Economic Anthropology最新文献

How do humans develop hope in the face of seemingly irreparable harm against each other? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 30 BIPOC Christians and 40 White Christians whom they identified as long-term allies, in this article, I consider how a slim minority of White Christians develop ways of hoping that sustain lasting antiracist engagement. I identify contributing factors to reorientations of hope, focusing on a type of catalytic event that I analyze as a form of exchange. As economic anthropologists from Marcel Mauss to David Graeber have elaborated, structures and moralities of gift giving reveal and define relationships. I extend that theory to argue that experiences of exchange relationships in turn shape the ways people hope. I trace a logic of exchange that interlocutors conceptualized using the term grace, an incongruous, freely given gift that anticipates future relationship in the context of unrepayable debt. As White Christians became highly aware of the systemic and historic immensity of racial injustice, their combined awareness of indebtedness and grace became formative to new kinds of relationship and hope. In response, they imagined and pursued a society in which love and repair across chasms of past harm are not taken for granted but are not impossible.

Senegal has long relied on local communities to expand health services and improve health outcomes for citizens and is internationally lauded for its effectiveness in promoting good health and facilitating local trust. Here we examine how community health care emerges in Keur Toma, a rural Wolof town in the Senegal River Valley that relies on a global network of labor migrants to fuel its remittance-based economy. Largely through its hometown association and the migrant men abroad who fund it, Keur Toma has built and sustained the local health infrastructure and staffing essential to achieving health care accessibility, providing consistent investment and critical stop-gap funding when government assistance falters. Following Robbins's call for investigating “an anthropology of the good,” we highlight the deeply rooted sense of care and obligation to kin and community that fosters the translocal ties that make Keur Toma's health care possible in the state's absence. We highlight what Ngom calls “sanctified suffering”—which valorizes personal fortitude and the ability to endure hardships for family and community, shaped by traditions of solidarity, mutual aid, and Islamic morality—and its role in migrants' hometown commitments to building stronger communities.

This article examines two values that have long motivated work in economic anthropology: the value of denunciatory critique and the value of thinking otherwise. Through a retrospective analysis of research that I have conducted on consumer debt in Brazil, I offer two different versions of that research based on whether the story is driven by the first value of denunciation or by the second of thinking otherwise. In doing so, I suggest ways to address the limitations of both anthropology focused on denunciatory critique and the more recent development of an “anthropology of the good” by outlining what I call an anthropology of wisdom.

For three millennia, there has been a conflict between landed military power (the traditional enforcers, now nation-states) and urban commerce (capitalists, now a lawless global plutocracy). This ancient battle was resumed by the European Renaissance, culminating in industrial revolution around 1800. This seemed at first to be a victory of the money interest over landed power. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the capitalists discovered that they could not manage without crowd control by the traditional enforcers, a compromise between money and landed power (business and government) that unleashed “national capitalism” in political revolutions involving the leading powers of the last century. These generated mass production and consumption at home and a global takeover by European colonial empires, both enabled by a bureaucratic revolution first proposed by Hegel. National capitalism—a merger of industrial capitalism and the “nation” by strong states attempting to modify the former's contradictions through central bureaucracies acting in the interest of the citizen body—became the main form of society after the Second World War, first through developmental states varying from socially responsible capitalism in the United States through social democracy in Europe to communism in the Soviet bloc, with the newly independent former colonies divided between the antagonists in the Cold War. Undermined by financial imperialism in the last four decades, this system is now failing, but humanity is far from achieving a world society to replace it.

