Economic Anthropology最新文献

Urban-to-rural migration is a rising trend across industrialized countries, the significance of which is not interpreted unanimously. The explanations tend to fall into two competing groups: (a) an alternative to capitalism or (b) perpetuation of the status quo, where, on one hand, the richer participants effect a green lifestyle choice, while the poorer participants follow a coping strategy, on the other. Instead of focusing only on the radical fringe, this article describes and analyzes the diversity of the present-day neorural movement in France. It argues that the neorural movement is a multivocal critique of modern capitalist societies that rapidly transforms into an apolitical lifestyle choice once it is confronted with the capitalist value-making mechanisms. It shows that the deradicalization of rural utopia has to do with social stratification and people's enormous difficulty in reappropriating their agency over their time-use and lives at the household level. Finally, it suggests that the imagery of rural utopia could be mobilized for constructing a shared alternative, but one that would require rewriting the rules of socioeconomic interdependence.

Bitcoin, regarded as a decentralized currency of the future as well as a digital gold, faces various challenges, such as scalability, the geographical concentration of mining, its politically informed design and history, its high market volatility, and inequalities in the proportion of accumulation. However, the number of Bitcoin owners has risen exponentially, and relevant socioeconomic and political groups have become increasingly diverse. Consequently, this article argues that what has contributed to the global diffusion of Bitcoin and its embeddedness in different human societies is its practical indeterminacy. Practical indeterminacy characterizes the fundamentally undefinable, indeterminate nature of Bitcoin's value, as it can change its form depending on who it encounters. In terms of temporality, practically indeterminate Bitcoin can urge potential owners and users to compare their pasts and futures, thus driving them to perceive, own, and use Bitcoin for their own purposes. By paying attention to the agency of Bitcoin, practical indeterminacy explains how individuals form their own relations with Bitcoin and how these relations lead to Bitcoin's further sociocultural embeddedness. The proliferation of such a wide range of human–Bitcoin relations shows that Bitcoin is not only monetary but also cultural, as it offers different meanings to users and owners.

Rice was historically a “total social phenomenon” in Sierra Leone, molding rural identities through farming. Crop yields are rapidly declining, forcing change among people who once claimed to be “wealthy” from rice and now face severe food insecurity. In response to change, they can take out loans—offered by “strangers”—to continue farming rice, or they can “diversify” and farm alternative crops. Low rice yields largely condemn those who accept a loan to farming solely to pay their debts, a “poverty trap” that most cannot overcome. However, the majority of farmers in our study area accepted seed and tractor loans, arguing that rice is “the only way” to offer their children a better life through education—even as no children from the villages have procured waged jobs—as it is the only commercial crop that pays school fees. We argue that thinking in terms of fetishes offers a constructive analysis of the dissolution of total social phenomena. Devoting the next generation to the new “fetish” of education is paradoxically dependent on retaining one's commitment to the old fetish of rice, allowing the usurious stranger to profit from this paradox.

In 1969, in the name of development modernity and Canadian unity, the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau undertook the most extensive land expropriation in the history of the country, to build the largest airport in the world, Mirabel. The Canadian government expropriated approximately twelve thousand people and ninety-seven thousand acres of land for the project. Mirabel was a dramatic failure, for social, political, and economic reasons. This article focuses on the development discourse that the state used to promote its ambitions, the relation that expropriated farmers had to their private property, and the slow but eventually strong and successful resistance of owners whose lands the state requisitioned.