Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1177/09213740211021863
Ute Röschenthaler
Brokers have played important roles in the trade of green tea between China and Mali, from the 19th century when tea first came to Mali up to the present. They mediate between tea buyers and sellers, work on their own account, use soft skills, knowledge and networks and make a living from the commission they gain. This article examines the work of brokers in the tea trade, the social constellations in which they are active and the scope of their activity. Based on extensive field research in Mali and China, this article shows how brokers create their own jobs in a dynamic business landscape, which is often delimited by governmental policies, competing entrepreneurial activities and social movements.
{"title":"Brokers in the tea trade between China and West Africa","authors":"Ute Röschenthaler","doi":"10.1177/09213740211021863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211021863","url":null,"abstract":"Brokers have played important roles in the trade of green tea between China and Mali, from the 19th century when tea first came to Mali up to the present. They mediate between tea buyers and sellers, work on their own account, use soft skills, knowledge and networks and make a living from the commission they gain. This article examines the work of brokers in the tea trade, the social constellations in which they are active and the scope of their activity. Based on extensive field research in Mali and China, this article shows how brokers create their own jobs in a dynamic business landscape, which is often delimited by governmental policies, competing entrepreneurial activities and social movements.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"401 - 417"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211021863","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46355252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-24DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014309
Mark W. Driscoll
This essay explores the intersections of race, weather and climate. Earth science construes weather as the temperature and precipitation that impacts environments. Thinking about how this applies to bodies has come into vogue in trying to understand the disproportionate number of COVID-19 infections and deaths for Blacks and Latinx people. Arline Geronimus pioneered this in 1992 when she transposed the notion of “weathering” from its standard meaning of a process that decays wood onto the cumulative racism experienced by Black women resulting in excessive maternal death. Her “weathering hypothesis” tracks the assemblage of negative health outcomes for all African Americans caused by dangerous work environments and polluted neighborhoods. My essay shows how these embodied health effects are linked to larger histories of burning fossil fuels. We now know burning coal and oil transforms the climate by increasing the ratio of CO2 molecules. We also know that this shifting climate determines specific weather outcomes. However, we don’t yet have a full picture of the racial dynamic undergirding this. As a corollary to weathering, this essay proposes a “climating hypothesis” to help expose the power that Euro-descendant whites have wielded for centuries to intervene in the earth’s climate.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-24DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014314
P. McHugh
The potential exists to rebuild a more just economy in the wake of COVID-19. By illuminating the gap between what economic institutions promised and the reality billions of people face, this crisis is focusing attention and activism in new ways, particularly at the juncture of race and class. Advocates for racial and economic justice are effectively using this moment to forge new shared understandings of our history and what it will take to build an economy which truly serves human flourishing
{"title":"Play it again, this time with meaning","authors":"P. McHugh","doi":"10.1177/09213740211014314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211014314","url":null,"abstract":"The potential exists to rebuild a more just economy in the wake of COVID-19. By illuminating the gap between what economic institutions promised and the reality billions of people face, this crisis is focusing attention and activism in new ways, particularly at the juncture of race and class. Advocates for racial and economic justice are effectively using this moment to forge new shared understandings of our history and what it will take to build an economy which truly serves human flourishing","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"203 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211014314","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44936124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-12DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014339
Kathi Weeks
