Economic Anthropology最新文献

Presented as the eyes, ears, and voice for the Canadian Armed Forces in the Canadian Arctic, Canadian Rangers within the first Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1CRPG) are applauded as being positive and progressive examples of state-Indigenous relations. Located in almost 70 communities across the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Yukon and Atlin, British Columbia (BC), Canadian Rangers in 1CRPG are viewed as a critical part of the arctic defense strategy and a cheap and easy way to maintain arctic sovereignty, especially in predominately Indigenous communities in the high arctic. Focusing on how Rangers and Ranger Instructors talk and think about the pay system, this article examines how value is ascribed to Rangers depending on their ability and desire to financially invest in the organization. Studying the polarity, this article analyzes how the military—which prides itself on employing Indigenous people as part of arctic defense—reinforces colonial ideologies and relational structures of Indigenous communities' dependence on state aid. However, this, I argue, further entrenches dangerous colonial stereotypes that (Indigenous) members make poor economic choices and are thus responsible for continuing their ongoing poverty and inferiority.

This article compares two East African unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs and how they have been interpreted by their target populations. While the US-American NGO GiveDirectly focuses on poor households in Western Kenya in an allegedly unbureaucratic and digital way, the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) distributes cash transfers in a bureaucratic and analogue manner in Tanzania. While the narrative of “free money” instilled fears about occult actors and skepticism toward political hierarchies in some recipients, others considered UCTs as offering an opportunity to enlarge their individual freedom. We argue that this radical difference with regard to how our interlocutors interpreted UCTs was catalyzed by the portrayal of “free money” as a context-independent carrier and store of value or, in other words, by UCT's socially produced “indeterminacy.”

This article analyzes the social and spatial dynamics of the mobile trade in low-cost goods by rural people from a mountainous region of China's Zhejiang province and how these interact with the mobility and social reproductive patterns of the rural–urban migrant workers they cater to. Also formally categorized as peasants, the traders not only supply the goods necessary for the maintenance of the workers but also of their spatially divided household, thus contributing to the reproduction of migrant labor power more generally. In doing so, they assume mobility trajectories that align with those of factory production and experience familial trade-offs commonly experienced by migrant workers. Meanwhile, the provision of low-cost goods to migrant workers has enabled a thriving economy employing peasant families for whom agricultural livelihoods slowly disappear. These dynamics indicate the mutual connection between waged and self-employed labor that works in the interest of capital accumulation at the same time with the differentiation of migrant labor. As in other comparable Asian contexts, their connection lies at the heart of the state-sponsored production regime premised on the low-cost reproduction of flexible migrant labor.

Anthropologists have spent tremendous effort developing value theory. We might generally understand value theory as a form of social theory concerned with what groups of people find important or worthwhile in life; how those groups of people, via their relationships, identify, seek, and create that which is valuable; how ideas of value and worth inhere in people and things; and how those people and things then circulate and meet other universes of value. This introduction specifically, and this special issue more generally, seeks to build on this bedrock conception of value theory to offer a series of implications and considerations one should take on board when thinking about value. We suggest that these considerations will allow social researchers to more ably understand the pressing issues that motivate their investigations.

A condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as “guests” of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan-Arab solidarity and Arab traditions of hospitality—this status does not guarantee or grant them access to substantive citizenship rights. In light of this, Iraqi exiles who arrived in Jordan following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have often found themselves dependent on potentially injurious ways to navigate their presence. One of these strategies are relations and practices of faḍl, a form of exchange governed by a foreclosure of reciprocity and necessity of public recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among what I refer to as the Iraqi exilic milieu in Jordan, this article examines how, in the absence and denial of expected forms of exchange, the circulation of stately faḍl and its cooptation by ordinary people articulate new notions and practices of valuable yet nevertheless wounding citizenship.

Reciprocity, redistribution, and (market) exchange were the “forms of integration” put forward by Karl Polanyi as a “special tool box” to investigate relations between economy and society where the principle of price-forming markets is not (yet) dominant. Though intended as the basis for a comparative alternative to the universalist assumptions of mainstream (neoclassical) economics, Polanyi did not make significant use of these concepts to analyze the noncapitalist societies of his day. This article investigates his Hungarian homeland, which in four decades of socialism evolved from Stalinist central planning to a mixed economy in which (re)distribution was supplemented by the expansion of market exchange, with personal taxation playing a negligible role. The constellation of (re)distribution and market has changed significantly in the postsocialist (neoliberal) era, but Scandinavian-type societal reciprocity has remained elusive. Long after admission to the European Union, Hungarian fiscal and social policy regimes are distinctive as the market form of integration combines with low taxation and political interventions to (re)distribute resources (including transfer income from the EU) to support the formation of a national bourgeoisie. Theoretically, the perspective of the socialist Karl Polanyi is contrasted with that of the liberal institutionalist economist János Kornai.