Economic Anthropology最新文献

The appropriation of commodities, or decommodification, occurs alongside processes of commodification as part of the diverse economies coexisting with capitalism. Drawing on research among aging Ghanaian immigrants living in Canada, I examine their attempts to decommodify housing within unaffordable housing markets as part of cultural projects to maintain family unity. This research reveals that the instruments of financial capital used to commodify housing—namely, mortgages—can be used to create shared ownership across the generations that removes housing, at least temporarily, from the market. In addition, I argue that the temporary removal of housing from commercial markets is a response to its commodification and expense, driving families to rely more on one another, creating both family unity and conflict.

Entrepreneurship among marginalized people in Bangladesh involves social, political, and cultural struggle against immediate crises of poverty and enduring crises of class, caste, religious, and gendered exclusions. Drawing on 25 months of ethnographic research among entrepreneurs in rural Bangladesh and the life stories of 137 entrepreneurs, we argue that the aspirations, relationships, and transformations that emerge with these practices reveal an entrepreneurship distinct from the mainstream development ideas so prevalent in the region about individualized market actors. This article calls attention to the specific forms of politics that entrepreneurship-as-struggle acquires and explores how entrepreneurs mobilize identity formation, accommodating protest, cultural critique, and solidaristic action through their ventures. Paying heed to such forms of politics in entrepreneurship offers insights into what types of crises entrepreneurship is able to confront and what forms of transformation become possible for entrepreneurs and their communities.

Spatial dynamics of market interactions are underexplored in the sociological study of markets. This ethnographically informed study dives into the intricate workings of a marketplace of migrant recruiters in Nepal, colloquially known as Manpower Bazaar. While spatial clustering of firms is often associated with efficiency or organizational design, this research reveals that their role extends far beyond these aspects. The study underscores the significance of interactional order within marketplaces where designed order is absent. In the early stages of market formation, a marketplace plays a pivotal role in fostering a unique market culture by shaping social norms, facilitating interactions, and standardizing behavior. Furthermore, Manpower Bazaar serves as a site for examining questions related to access, inequalities, uncertainties, and the survival of market actors. Tracing patterns of provisional alliances among competing recruiters, or what I refer to as fission and fusion in the market, the study highlights the complexity of the marketplace dynamics, including the consequences of spatially enabled market interactions on nonfirm actors around whom the marketplace is structured—the migrant workers. Reminding how space matters in the study of markets, this article contributes to our understanding of marketplaces, intermediation, and cross-border migrant labor markets.

As the concept of sustainability became mainstream in development discourses from its environmentalist origins, it increasingly came to resemble the unchecked capitalist logics that it was originally meant to critique: Rather than reorganizing the economy, sustainability could be achieved through the economy as philanthropy became modeled on venture capitalism. This article traces this neoliberal refashioning of sustainability by charting how one Islamic development organization's funding was cut when its project to develop a preprimary sector in Zanzibar's schools was deemed unsustainable. I term this now-dominant model of funding short-term sustainability for the way that it narrowly focuses on a temporal frame of only a few years, demanding that projects “sustain” themselves after initial investment through either profit generation or embeddedness in the neoliberal state. In contrast, I chart how another organization redefines sustainability as long-term relationships of wealth redistribution and care. By modeling funding on the Islamic waqf (pious charitable endowment), they center the spiritual and material interdependence of donors and recipients, in contrast to the Euro-American liberal valuation of independence that undergirds much contemporary sustainability discourse. Closer to its environmentalist origins, sustainability here is premised on humanity's fundamental dependency, thick webs of relationality, and a commitment to mutual flourishing.