I am grateful to the editors, Michaeline Crichlow and Dirk Philipsen, for inviting me to think alongside and reflect upon this archive of essays. It is a rare treat to read such a diversity of analyses that nonetheless cohere around a clear theme: the problems and possibilities of the moral economy of (neo)liberal capitalist markets in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. Marisa Wilson offers what I found to be a useful explanation of the designation of capitalism as a moral economy: whereas the concept is more often associated with noncapitalist economic models, we need to acknowledge that market liberalism is an equally moralizing force, that ethical prescriptions for and judgments of the being, practices, and values of both individuals and groups are part and parcel of a capitalist mode of production. Arjo Klamer echoes this insight with his insistence that neoliberalism needs to be recognized as a perspective, that is, as situated, partial, and value-laden as any other. The authors agree that the pandemic has thrown into painfully sharp relief the multiple practical failures and ethical injustices that the entanglements within the label “racial, colonial, patriarchal capitalism” only begin to suggest. For example, as Maziki Thame notes, class and race are inextricable everywhere and carry profound consequences for the impact of the COVID crisis across the differentiated spaces of the postcolonies. Michaeline Crichlow, too, usefully steers our attention to “the fundamental articulations of racialization, gender, and economic deprivation.” Building on these insights, we could posit that race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation intersect to predict the particular manner of one’s utility to and deprivation within this globalized system, whether, for example, this experience is best described in terms of which combination of dispossession, marginalization, informality, extraction, indebtedness, precarity, disposability, or exploitation. Again, the point of naming this a moral economy, as I understand it, is to underscore that the values of the economic system are an integral part of these intersecting axes of debility and subordination, including, as Dirk Philipsen describes them, the tragic “capitalist focus on self-interest rather than common good, on efficiency rather than resilience, on more rather than better, on the private over the public.” To put it in other terms, if capitalism is not just an economic system in the narrow sense but what Marxists call a mode of production inclusive of
{"title":"A discussion: Capitalist crisis and economic estrangement","authors":"Kathi Weeks","doi":"10.1177/09213740211014339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211014339","url":null,"abstract":"I am grateful to the editors, Michaeline Crichlow and Dirk Philipsen, for inviting me to think alongside and reflect upon this archive of essays. It is a rare treat to read such a diversity of analyses that nonetheless cohere around a clear theme: the problems and possibilities of the moral economy of (neo)liberal capitalist markets in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. Marisa Wilson offers what I found to be a useful explanation of the designation of capitalism as a moral economy: whereas the concept is more often associated with noncapitalist economic models, we need to acknowledge that market liberalism is an equally moralizing force, that ethical prescriptions for and judgments of the being, practices, and values of both individuals and groups are part and parcel of a capitalist mode of production. Arjo Klamer echoes this insight with his insistence that neoliberalism needs to be recognized as a perspective, that is, as situated, partial, and value-laden as any other. The authors agree that the pandemic has thrown into painfully sharp relief the multiple practical failures and ethical injustices that the entanglements within the label “racial, colonial, patriarchal capitalism” only begin to suggest. For example, as Maziki Thame notes, class and race are inextricable everywhere and carry profound consequences for the impact of the COVID crisis across the differentiated spaces of the postcolonies. Michaeline Crichlow, too, usefully steers our attention to “the fundamental articulations of racialization, gender, and economic deprivation.” Building on these insights, we could posit that race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation intersect to predict the particular manner of one’s utility to and deprivation within this globalized system, whether, for example, this experience is best described in terms of which combination of dispossession, marginalization, informality, extraction, indebtedness, precarity, disposability, or exploitation. Again, the point of naming this a moral economy, as I understand it, is to underscore that the values of the economic system are an integral part of these intersecting axes of debility and subordination, including, as Dirk Philipsen describes them, the tragic “capitalist focus on self-interest rather than common good, on efficiency rather than resilience, on more rather than better, on the private over the public.” To put it in other terms, if capitalism is not just an economic system in the narrow sense but what Marxists call a mode of production inclusive of","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"253 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211014339","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46260075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information and resources, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their particular life stories, contributions to this special issue examine brokers’ successes and failures, their vulnerabilities and limitations, (changing) interests and motivations within the cultural contexts that these brokers are part of. By adopting a comparative perspective in a thematic and a geographic sense, this special issue discusses the role of brokerage in diverse settings such as the transnational world of trade and development, peacebuilding and activism, refugee care and health care, government services and colonialism. In preparing the ground for our individual contributions, this introductory article identifies gaps in the existing brokerage literature and develops the conceptual framework for the special issue.
