us on a tour across multiple continents and several centuries, introducing us to capitalization as a 'cultural syndrome'. Their pragmatist enquiry involves tracing capitalization via the scenarios in which value is created, and the gaze that stimulates such value-creation. The result is a field guide to the terrain of capitalization that integrates anthropological work on the dramaturgy of finance with sociological attention to the technicalities of valuation. The stage is set for further investigation into the uneven distribution of the capacity to capitalize and its consequences.

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

Η πρώτη παράδοση οικονομικής ανθρωπολογίας στο Κοινωνικό πανεπιστήμιο ασχολείται με τον όρο "οικονομία" και πως αυτός διαμορφώθηκε τους τελευταίους τρεις αιώνες για να στηρίξει θεωρητικά ένα μοντέλο κοινωνικών και παραγωγικών σχέσεων, τον καπιταλισμό

Until 1993 there were conducted first excavations in what promised to be the site of one of the most important buildings of Petra, the stunning capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Its construction, whose initiation century BC, several changes, reconstructions and landslides along its more than five hundred years of operation. But despite this still unknown for certain functions for which it was designed and that, regardless of the construction elements, materials have been located just still less inscriptions that shed some light on a mystery that will try here exhibit various theories that enable closer to resolution.

Work, Sleep, Repeat is a fascinating account of the work regime of German management consultants. Examining one of the most sought-after – and secretive – graduate professions, the book provides a first-hand account of the boardroom culture of Europe's strongest economy. Analyzing how knowledge and power operate in this sector, the book explores a number of paradoxes. For example, while it is the job of management consultants to analyse the activities of other employees, they actually spend most of their time in luxurious seclusion away from them. In addition, despite having a strong sense of the importance of their work, consultants often find it difficult to explain to outsiders what it is they do. The book addresses these and other paradoxes by arguing that consultants are engaged in abstract labour. Anthropologists have long struggled with the question of how to describe contemporary work regimes which do not produce anything tangible. Stein demonstrates that elite work is predominantly abstract, in the fourfold sense that it is epistemically removed from the object of analysis, emotionally detached from it, several steps away from the assumed sources of economic value creation, and increasingly hard to grasp. In doing so, he offers new ways to think about white collar work and elites in the 21st century and establishes the notion of 'abstract labour' as a key category in social anthropology.

This paper explores the emergence of coworking spaces in Slovenia in the 2010s as a response to economic pressures and youth culture fads and explores the distinction between self-generated and top-down developed coworking spaces. While the former were created by young activists, whose endeavours were rooted in identifying with particular modes of sociality, work, and local belonging, the latter point to a new systemic interest in youth. This interest - alongside other shifts in spatialization by young people and of them - indicates a historical change in social value ascribed to the youth. This value is founded on an ascribed entrepreneurial ability.

Debt is one of the oldest and most widespread social arrangements that humans use to manage hardship—and it has also been one of the riskiest. David Graeber convincingly makes this case in his recent study of debt over the last five thousand years, but his focus on the Old World leaves open the question of whether similar contradictions emerged among the markets, cities, and states of the Americas. This article uses sixteenth-century documents to reconstruct the practices, institutions, and morality of debt in Nahua society during the Aztec Empire (AD 1428–1521) and show how debt was a double-edged risk in the Aztec economy. Debt played a constructive role, helping some households through hard times and carrying little of the negative moral valence commonly associated with it. However, debts could create new vulnerabilities when secured by selling family members into slavery. Exploitative debt, however, may have only become a problem during economic and environmental crises that made the risks of debt seem less than the risks of other ways to deal with hardship. Without careful attention to cultural context and historical circumstances, generalizations about debt's exploitative aspects are limited in their ability to explain debt's global extent and historical persistence.

What happens when market crisis and neoliberal reorganization hit a local industrial district, renowned for its social and political cohesion? This chapter is based on a diachronic perspective and interviews with entrepreneurs, workers, trade unionists and institutional representatives of the Valdelsa district between Florence and Siena.  It examines the radically diverging local interpretations of the crisis of the furniture industries during the Nineteen-eighties and the recent market crisis of chassis for motorized caravans. A comparison of the two crises, considering also the  “colonization” of the district by multinational companies, reveals a process of dis-embeddedness of the socio-political dimensions, resulting in a more hierarchical structure of what was once considered a model of socially integrated capitalism.

"About the book:
Los resultados de las multiples investigaciones sobre pobreza coinciden en que un porcentaje importante de lo habitantes rurales se mantienen con la cuarta parte de lo que se ha calculado como el nivel minimo requerido para subsistir. En otras palabras, los pobladores rurales de mas bajos ingresos sobreviven sin contar con los medios materiales para hacerlo. En las paginas de este libro se analizan los medios no materiales involucrados en los manejos financieros a los que recurren estos y otros actores para salir adelante. "