Economic Anthropology

In the first part, the global economic crisis that began with the banking collapse of 2008 is attributed to the end of the system of money that dominated the last century, «national capitalism». This entails the break-up on «all-purpose money» or national monopoly currency and its replacement by a distributed global network of financial agencies issuing  specialized monetary instruments in many forms. The political challenge is to devise forms of government adequate to controlling money in this new form. But the old ideas persist to the detriment of finding effective solutions. The second part takes off from the recent publication of The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (20100, an international collaboration that grew out of the «alter-globalization» movement. A human economy gives priority to what people really do and has the interests of humanity in mind. A programme for building a human economy in the current historical context is outlined; and the prospects for economic anthropology after the financial crisis are considered briefly in conclusion.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the level of awareness of the topic of sustainability among Italian consumers in the wine sector and their perception – that is, what does it mean to consumers – of this issue. Design/methodology/approach This paper develops a quali-quantitative study on a random sample of Vivino reviews analysed through content analysis. Findings Awareness of topic of sustainability among Italian wine consumers is currently low, although it is increasing. It is not among the main factors that influence the choice of wine among Italian consumers, who are still mainly attracted by organoleptic properties and characteristics linked to the terroir concept. Research limitations/implications The research utilises a random sample, and the analysis is limited to the perception of consumers using online word of mouth (WOM). Practical implications To develop a long-term perspective on sustainability in the wine sector, it is necessary to have the courage to mak...

através de seus produtos, reflete uma relação de respeito e admiração pelas pessoas com quem colaboram. Ao Ministério Público Federal pelos trabalhos juntos e pela luta por melhores condições de vida dos povos indígenas e ribeiros do Médio Xingu. Agradeço a seu Pedro, meu pai de Altamira, meu velho que foi de tudo nesse mundo e ainda guardou um espaço em seu coração que é parte da minha moradia. Aos meus amigos altamirenses, cuja presença foi fundamental para a conclusão desta tese e para os 3 anos e meio que vivi nesta cidade:Thaís, Augusto, Ana, Érika, Thiago, Clara, Cris, Merra, Lunara, Iago, Sidi e outros que fui fazendo relações enquanto estive em Altamira. Aos meus pais, artífices do meu ser, que me moldaram com afeto e dedicação para ser uma mulher formada, independente, e que batalha pelos desígnios de seus sonhos. Ao meu pai, cujas palavras sempre ecoaram que devo ser aquilo que desejo, e à minha mãe, que me agraciou com o amor que me trouxe até este ponto. Dedico essa tese com amor! A minha irmã Elaine e ao meu cunhado Tadeu, que me criaram para ser forte, livre, voar e acreditar nos meus sonhos de um mundo melhor e talvez impossível, mas não deixam de reconhecê-los e validá-los e que continuam dando todo apoio necessários para que esses sonhos se tornem realidade, sem vocês nada disso seria possível. Dedico essa tese com amor! Ao meu irmão, Madson, confidente gentil que acolhe minhas narrativas de enfrentamentos na vida, contribuindo com carinho e paciência para a realização dos meus sonhos. Uma parte especial deste agradecimento é reservada à sua ex-mulher, Aline, que por muito tempo compartilhou da mesma convicção no meu amor e dedicação aos povos indígenas, tecendo juntos os fios de apoio e compreensão. Ao meu irmão Kisson, sua esposa Rita, e meu sobrinho Igor, que, com amor e respeito, dedicaram-se a ouvir todas as minhas histórias sobre os povos da floresta, compartilharam minhas angústias e ofereceram apoio constante para que eu alcançasse o fim desta jornada. Ao meu ex-companheiro Dimas, por compartilhar a vida comigo e manter uma amizade sólida ao longo de uma década. Rafazildo, meu precioso amigo de jornada, cúmplice nos sonhos e irmão não por laços sanguíneos, mas um presente que a vida me ofereceu generosamente. Aos meus amigos, verdadeiros arquitetos dos sonhos compartilhados a cada amanhecer das nossas vidas. Agradeço pelo privilégio de construir a existência ao lado de

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in research into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of developing regions, particularly into how such ICTs might be appropriately designed to meet the unique user and infrastructural requirements that we encounter in these cross-cultural environments. This emerging field, known to some as HCI4D, is the product of a diverse set of origins. As such, it can often be difficult to navigate prior work, and/or to piece together a broad picture of ...

Since the inception of human civilization, money has stood not merely as a medium of exchange, but as a cornerstone of social organization, authority, and trust. From the barter systems of early societies to the complex algorithms underpinning digital currencies, the journey of money is often celebrated as a linear narrative of progress. Yet, in The Current Version of Money and the Little Patches to It, this simplistic narrative is challenged. The paper argues that rather than representing an unbroken arc of innovation, the evolution of money is, in truth, a fragmented story — a series of desperate patches stitched onto a fraying fabric, masking the deeper structural inadequacies that modern economies can no longer ignore.