In his broad and compelling essay “The Rise and Fall of National Capitalism,” Keith Hart offers an alternative interpretation and periodization of global capitalist order that diverges from standard distinctions into prewar, postwar (Keynesian/progressive), and neoliberal eras. Hart's core claim is that, in the Second Industrial Revolution, a strong nexus between mass industrial capitalism and state power was forged. This nexus gradually loosened and now dissolves. Sovereign all-purpose money—money that links the financial sector with public debt and taxation, as well as national payment infrastructures—has been an important building block of “national capitalisms,” and its diminishing role indicates the latter's demise. The essay does not present one concise explanation of this development but rather engages with diverse themes, from neoliberal policies and ideology to “lawless global money circuits” to the power of transnational corporations to the digital revolution to secular stagnation in advanced economies (with a concomitant shift from productivist to rent-extracting capital accumulation). I have difficulties at times following Hart's precise argument with regard to each of the causal drivers. In many cases, the essay relies on explanations developed in more depth elsewhere in the author's work. For these reasons, I take the liberty to focus solely on the main descriptive claim, namely, that we have been living in national capitalisms that are about to disappear, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

A significant first question left unanswered by this essay concerns the linkage between national capitalisms, to the extent that they have come into existence, and the global order. Clearly, Hart sees this order as imperialist, with the United States as the hegemon since the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, as other authors have stressed, global monetary and financial structures, even more so than military and security structures, support this empire. The dollar is by far the globally dominant currency, used not only in most trade but even more so in financial transactions. The collapse of Bretton Woods institutions, and again the financial crisis of 2008, have not challenged but rather reinforced this hegemony. But if we have been living in imperialist global orders all the way through, this raises interesting questions about national capitalism. Clearly American imperialism has supported such capitalisms in some regions and some periods. In particular, dollar hegemony has facilitated the reemergence of national capitalisms in Europe after the Second World War by generating the institutions, necessary demand, and liquidity for capital formation and sustained growth. However, the very same dollar hegemony has undermined or inhibited attempts to build national capitalisms in most of South America and Africa, exposing these countries to resource-extraction logics and to financial cycles that destabilize exchange rates, purchasing

Keith Hart's magisterial, eclectic essay “The Rise and Fall of National Capitalism” takes on a dizzying array of topics, from the nature of money to the concept of the nation to the tension between “shareholder value” and “corporate social responsibility” to the mutual admiration society of celebrities, economists, politicians, and journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The essay must be read as part of Hart's project over the past few years of synthesizing his past work and conveying through multiple publications, venues, and media his universalist, humanist view, which is above all against parochialism in all its forms (including the disciplinary parochialism of economic anthropology and anthropology more broadly) to meet the exigencies of the current moment—a moment centuries in the making.

He has approached this task in several ways, recently and emblematically in the publication of his book Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes (Hart, 2022), which he described at the launch at the London School of Economics as an attempt to realize the poles of individual and society as a dynamic yet integrated whole (Hart, 2023).

Hart's universalist vision, and his Gramscian blend of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,”¹ takes form in this essay of an account of ways in which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the nation-state as an ideological and institutional form has acted as a more or less functioning stage manager for a particular phase of capitalism that Hart terms “national capitalism.” This phase, through a bewildering series of forces, but perhaps especially changing technologies and politics surrounding money and its particular currency forms, is now drawing to a close, with no clear sense of what is to come.

What is to come is not yet completely clear, in Hart's view, partly because, as he says in the second paragraph, “folk models lag behind world history in the making” and partly because most people are trapped within narrow understandings of their identity, circumstances, interests, desires, sectors, academic and nonacademic fields and disciplines, and so on. The essay is diagnostic: it seeks to provide a heuristic, temporal frame to unite and make sense of disparate happenings and phenomena. It is also hortatory: “Humanity,” says Hart, “is sleepwalking into what could be a terminal disaster,” and this essay is meant to be an alarm clock.

There are many paths to follow in this essay; I will focus on just three: temporal choices, materials and money, and what kinds of politics is called for in response.

Hart's essay relies on timelines. He identifies several key switch points in the past 150 years, including the consolidation of “national capitalism” in the 1860s, the first span of “financial imperialism” from the 1880s to 1914, and the second from the late 1970s–1980s to the present (although the key conjuncture in