Economic Anthropology最新文献

Conducting ethnographic research in financial institutions is challenging because secrecy is pivotal for traders to maintain their expert image. It became more difficult in Turkey after the failed coup in 2016 as Turkish President Erdoğan increasingly weaponized conspiracies that are historically and politically rooted in Turkish society to accuse traders of colluding with international foes and unsettling the economy. I use this highly conspiratorial aftermath of the failed coup as a critical site for analyzing the micropolitics of secrecy in finance, that is, how traders understand and reproduce secrecy on a daily basis. How does the aftermath of the coup attempt reframe the micropolitics of secrecy on which traders build their expert image? As traders also share and circulate conspiratorial thinking, how do conspiracy and secrecy form ethnographic interlocutors with traders? On the basis of my fieldwork in an investment bank in Istanbul in 2018, I track traders' shifting comprehensions of my presence on the trading floor through everyday encounters and discuss how the micropolitics of secrecy shape traders' enactments of expertise. I show that these enactments are not monolithic or static. Rather, they are affective and interactive, interwoven with the power dynamics on the trading floor, and susceptible to outside intervention.

For decades, anthropologists have fought against the intrusion of neoliberal policies and norms into the university. We have lost. Today, neoliberal policies are ubiquitous within the university, forming the contours of our professional practice and informing our relationships with colleagues, administrators, and students. Given this reality, this article presents a practical model for university reform and encourages anthropologists to give up our futile resistance to neoliberalism and instead, whole-ass it.

This article responds to the claims of Beck and High that the age of neoliberalism has passed and a new age of illiberalism is upon us. Against Beck and High, I argue that illiberalism is not opposed to neoliberalism, but rather accelerates it. In closing, I offer several practical strategies for navigating (thriving, even) in this illiberal, but still neoliberal, political moment.

Classic work in the analysis of money has emphasized the role of the state and the market in giving money its value. This article seeks to build on work that has emphasized the coin's “third side,” in which society serves as a source of monetary value. In so doing, the article builds on the concept of illiberal economies by theorizing what is termed illiberal money. It does so through an analysis of the Comox Valley LETSystem, a community currency developed in British Columbia in the mid-1980s and intended to promote community resilience in the context of global recession and a local depression. Local exchange trading systems (LETS) are networks that create a unit of account distinct from state money to facilitate the exchange of goods and services between community members. This article suggests that, in contrast to liberal markets, where the goal of exchange is the generation of profit measured in money, the goal of LETS is to strengthen the interdependence of community members on one another by creating credit and inviting others to participate in commercial exchange through what is termed expanding the “credit field.”

The khipu knotted string records in the ancient Andes were accounting systems, but they did not indicate any concepts of commensurability or exchange value. They were not incipient money; instead, monetized commerce appears to have predated the economic organization of the Inca society. The article begins by tracing the emergence of coinage in the Aegean area around 600 bce and reflecting on the subsequent role of money fetishism in Eurasian economic history. As David Graeber has argued, the transformation of accounting systems into inherently valuable artifacts in the Axial Age (800–200 bce) appears to have fundamentally transformed social relations and cosmologies. The dramatic ramifications of coined money are highlighted by the profound differences between premodern civilizations in Eurasia and the Andes. The absence of money in the Inca Empire was a result of an elite power strategy but had the inadvertent effect of promoting local community autonomy. Accounts of the Inca economy that gravitate toward a neoformalist approach are rejected as distortions of its cultural specificity. The article argues for an acknowledgment of the momentous significance of physical money tokens. It discusses the cultural processes by which money can be transformed from an accounting system to an indexical sign attributed with intrinsic exchange value.

Since the early years of the 21st century, the city of Ruili has grown to be a major trade hub for Burmese jadeite on the China–Myanmar border. Starting from 2016 to 2017, Ruili's jadeite trade shifted heavily to online live streaming transactions through media platforms like Douyin, RedNote/Xiaohongshu, and Taobao/Tmall. This article showcases how the rise of a platform economy has fundamentally changed the settings of work and structures of jadeite trade in Ruili in the digital era. It investigates the inner workings of the live streaming industry and its influence on jadeite trade. I argue that the newly developed live streaming is a novel means that has transformed jadeite from previously being imagined as a rare and relatively expensive gemstone to a more affordable and common set of products in the spectrum of the digital platform economy. By focusing on the influence of the digital economy on commodities, this study showcases how digital platforms mediate expressions of power in online and offline worlds.