Money began as a spontaneous human creation, an ingenious tool devised to overcome the inefficiencies of barter. Its earliest incarnations — shells, livestock, metal coins — were physical, tangible, and deeply embedded in cultural rituals and mutual recognition. Over time, however, the physicality of money gave way to abstractions: promissory notes, fiat currency, credit systems. Each abstraction introduced new layers of complexity and, with them, new vulnerabilities. Trust, once grounded in communal relationships, was transferred first to sovereigns, then to banking institutions, and finally to nebulous networks of digital ledgers and cryptographic proofs. What began as a system of facilitation increasingly morphed into a system of domination and alienation.

Throughout this transformation, monetary systems have been repeatedly patched rather than fundamentally reengineered. When precious metal standards collapsed under the strain of economic expansion, the gold standard was introduced. When the gold standard itself faltered, Bretton Woods attempted to stabilize international exchange. When Bretton Woods collapsed, floating exchange rates emerged as an unplanned, chaotic norm. Each step was not a product of foresight or rational design, but of necessity — a desperate attempt to prevent systemic collapse without addressing root causes. Modern central banking, the establishment of regulatory frameworks, the invention of derivatives and credit default swaps: all are symptomatic of a global system continually firefighting its own inadequacies.

This paper provocatively contends that the current global monetary system is akin to an ancient ship kept afloat not by sturdy construction but by a patchwork of hastily applied repairs, leaking from every seam. It explores how contemporary finance, reliant on ever-increasing layers of complexity, actually undermines its own purported goals of stability, trust, and universality. Sovereign debt crises, hyperinflation in emerging markets, the endemic fragility of "too big to fail" institutions, and the rise of asset bubbles reveal that the monetary architecture is less a castle built on solid ground than a house of cards trembling in the wind.

The notion of money as a "neutral veil" over real economic activity — an idea perpetuated by classical economists — is thoroughly dismantled in this work. Instead, money is shown to be a dynamic, political artifact: it shapes behavior, structures power, and embodies ideology. The current version of money privileges debt-creation over value-creation, speculation over production, and accumulation over circulation. Central banks print unprecedented sums to stabilize markets, yet wealth inequality skyrockets; financial innovations claim efficiency, yet systemic risks multiply; digital currencies promise democratization, yet increasingly resemble speculative casinos rather than foundational monetary reforms.

Cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) are addressed not as revolutionary departures from the existing system, but as symptomatic expressions of the same fundamental malaise. Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) all replicate, to varying degrees, the underlying assumptions of scarcity, competition, and commodification that have plagued traditional money. Their emergence is less a rupture and more an extension of the logic of patches — another attempt to solve for trust, efficiency, and sovereignty without a radical reexamination of the very purpose of money itself.

The paper critiques the mythology surrounding blockchain technologies, arguing that the fetishization of decentralization often obscures the centralization of real economic power and the environmental costs of proof-of-work systems. Moreover, it challenges the facile narrative that simply transferring monetary systems to digital platforms will resolve issues of inequality, financial exclusion, or systemic risk. Without a redefinition of money’s function — from a tool of hoarding and speculation to a medium of shared prosperity and sustainable development — such technological innovations are doomed to become just another set of patches on an already overburdened system.

Drawing on historical case studies, contemporary financial data, and philosophical insights, The Current Version of Money and the Little Patches to It presents a stark warning: the global economy teeters on the brink not because we lack sophisticated tools, but because we refuse to ask fundamental questions. What is money for? Who controls it? Who benefits from its design? Can a tool designed to serve empires and monopolists be repurposed to empower communities and individuals? Or must we abandon it entirely and imagine new forms of collective value altogether?

The work concludes by calling for a radical, interdisciplinary reimagining of money. It proposes that the next evolution of money must be conscious, democratic, and humane. Future monetary systems must prioritize ecological balance, equitable distribution, and genuine human flourishing over mere transactional efficiency. This will require not merely technological innovation but moral and philosophical courage — a willingness to tear off the patches and stitch a new fabric from entirely different threads.

In sum, The Current Version of Money and the Little Patches to It is both a lament and a call to arms. It laments the missed opportunities and compounded errors of past generations, but it also challenges readers — economists, technologists, policymakers, and citizens — to imagine and build a future where money serves humanity, rather than enslaves it.

This chapter critically examines the evolution of currency systems in Africa, emphasizing the imposition of Western currencies as instruments of colonial dominance and economic manipulation. It begins by exploring pre-colonial African trade practices, notably barter and the widespread use of cowries, before analyzing the disruptive impact of European colonization on indigenous economic structures. The study delves into the strategic introduction of foreign currencies—such as the Italian lira, Eritrean tallero, and British East African shilling—highlighting how these monetary systems facilitated the penetration of foreign capital and entrenched colonial economic interests. Through detailed case studies, including the forced devaluation of Ethiopia's silver thaler and the British replacement of the lira AOI in Somaliland, the chapter demonstrates how colonial powers used currency to assert control and undermine local economies. The chapter also traces the emergence of modern banking in Nigeria, rooted in colonial commercial needs, and critically assesses its legacy. While modern banking introduced financial intermediation and digital banking innovations, it also perpetuated inequalities, exposed users to fraud, and underscored infrastructural deficiencies. By contextualizing both historical and contemporary monetary practices, the chapter argues that Western currency systems remain enduring symbols of colonial influence in Africa’s economic landscape.