{"title":"Brokerage from within: A conceptual framework","authors":"Birgit Bräuchler, Kathrin Knodel, Ute Röschenthaler","doi":"10.1177/09213740211011202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211011202","url":null,"abstract":"Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information and resources, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their particular life stories, contributions to this special issue examine brokers’ successes and failures, their vulnerabilities and limitations, (changing) interests and motivations within the cultural contexts that these brokers are part of. By adopting a comparative perspective in a thematic and a geographic sense, this special issue discusses the role of brokerage in diverse settings such as the transnational world of trade and development, peacebuilding and activism, refugee care and health care, government services and colonialism. In preparing the ground for our individual contributions, this introductory article identifies gaps in the existing brokerage literature and develops the conceptual framework for the special issue.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"281 - 297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211011202","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41435734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-07DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014308
D. Philipsen
In a world of escalating climate crisis, metastasizing market logic, structural racism, growing inequality, and a global pandemic, this essay argues, the tragedy is not one of the commons, but one of the private. The relentless capitalist focus on self-interest rather than common good, on efficiency rather than resilience, on more rather than better, on the private over the public, has brought societies and ecosystems alike to the breaking point. As COVID-19 has helped us rediscover, wellbeing instead depends on a healthy commons—resilience, reciprocity, solidarity, and sharing. The essay ends with practical suggestions as to how to move in the direction of an economy squarely focused on wellbeing of people and planet.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-07DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014331
Maziki Thame
This essay is concerned with the conditions of Black life in the 21st century and the continued need to imagine Black freedom as projects of self-sovereignty, in the current moment of global protests centered on the socio-economic inequities that people especially those of color face, deepened by the devastating effects of Covid-19. The essay’s focus is on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. I highlight the articulation of race and class that springs from a world history of anti-blackness, historicized through plantation slavery. The essay addresses the enduring violence manifest in physical assaults and political projects of Development, that lead to widespread deprivation for lower-income Jamaicans. Yet the essay suggests that it is these very sordid conditions that generate alternative imaginaries for a sustainable re-ordering of life.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-07DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014312
S. Ratuva
One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that communities have looked for alternative means of survival as the market economy went into a major crisis and people lost their jobs. For many communities in the Pacific Islands, who have relied largely on the market economy over the years, this means falling back on their communal way of life which has provided resilience for centuries. The revival of various forms of communal capital such as kinship exchange, subsistence farming and strengthening of social solidarity have become features of this bourgeoning moral economy. In the post-COVID era, there needs to be a major rethinking of how community-based moral economies can be mainstreamed as assurance for resilience and as a responsive mechanism against future economic calamities.
{"title":"COVID 19, communal capital and the moral economy: Pacific Islands responses","authors":"S. Ratuva","doi":"10.1177/09213740211014312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211014312","url":null,"abstract":"One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that communities have looked for alternative means of survival as the market economy went into a major crisis and people lost their jobs. For many communities in the Pacific Islands, who have relied largely on the market economy over the years, this means falling back on their communal way of life which has provided resilience for centuries. The revival of various forms of communal capital such as kinship exchange, subsistence farming and strengthening of social solidarity have become features of this bourgeoning moral economy. In the post-COVID era, there needs to be a major rethinking of how community-based moral economies can be mainstreamed as assurance for resilience and as a responsive mechanism against future economic calamities.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"194 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211014312","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43895380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-05DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014338
Walter D. Mignolo
“Market” in the past 500 years became synonymous with “capitalist market” (mercantile economy, industrial economy, technological and financial economy, market democracy). Before 1500 all organization of people living together (civilizations or cultures) had their own places to exchange within the communal and between nearby communities, all over the planet, not only in Europe. They did not go away. They are not pre-capitalist places of exchange. They are co-existing non-capitalist places of exchange. “Market” is the word used—since the 12 century—in Western vernacular languages to name the place of a meeting at a fixed time for exchanging livestock and provisions. By the 12th century medieval European “markets” where equivalent to all existing similar places of exchanges among co-existing civilizations. The constitution of the Western modern/colonial “market” in the 16th century (an experience the Adam Smith theorized in the second half of the eighteenth century), destituted all existing equivalent places of exchange. The task now is the decolonial reconstitution of communal places exchanges, reconstitution that is already under way, which implies gnoseological (knowing) and aesthesic (sensing, emotioning) praxis of living.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1177/09213740211014335
N. De Genova
Like all ostensibly “natural” disasters, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic unceasingly reveals the depths of social inequality and political myopia or governmental recklessness that predictably exacerbate the effects of a more strictly natural calamity. The pandemic thereby exposes the grotesque disparities in how illness, death, and suffering are unevenly distributed. As the COVID-19 public health crisis has summarily provoked a global economic crisis, furthermore, it is simply unthinkable to comprehend the real ramifications of the pandemic outside of the sociopolitical relations of labor and capital, more generally. Furthermore, the global public health crisis commands that we reflect anew on the relations between human life and state power. Both for those who have historically and enduringly been subjected to expulsion from gainful employment, as for those whose labor-power is a commodity of choice for capital, exceedingly selected for hyper-exploitation, the coronavirus pandemic is a toxic matter of both class and race. These dire and increasingly desperate circumstances, however, reveal not only what is most barbaric about capitalist social relations but also the opportunity latent within this crisis.
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