Economic Anthropology最新文献

This article defines social and financial money as distinct institutions that account for different realms of value. I present a fundamental dichotomy among economists' where orthodox theory defines money as a medium of exchange whereas heterodox chartalist economists characterize it as a unit of account. I argue that (pre)historical data provides clear evidence in support of the heterodox position. The unit of account function of money is exemplified by how wampum accounted for social debts and was expanded to also serve financial functions by European colonial governments. The heterodox position is further evidenced with the metal coins that denominated Rome's financial money that transitioned to serve primarily social purposes in early Anglo-Saxon Britain. Focusing on the accounting function of social and financial monies transcends the Polanyian special-versus-general-purpose framework that often still structures archaeological practice. With this framework of money defined by what gives it value, I then evaluate recent claims that financial money was integral to the political economies of Bronze Age Europe. I conclude that the adoption of the orthodox assumption that money is primarily a medium of exchange inhibits understanding of what money is and how the political economies of ancient societies were organized.

Metrics and other forms of quantification as technologies for rendering knowledge as measurable, usually quantitative “data,” in simplified, legible, and portable ways, have become increasingly central within discussions of the economy, and these quantitative tools have equally become the subject of anthropological discussion and critique. The motivations behind and effects of numbers in the field of “responsible finance,” already a space where the “ethical claims” of the economy are made explicit, have themselves become the center of ethical discussion, both within the field of responsible finance and among those anthropologists studying that field. The authors of this article (one an academic, one a practitioner in impact investing, and one a hybrid academic-practitioner in climate finance) respond to the argument that we suggest is implicitly or explicitly present in most of the work around quantification and metrics, namely, that quantification acts as a kind of “antipolitics machine,” rendering political problems as technical ones and simplifying complex realities.

In this article, I analyze the arguments marshaled in favor of and against the project to build a new port on the Danube River in the wetland area popularly referred to as Belgrade's Amazonia. Building on scholarship on ascribing value to infrastructures and the environment, I use the term estimation to highlight ambiguity in the process of ongoing and open-ended valuation. Estimation denotes a rough determination of value, a process of valuation based on approximation rather than measurement or enumeration. In estimations articulated by disparate social actors in this case, various economic and socioenvironmental values sometimes clashed, sometimes blended with one another. The flexibility in the use of registers of value enabled contradictory outcomes: a coalition was formed to protect Belgrade's Amazonia despite the heterogeneous arguments against the project, and later, the project's critique was co-opted by the government. Estimations are fundamentally open to opportunistic political uses owing to their malleability, with implications for the politics of valuation with regard to infrastructures and environmental protection more broadly.

In 2011, the Cuban government authorized banks to start offering loan credit to the country's growing number of small businesses for the first time since the beginning of the revolution. Yet in the following years, citizens have largely circumvented these services. This article draws on twenty months of fieldwork among market traders in Havana to examine why so few Cubans rely on the formal banking system to secure capital. It analyzes alternative methods people employ to organize their financial futures, by leveraging kinship ties, partnerships, friendships, property, and loan sharks, and by participating in rotating savings and credit associations. To understand the advantages these approaches offer to mobilize capital, it is crucial to grasp how people navigate their economic lives in ways that are influenced but not dictated by short-term considerations of net profit. Nonmonetary concerns about access, time frame, and visibility lead people to raise and store wealth outside the formal banking system, constituting a domain I call infrabanking: banking practices that are too far removed from the established assumptions about banking to be perceived as part of the same phenomenon.

Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) in the US and Europe. While social scientists classify heterogenous practices as AFNs, their participants share the desire to work against the existing food system, and efforts to access food from outside this system. Many analysts have captured these features of AFNs by using concepts from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Yet while Polanyi's framework has been productive, it has also contributed to binary representations of alternative food movements as either advancing non-market values or in service to commodification and hegemony. We scrutinize San Francisco-based independent contractors who sell food alternatives and health supplements produced by a multi-level marketing company we call NatureRise. The marketers of NatureRise products are committed to working against an industrial food system that they consider corrupt. They promote food alternatives that they regard as more natural than food in the conventional system, and embed sales in face-to-face relations in which a family-like concern for human wellbeing is expressed. Yet, they also engage in sales for what Polanyi calls “the motive of gain.” Our case highlights a shortcoming in Polanyi's thought, one that characterizes many social analyses, while supporting the continued relevance of his work.