The paper will explore the global exchange of images of architectural projects linked to cryptocurrency speculaBon, designed to locate a range of utopian and libertarian projects affecBvely and geographically within a global narraBve economy. Images of Patrick Schumacher's navigable design for the micronaBon 'Liberland'-a free territory in a 'noman's land' between the borders of CroaBa and Serbia-and Ecuador's 'Bitcoin City' illustrate the hypersBBonal currency of the networked architectural image-not only a representaBon of space but of its very possibility, paradoxically pitching financial innovaBon as a guarantee of the conBnuity of established means of spaBal reproducBon. This paper explores spaBal representaBon as a parBcular trope of 'imaginaBve capture.' (Bear, L.) and how the global exchange of digitally-manufactured photorealisBc architectural images funcBons as a key mechanism of capital generaBon under Neoliberalism and its successor paradigms. The residual truth funcBon of the photographic image serves to anchor convicBon in a reality to be, in the face of both the play of probabiliBes and condiBons of the necessary risk to secure sufficient gains. (Ayache, E., 2015)

El presente artículo pretende abordar desde una perspectiva del feminismo situado y a través de
la historia oral las experiencias de mujeres dentro de la pesca artesanal en Península Valdés,
analizando su capacidad de agencia y sus experiencias. Procuraremos analizar sus relatos
haciendo hincapié en su construcción identitaria dentro de la actividad, como respuesta y
resistencia ante otros sectores como la propiedad privada y el Estado.
A partir de una escucha atenta, reconstruiremos los saberes y prácticas de cuatro mujeres en la
pesca, con el objetivo de reconstruir sus indispensables figuras dentro de la actividad.

How does money’s power influence our minds and social relations? To say that money’s ability to persuade is universal would be misleading. The way money persuades was different for Adam Smith than for Maynard Keynes and even more for us who live in the digital revolution’s expansion of virtual society. We often feel that we are more acted upon than acting, but this is to fetishize money's agency. People make and use money, not the other way round. Money conveys meanings at the same time as it negates them. As a symbol, money informs our subjectivity, gives concrete expression to our desires and feeds our imagination. It is a store of individual and collective memory, linking persons to their communities, especially the nation-state. **** Money’s chief function was once to persuade people to exchange their goods and services; but separating people from what money they can lay their hands on is now the object of capitalism. The ideas we have of money are disseminated by economists who make a great effort to persuade people to accept their jargon as natural. Money’s unconscious influence on us is easily confused with it as a social force. **** Rhetoric makes much of the distinction between the content of a communication and how it is communicated. Money’s persuasive power lies in its ability to synthesize the two by schooling us to move between our widest and most intimate associations, back and forth. World markets, national economies and the local shops all run on it.

In 2021 a group of left-wing protesters wrote "basta de polenta" in letters made of the eponymous grain in front of the Argentine Ministry of Social Development (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social). Ridiculing the government's paternalistic policy of distributing superfluous free food to the needy became a viral political joke. As news or as a meme, it was largely consumed and commented on through social networks. Indignation and laughter preceded reflections on the state's moralization of poverty and previous electoral promises to promote red meat consumption among low-income families. Jokes and ironies challenged the "moral economy" promoted by the Frente de Todos ("Everyone's Front") government. A state-created image of the poor and one of the government's moral panics, looting, were ridiculed through polenta jokes. In this way, political and moral practices in relation to crises of consumption were transformed into the consumption of jokes, at the same time that as a right-wing electorate grew.

Covid-19 pandemic governance was widely characterized by an interpretation of the virus as an invisible enemy which states were at war with. This interpretation was accompanied by the implementation of unprecedented lockdown policies. The combination of-at least-these two points contributed towards questions around the potential complementary purposes and impacts of this type of governance. Moving in this same direction, this article focuses on the public space in Athens, Greece in order to produce insights from a case study. This aims to highlight if, how, and at what point in the pandemic-in terms of its governance-did these policies serve as an opportunity or an excuse to reinforce the dominant socio-spatial order, thus, boosting its pre-pandemic efforts to control the public space and suppress the latter's political role. In order to answer-at least to a certain extent-this research question, we carried out active participation and interviews as well as analyzing grassroots and mainstream media.

