Economic Anthropology最新文献

This article investigates the unique economic practices of Slab City, California, an off-grid community that rejects mainstream US values. Despite operating within the broader US economic system, Slab City residents have developed alternative forms of exchange, using cigarettes and cannabis alongside US dollars. The article examines the symbolic meanings associated with these alternative currencies, arguing that their value derives from symbolic gestures of trust and solidarity, reflecting a rejection of surplus value extraction and an embrace of shared economic experience. The analysis dives into Slab City's moral economy, highlighting the community's reliance on collective action for resource provisioning, such as weekly rituals of free meals, communal water tanks, and group efforts in resource acquisition and distribution. Contrasting Slab City's internal economic practices with the exploitative practices of the investor–state nexus in surrounding towns, the article underscores the community's commitment to mutual aid and challenges to capitalist norms. Finally, the article highlights the fluidity of monetary forms and the potential for alternative currencies to emerge within specific social contexts.

The following piece is a work of fiction. The trigger for this text was to explore a “what if” question. “What if X happened?” “What scenarios would emerge as a consequence of X?” This premise guided the scenarios presented in this text: what if the movement of every US dollar was made completely traceable? What other currencies, monies, and types of political, social, and economic organization would emerge because of this measure? As a result, four scenarios are presented. The first one responds to the former question, and the other three refer to states and monies that would emerge, grow, or strengthen, as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the first scenario. This way of organizing the text combines finance, economics, fiction, and speculative design. In terms of genre, the piece was originally organized as a brochure destined for potential investors who might be interested in profiting from these alternative currencies - which I have adapted to fit the journal format.

Santiago Mandirola's investment brochure describes a fictional world in which the collapse of the US dollar has transformed the global monetary landscape. This comment analyzes the brochure and its assumptions through the lens of the crypto community. It considers the highly centralized, technocratic vision of monetary governance put forth by the brochure against the crypto community's efforts to build decentralized, consensual alternatives to existing economic institutions. Highlighting crypto's engagement with issues such as inflation and distribution, the comment suggests that Mandirola's brochure overlooks important contemporary debates on economic governance and underestimates the growing significance of non-state-led monetary arrangements.

English political discourse has long featured accusations of parasitical behavior. In this article, I provide insight into how discussions of parasitism feature in English people's daily lives. Specifically, I discuss how more than a decade of austerity has informed perceptions of parasitical behavior. In exploring this, I make use of more than a dozen months of fieldwork conducted with residents of Lyon, a rural, postindustrial village in North East England. My specific focus is discussions of parasitism occurring in two fixtures of austerity-era England: the food bank and the charity shop. After more than a decade of austerity, even those villagers volunteering at charity shops and food banks frequently engaged in conversations about parasitism. I draw on Michel Serres's scholarship on the parasite and place it in conversation with George Foster's various writings on the image of the limited good and the static economy to explain why this occurred. I suggest that the development of a worldview informed by a sense of limited good has encouraged beliefs about parasitism's contemporary prevalence.

Written in response to the Nordic Krone scheme described in Mandirola's (2025) fictional brochure, this essay continues the fiction, presenting a historical and archaeological look back on the Nordic Council 200 years after its formation. In confusing a measure of economic output (e.g. money) with the output itself, the Nordic Council has doomed its society to violence and collapse.