This article presents the results of a survey of the small and medium enterprise sector in Papua New Guinea. This sector is key to providing income opportunities for the country’s large rural population. The interaction between local, inter-provincial and international markets is considered. Suggestions are provided for government action to overcome the constraints to the development of the sector. Peter Kora is an officer of the National Planning Office of Papua New Guinea. At the time of writing, he was an AusAIDfunded Research Fellow with the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University. Small and medium enterprises in Papua New Guinea: performance and growth prospects

The dominant political-economic approaches to global trade flows known as global value chains and global production networks offer powerful insights into the coordination and location of globally stretched supply chains, in particular from global South to North. By way of both conceptual and empirical challenge, this paper highlights flows of end-of-life goods from the global North towards the global South. This involves the disassembly and destruction of goods to recover secondary resources for further rounds of commodity production. Global recycling networks take things of rubbish value (often spent or 'end-oflife' goods) and turn them back into resources in other places and production networks. They operate not through adding value, but by connecting different regimes of value. The paper does not set out a new conceptual framework, but asks what challenges the rekindling of value in used goods creates for global commodity chain analysis and what insights those approaches bring to looking at 'waste' flows. The examples of used clothing and end-of-life merchant ships are mobilised to illustrate the dynamics of global recycling networks and to challenge prevailing commodity chain approaches in three key areassupply logics and crosscutting networks, value and materiality, and inter-firm governance. We argue that resource recovery engenders highly complex and brokered forms of governance that relate to practices of valuing heterogeneous materials and which contrast markedly with the modes of co-ordination dominated by 'big capital typical of global production networks for consumer goods.

¿Por qué brókeres persiguen bienes que no pueden cambiar a discreción? Una teoría comprensiva sobre las acciones de brókeres y clientes es ofrecida para responder a dicho interrogante. Al respecto, se sugiere que brókeres persiguen bienes que no pueden cambiar a discreción más a menudo de lo que se cree. Para ello se apela a la noción “comunidades identificantes” y a aspectos que definen a la figura del bróker. Cuatro historias que transcurren entre 1980 y 2015 en barrios populares de un distrito de la periferia de Buenos Aires (Argentina) ilustran los argumentos aquí vertidos. El diseño teórico-metodológico incluyó etnografía en territorio y virtual.

I post del blog di Lucia Vassallo sono distribuiti in modo omogeneo in cinque capitoli molto briosi: Primavera, Estate, Autunno, Inverno, Di nuovo primavera. Le pagine del libro si possono respirare, come boccate di aria pura, fresca, tonificante, ossigenante.

resUMO Este texto concebe o mercado/Tianguis como uma instituição econômica na qual se interligam várias formas de intercâmbio de bens que formam um sistema híbrido predominantemente monetário. Descrevem-se etnograficamente os intercâmbios para revelar que os fatos econômicos estão mediados pelos traços socioculturais dos sujeitos, cuja função é fundamentalmente econômica.

I introduce the concept of transactional pathways, coined by anthropologist Jane Guyer, to trace the institutional processes that contribute to uneven and unjust patterns of wealth and status distribution under systems of colonialism and racial/caste capitalism. Transactional pathways employ historical perspectives to reveal how divergent economic institutions and sources of valuation relate to social hierarchies. This approach links everyday economic transactions with patterns of wealth accumulation that are based not only on class, but intersectional social groups including race, caste, and/or ethnicity. Transactional pathways account for the fact that not only do different groups receive different amounts of valuable resources because of uneven distribution, but they have variable access to the symbolic power required to define which resources are deemed valuable in the first place and to monopolize them accordingly. The article briefly surveys foundational concepts from the economic anthropology literature before detailing transactional pathways. It introduces the case of attempted formalization of waste collection and recycling in Delhi, India, using the related concepts of thresholds and conversions to analyze key moments when wealth and status accumulation becomes especially possible in institutionally plural contexts.

This essay is based on one I published over three decades ago in a collection on trust (Gambetta 1988). It was an ethnographic analysis of 1960s fieldwork done in the slums of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. My original article had three sections. The first was empirical, which I have greatly reduced here. I address there how durable economic relations could be sustained in an urban environment that was marginal to both traditional and modern society. I illustrate with examples the tenor of commercial life and petty enterprise in Nima. I do not highlight trust at first. Only in the third section do I turn to what we may call the philosophy of trust. I focus there on migrants’ attempts to build viable enterprise. An intermediate section bridges the empirical and theoretical parts by exploring the semantics of trust and the set of terms to which it belongs. Anthropology is philosophy with real life examples. I offer here some reflections on what I have learned since, but first a few empirical observations.

Book review of Suter, Geld an der Grenze by Karl Konstantin WALTER in Historische Zeitschrift.
Book discusses historical conflicts over money as a societal medium, looking at discourses in late 19th financial crisis, emergence of marginalist economics, introduction of German colonial currency in Tanzania, as well as street protests and policy debates during Weimar inflation.

This thesis was created with mixed feelings: boundless enthusiasm, determination and selflessness, an unfailing anthropological curiosity as to why people do things the way they do, and a level of joy, comparable to a child's excitement, when discovering time and again the inexhaustible potential of anthropology's methods and approaches. Needless to say, perhaps, more often than not this elation was overshadowed by a level of despair arising from the sheer scope of the work, the sleepless nights, and the feelings of guilt because of time spent away from my children.

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This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version.

Over the past decade, growing numbers of researchers in the arts and humanities have turned their attention to questions of money, finance, and the economy. At the same time, social scientists have increasingly drawn on humanities-based methodologies in their analyses of economic phenomena. "Money Talks: Futures for the Economic Humanities" is a landmark conference dedicated to mapping this emerging interdisciplinary space and charting its multiple potential futures. Much cutting-edge research into economics and the economy has coalesced around concepts and approaches conventionally associated with humanities scholarship. Theorists of money, for example, have sought to understand its nature and function historically (by investigating origins and patterns of development); philosophically (in light of moneyʼs confounding of standard ontological and epistemological categories); literarily (as homologous to literary forms such as realism or modernism); narratively or hermeneutically (with attention to the powerfully charged myths and meanings bound up with monetary objects); materially and visually (considering the material cultures and semiotic dimensions of money); theologically (as an essentially sacred phenomenon that retains vestiges of its divine underpinnings); or performatively (in terms of moneyʼs self-authorizing capacities, as spectacularly dramatized in recent years by the rise of cryptocurrencies).

Avec la décentralisation, les collectivités territoriales sont devenues des acteurs clés du développement local. Pour la mise en oeuvre des actions de développement d'intérêt communal, l'exploitation aurifère constitue ainsi une véritable aubaine pour les communes qui abritent les sites miniers aurifères au regard de leurs contributions à l'économie local, des recettes budgétaires et de la création d'emplois. En 2017 et 2018, la part des revenus miniers a représenté 57% à 97% des ressources propres des communes minières. Toutefois, le constat est que, malgré cette manne financière, la fourniture de services sociaux de base n'est toujours pas assurée de façon adéquate. L'objectif de l'étude est de mettre en exergue l'impact de l'exploitation minière sur la fourniture durable de services sociaux de base dans la commune de Yallancoro Soloba au Mali. L'analyse s'appuie sur la recherche documentaire, l'observation directe et une enquête quantitative auprès d'un échantillon de 97 chefs d'unités de production choisis de façon aléatoire. L'étude montre que pour la période 2018 -2022, le cumul de la patente minière a été de plus de 500.000.000 FCFA, soit plus de 62% des ressources propres de la commune. Malgré cette manne financière, l'étude montre que la commune de Yallancoro Soloba, pour la plupart des services sociaux de base, l'offre est en dessous de la moyenne de celle des communes « Très pauvre ».

This study examines the English pronunciation proficiency of Pentecostal pastors during sermon delivery and its impact on youth engagement in Saki, Oyo State, Nigeria. With the increasing influence of Pentecostal churches among young congregants, effective communication plays a crucial role in sustaining interest and participation. The study focuses on 25 youths from selected Pentecostal churches in Saki town, exploring their perceptions of pastoral pronunciation accuracy, clarity, and its effect on their engagement during sermons. Data were collected through questionnaires. Findings reveal that pronunciation proficiency significantly influences youths' comprehension, interest, and retention of sermon messages. While some youths demonstrate tolerance for minor pronunciation lapses, frequent errors contribute to disengagement and reduced comprehension. The study underscores the importance of linguistic competence in religious discourse and suggests targeted training for pastors to enhance sermon delivery effectiveness.

'We want bread, education and freedom' is an ethnographic experiment that traces and weaves together the unfolding of multiple crises in Greece in the mid-2010s. An ethnographically informed snapshot of a visit to the squatted hotel City Plaza in Athens, the piece unfolds by exploring the polysemy and versatility of the 1973 slogan 'Bread, education, freedom' and how it has been reappropriated and re-signified over time to make sense of the 2010 economic crisis and later, of the so-called refugee crisis. While the text pulls together historical events, political discourses and personal reflections, the graphics capture the Hotel City Plaza's dense affects and lay bare those tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences that are often hard to verbalise and make sense of. Altogether this piece configures an unfinished, raw and sensorial journey through the struggles of reconciling political belonging, positionality and intellectual commitment to anthropology.

“El dinero no tiene olor” recita un dicho común. Con ello se entiende que el dinero no lleva consigo la histo-ria de su circulación. No importa quien lo poseyó an-tes, ni tampoco como llega a sus manos, ya que en cada transacción se renueva su función de medio de equivalencia ...

We write to note the passing of world-renowned Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Isabel Guyer, who died in Davis, California, on January 17, 2024, from complications from dementia. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, on New Year's Eve in 1943, she had just turned 80. Jane earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Rochester in 1972 and went on to teach at Boston University, Harvard, Northwestern, and, finally, Johns Hopkins, from which she retired in 2015. Jane is survived by her husband, Bernie; their three children, Sam, Nathan, and Kate; five grandchildren; and legions of friends, colleagues, and admirers across the world (see Figure 1). Jane's "extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions" (Ferguson, 2017, xvii) count among economic anthropology's most seminal works. Her extensive fieldwork in Nigeria and Cameroon-on household budgets, Indigenous currencies, intergenerational relations, taxation, and urban food supplies-inspired her lifelong interest in economic transformation in Africa and provided the foundation for her later work on global monetary and financial practices. Her husband, Bernie, remembers her as being "above all" committed to her interlocutors, "believing that knowledge emerged from real-life experiences." This approach resulted in meticulously documented individual and collaborative works that emphasized people's capacity for adaptation and invention in the face of economic crisis. Paying scrupulous attention to the stakes of individuals' lives, Jane had an extraordinary ability to look across scales of economic relation to consider the interplay between multiple "value registers" (Guyer, 2004) to discover how systemic processes articulate with and emerge from the lives of ordinary people. Jane used this approach to take on topics as varied as the creation of value and wealth, currency exchange, kinship and marriage, gendered divisions of labor, the impact of devaluation and structural adjustment policies, and the interface between informal and formal economies. The breadth of her scholarship attests to her intellectual acumen and boldness as a scholar, fearlessly tackling the quantitative data sets of economists and historians' archives. Trained at the London School of Economics in the traditions of British social anthropology, Jane's work helped transform the foundations of economic and anthropological thought, destabilizing notions of the household as a basic economic unit (Guyer, 1981), questioning what is real about the "real" economy (Guyer, 2016b; Neiburg & Guyer, 2017), and revealing that even counting may not be the simple, incremental act one might assume (Guyer, 2004). Critique was never her main ambition, however. Instead, she deconstructed economic concepts and fashioned new ones to explore fresh approaches to the data, opening "new methodological horizons" in economic anthropology (Hart & Ortiz, 2014, 474). This allowed her to explain, for example, "how new monetary relations are created without resorting to a single overarching narrative of what money is" (Hart & Ortiz, 2014, 474), giving us the tools to both reexamine capitalism and supersede its confining terminologies. Jane's unflagging confidence in the potential for economic anthropology to speak across disciplines and beyond the academy resulted in innumerable honors and invitations to speak and serve on steering committees. She advised the National Academy of Sciences projects on Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) and Lost Crops of Africa (2006-8), as well as the World Bank and the governments of Chad and Cameroon on their major Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project (2001-9). Earlier in her career, she was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and the US African Studies Association to traverse the country, meeting with university faculty, students, and administrators and analyzing the reams of data and documents they gave her, to write a report on "African Studies in the United States: A Perspective" (Guyer, 1996a). In it, she argued that Africa was not only being sidelined as a "special case" of poverty and stagnation but was furthermore being cast as a threat to the rest of the world's otherwise optimistic economic future. These assessments, she argued, were not only wrong on empirical grounds but obscured the inventiveness of economic practice on the African continent. Among her formal honors and recognitions, Jane was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (2008) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and was awarded an honorary chieftaincy by the town of Idere, Nigeria, where she carried out fieldwork. Here we present reflections by Jane's colleagues on her life and legacy, centered around three pivotal moments of her career and the bodies of work that emerged from them, to redefine economic anthropology. Sibel Kusimba first reflects on the impact of Jane's work on "wealth-in-people." Caroline Bledsoe then turns to the time surrounding the writing of Jane's seminal volume Marginal Gains at Northwestern University, drawing on the contributions and memories of Jane's husband,

Back in spring 2007, just before the financial world was tipped into turmoil by the Great Financial Crisis, I struck up a conversation with a senior banker in London, who discovered that I had a PhD from Cambridge University. "What was your topic?" he asked. "Economics? Business?" It seemed a reasonable guess: at the time, I was working at the Financial Times in London, running a team that covered financial markets, and most people who worked in that field came from an academic background focused on subjects such as economics. Indeed, in the banking world as a whole, it was quantitative degrees that commanded credibility. "Soft" subjects, such as social sciences, seemed to be just that: a little feeble. But I explained to the banker that I had a PhD not in economics but in anthropology, based on fieldwork conducted in Soviet Tajikistan, focused on wedding rituals and ethnic identity in women. "Anthropology?" he sneered. "What's the point of that?" It is a question of growing relevance these days-both for anthropologists and bankers. When the field of anthropology developed into a fully fledged discipline in the twentieth century, the idea of combining cultural analysis with the discipline of modern Western economics-or using this combination to look at financial markets-was not a dominant theme. After all, anthropologists tended to study premodern societies, which did not have what bankers would consider sophisticated formal economic systems. And while anthropologists always had plenty of say about the issue of exchange, credit, and value-exemplified by the seminal works of Marcel Mauss on the "gift"-these ideas were slow to permeate the world of Western economics. One explanation for the general absence of anthropological input into the broader economic discussion is that during the twentieth century, the discipline of economics became increasingly quantitative in its focus. As Californian economist Axel Leijonhufvud observed in a wry little essay in 1973, status in university economic departments tended to be determined by academics' skills with mathematical models-or "modls"-which turned academic economists into scathing critics of cultural analyses. But the split also arose because anthropologists tended to be fairly tribal, too. Since the discipline has often had an antiestablishment (if not anticapitalist) bent, the world of modern Western money seemed immoral. In any case, it was very hard for anthropologists to get access to the institutions at the center of Western finance to do internal research. After all, as Karen Ho (2009), a professor at the University of Minnesota, has observed, anthropology emerged in an era when Western anthropologists typically occupied more powerful positions than the people they studied, which gave them access to their "fieldwork.

Focusing on shepherds' cooperatives in Sardinia, Italy, I show how cooperatives have borrowed incessantly from other types of businesses, including private capital businesses, and have provided models for those businesses and other organizations. In order to highlight the place of these organizations within a common institutional environment, "corporations" here are corporate bodiesincluding firms, trade unions, and political parties-and the cooperatives are also a type of corporation. The Italian state and the market are key institutions in the organizational context and climate within which cooperatives in general, and Sardinian cooperatives in particular, function. The emergence and consolidation of the European Community has added a new layer of complexity to the organizational environment as it tries to regulate in all European countries the ways in which capitalist businesses and cooperatives operate.

How do fervent communities of belief around cryptocurrencies form and what fuels their expansion? VictorTurner’s rites of passage framework offers insights into this acculturation process, helping demonstrate howspatial metaphors, temporality, imitation, and performances of hierarchic roles all play key functions in theinvestment and promotion of meme coins. I argue that the expansion of meme coins communities primarilyrelies on the proliferation of personae that represent a corresponding digital asset’s speculative imaginary.

This article offers 'stages', an original device, to sharpen the focus on a particular divinatory economic performance: the folding of imagined profitable futures into the present to create the impression that profitable futures are imminent or already realized. Drawing on ethnographic material from the startup and multi-level marketing (MLM) cryptocurrency sectors, and utilizing 'stages' as a concept/pun-in the spatial and temporal sense-I show how economic performances must be 'staged' to convince people to invest. 'Staging' economic performances leads to creating a physical space of heightened excitement, expertise, and a temporal period that is experienced as urgent where one must think in an innovative way to bring about a profitable future. Under these conditions, 'stages' reveals how the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate project becomes indistinguishable to those on the ground. Doing your 'due diligence' to discern between the two is anything but straightforward. Despite claims by Euro-American financial elites that startups and MLMs are polar opposites, this article demonstrates their striking similarity. More broadly, 'stages' reveals how economic performances gain efficacy, travel beyond specific sites, and come to act on people. Economy of appearances brought about by economic performances In an increasingly financialized and unequal world, as many scholars have highlighted, the future must be worked on in the present with great urgency (Appadurai 2013;

People within the cryptocurrency world come together on imageboards and forums to tell stories about the highly volatile and uncertain world they inhabit. Although they engage with a highly technical digital money form, the stories they share online could be more productively analysed as digital folklore. Through ethnography primarily conducted via 4chan and Reddit, I highlight three types of stories, loosely grouped together within the categories of 'despair', 'comedy' and 'courage'. Drawing parallels to folk and fairy tales, I explore how 'netizens' use these stories to engage with the uncertainty that characterizes cryptocurrencies. Consequently, I highlight how stories come to make the online cryptocurrency world more inhabitable, as well as allowing people to subvert and resist 'economic reason'. By foregrounding storytelling, I highlight the fluid, intersubjective and collective actions that help to sustain a volatile and uncertain market that is favourable for those who take to online message boards.

The OECD promotes the 2015 version of the Principles of Corporate Governance as a means "to support investment as a powerful driver of growth". But how realistic is this ambition? This article provides a critical assessment of the operation and impact of these Principles. It maps the governance model of the Principles and discusses their impact on state legislation and corporate governance at the firm level. It concludes that there are various problems with the operation of the Principles insofar as they are regarded as a universal benchmark, while they can be a useful "common frame of reference" for the debate about corporate governance reform in academia and practice.

WORK-IT is hiring a PhD researcher in economic anthropology for four years, to start in September 2025. More information, see helsinki.fi/work-it and https://jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki-Doctoral-Researcher-in-economic-anthropology-%28southern-Levant%29/814149302/
Deadline 13 March 2025.

La Côte d’Ivoire connaît actuellement un boom minier. La contribution du secteur minier àl’économie du pays est amenée à croître rapidement. Ainsi, le secteur minier pourrait permettre de financer une partie des projets de développement du gouvernement au cours des années à venir. Toutefois, la Côte d’Ivoire continue de faire face à des difficultés sur le plan politique et en matière de sécurité, comme en témoignent les mutineries de 2017. De fait, s’il était mal géré, ce boom pourrait exacerber les revendications sociales et politiques. La faiblesse de la gouvernance et le sentiment que les bénéfices dérivés de l’exploitation minière ne sont pas répartis équitablement ont ainsi donné lieu à des émeutes au sein des communautés minières. L’atténuation des tensions potentielles liées à l’impact et aux bénéfices de l’exploitation minière mérite toute l’attention des pouvoirs publics, aussi bien à l’échelle locale que nationale, afin d’éviter que des épisodes de conflits violents ne se ...

There has been a long-standing stigma among Mongolians surrounding the wearing of used clothes, particularly among the older generation. Traditionally, many have disposed of their garments by burning them or cutting off the collars before giving them away. Even when clothes are donated, it is preferred to do so within the same kinship to avoid perceived spiritual implications, as Mongolians believe that clothes retain the energy or spirit of their previous owners. Recently, the introduction of thrift shops in Ulaanbaatar became a trending practice of secondhand clothing consumption among the younger generation. As young generations adopt secondhand clothing consumption with enthusiasm, the existing stigma associated with komiss shops is revisited and contested. Komiss shops, wholesale vendors of secondhand clothing since the 1990s, primarily catered to the less affluent. When the same idea of selling used clothes was reintroduced with the concept of ‘thrift shops’, komiss clothes are now considered to be trendy and ethical among young Mongolians. This article introduces the secondhand clothing market in Mongolia, focusing on komiss and thrift shops. It explores the shifting perception and motivation towards secondhand clothes consumption. [secondhand clothing, thrift shop, ethical consumption, sustainability, Mongolia]

In an inspiring critique of 'flexibility ', Anna Pollert (1991) pointed both to the ideological aspect of the concept of flexibility as it was voiced by proponents of industrial restructuring in the 1980s and early 1990s, and to its force as a reality performing the transformation of relations in the labour market and in the labour process. She also underlined how the argument of change that dominated the flexibility debate often presented the saliency of new flexible organizational, work and labour-market arrangements against the background of a particularly simplistic characterization of the past (that is, Fordism), where these types of relations were deemed to be absent. In this chapter I want to engage with this critique by trying to address 'flexible capitalism' not as something 'new' but as a persistent aspect of capitalism that acquires different expressions depending on history and place. Moreover, I will try to show how concepts that become part of a particular structure of the social reproduction of capitalism, and give form to a dominant moral economy at a particular moment and place, have to be articulated to the material transformations of relationships of exploitation and domination that structure the political economy of that time and place (see also Neveling, this volume). From this perspective, the alienable aspect of labour power in capitalism is always dependent on its inalienable ties to a social environment that constitutes its specificity (Narotzky 2009; see also Garsten, Knox, this volume).

I focus on Pentecostal genres performed in the market space, a thick religiously plural environment. I look at the ways in which Pentecostal evangelizers (animateurs, a subcategory of the evangelizing ministry in Pentecostal churches) negotiate their public presence in terms of form and style; how they navigate the religious plural market space; and how this navigation is expressed discursively. I study different forms of textual mediation, and the ways in which Pentecostal publics are construed. My main argument is that part of the Pentecostal accommodation is the conscious selection of evangelizing genres that fit the performance context. Animateurs choose evangelizing genres in terms of the performance space. The innovative aspect of this chapter is the social significance of what I call “small Pentecostal genres”, seemingly banal discursive forms, that may escape the scholar’s analytic gaze because they are less dramatic and formalized than the more common genres such as sermons, gospel songs, and testimonies.

Il a mené des enquêtes de terrain sur l'île grecque de Naxos sur lesquelles il a écrit deux livres : Demons and the Devil : Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton, 1991) et Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece (Harvard, 2012). En tant qu'éditeur ou coéditeur, il a publié des volumes sur le syncrétisme, la créolisation, la psychothérapie en Grèce, et l'austérité en Europe du Sud. Plus récemment, il a codirigé The Varieties of Historical Experience (Routledge, 2019). Ses recherches actuelles portent sur le concept d'« historicité » dans une perspective anthropologique comparative. Articles du même auteur Le rêve et la temporalité de l'être [Texte intégral] Paru dans Écrire l'histoire, 23 | 2023 Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Zagreb in 2016–2017 and secondary sources, this article explores ways in which debtor activists and their opponents represented troubled debtors in post–credit boom Croatia as deserving or undeserving of public assistance. Debtors have been represented as deserving on the basis of their status as victims (in either legal or humanitarian sense) and their belonging to other social categories, such as war veterans or the middle class.  The analysis stresses the embedding of the discourses of (un)deservingness in actors‘ political projects, popular common sense, and hegemonic narratives and social coalitions.

Focusing on Sinti concepts of time, space, memory and respect, this paper explores the overlooked presence of Sinti in the Alps and their relationship to Alpine landscapes, which is closely linked to their relationship to their dead. Their way of making the world calls for a rethinking of concepts concerning the relationship between humans and land and opens up a different possibility for thinking about societies in the Alps.

The Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics held its biannual meetings in San Diego in June 1999. The major theme of the conference was the reorientation of economics. Recent decades have witnessed an expansion of economics beyond its core theories based on the assumptions of rational self-interest and exogenous preferences. Economists now study a broader scope of topics, including motivation, organization, cultural assimilation, religion, marriage, and many other topics previously considered outside their discipline. Participants were invited to present papers exploring the relationship between economics and other social science disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and statistics. The proliferation of research at the intersection of economics with these other disciplines prompts us to ask, what is economics? What differentiates it from other social sciences? Traditional definitions are no longer satisfactory. One such definition...