Economic Anthropology最新文献

According to the cultural consensus model of business ownership in the United States, business entities seek to grow both in organization size and in revenues. To borrow the framing used by Patrick Bigger and Morgan Robertson (2017), business firms create value for their owners and/or shareholders through growth and maximization of profit, but the underlying societal value of business growth is the foundational semiotic value of the orderly conduct of US society, which, it could be argued, flows from the moralized, economic value (Braverman, [1974] 1998) of human material well-being. In this article, I examine nonemployer (single-person) businesses in the context of the economic values of capitalism and the fundamental societal values underlying the capitalist values. In doing so, I ask: What is the noneconomic value contributed to the United States by its 27 million nonemployer business firms? What value does the operation of a nonemployer business firm offer to its owner? My research suggests that nonemployer business firms, through practices of sufficiency, create both economic and social value for their owners. Their foundational societal semiotic value is self-produced, material self-sufficiency, which flows from the almost-mythically American values of independence, freedom, and humility.

For many middle-income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an ever-increasing number of low-income families, the electricity bill—filtered through the racialized materiality of poor-quality housing stock and antidemocratic price regulation—represents something more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and a deep spin of vulnerabilities. This article explores the materiality of race in the US South through the prism of southern utilities and maps the political landscape on which contestations over the value of energy are taking place. I ask, how do different conceptualizations of value by utilities, regulators, and energy justice advocates figure into the price of energy and racialized dispossession in the Deep South? I draw attention to the highly elaborated narrative politics of the value of Georgia Power's energy. In conversation with recent anthropological debates about value and “the just price,” I argue that Georgia Power's monopoly on public power engages and reinforces the racialized political economy of the South to produce high home energy prices for low-income families. But it also provokes a decryption of these energy prices by energy justice advocates that connects the silent violence of energy injustice to people's everyday experiences of extractive utility bills.

The decline in the number of Native Hawaiian–owned kuleana properties is partly the result of legal frameworks surrounding heirs' property adjudication, which does not easily allow families with multiple owners to collectivize their interests. As a result, families are made vulnerable to land dispossession by developers' use of quiet title and partition actions through the courts. Based on fieldwork that incorporates ethnography and archival research, I explore the disjunction of kin-based patterns of inheritance within a culturally Western legal framework that values one owner, one property scenario. A novel analysis of heirs' property reveals the extent to which current legal doctrine is inherently unsuited to address both real and intangible inheritance patterns, thereby creating property and wealth destruction characteristic of a tragedy of the anticommons.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American “way of life.” Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we think is important and the futures we are fighting to create. The climate crisis, as such, is not a crisis of emissions or hydrocarbons but a crisis of how value is assigned to worldly things. I conclude by arguing that until we address questions of value, we are unlikely to address the existential crisis of anthropogenic climate change.

Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co-opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber's relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very different stakes: the families of Mongolian herders who comb goats together each spring, the brokers and buyers who weigh it and feel it to adjudicate it for fashion houses, and the advertisers and marketers who decide what is desirable in global markets of end consumers. This article examines three nodes in the production and circulation of Mongolian cashmere to show how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and travel, or not, from one context to another. I focus on interactions as moments of qualic evaluation. Here embodied, tactile experiences of qualia—which might seem to be immune to perceptual difference and “outside culture”—in fact differ. The example shows how valuation in a transnational commodity chain depends on both exploiting semiotic gaps in the chain and nonetheless meeting a threshold of commensurability, neither of which is divorceable from physicality.

This article examines the valuation struggles around Argentina's Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social (AUH), a large conditional cash transfer (CCT) program introduced in 2009. Thinking about value as a verb invites us to move away from reified notions and to consider the work differently positioned social actors do to value and devalue specific ideas, practices, people, and things. The article identifies two broad perspectives on the AUH, one that frames the social payments as an entitlement based on the rights of children and the other that frames the AUH as social assistance or help. There were many reasons to believe the AUH would have broad social support, yet most people, even most beneficiaries, saw the AUH as assistance rather than a right. Two other key concepts at play are work and dignity. These diverse views intersect—surprisingly—in discussion around sneakers, a topic that every interview and commentary on the AUH seems eventually to mention. Sneakers appear as a sign of dignity or as evidence of misspent government funds. This article thus attends to how political struggles are centrally about the practices of valuing and devaluing specific kinds of people.

In designating its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations invoked the “water–energy–land (WEL) nexus” to emphasize the interconnections between different policy sectors and accentuate the importance of an integrated approach to human and environmental welfare. Identifying the WEL nexus draws attention to the interplay of technical and moral values, the intersections or overlaps between these values, and the areas where values conflict, tradeoffs happen, and priorities are set or shifted. And within this WEL resource nexus, the development and expansion of renewable energy technologies has the potential to redefine and reorder the balance of values. The archipelago of Zanzibar, a semiautonomous protectorate within the East African nation of Tanzania, is currently making complex energy choices that highlight the significance and fragility of this resource nexus and the role of renewable energy in reshaping it. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in peri-urban Zanzibari communities to consider how the WEL nexus in Zanzibar is generated by and generative of complex gradations of value and to explore how the development of renewable energy technologies, particularly solar technology, is both entrenching and transforming the linkages between energy, water, and land in Zanzibar.

Is life “priceless,” or can life be bought and sold like a commodity? Anthropological theory has not yet been able to integrate incommensurable value with commensurable value. But such an integrated theory of value exists—not explicitly in theory but implicitly in everyday ethics and fictional narratives. I analyze how the movie Titanic, one of the most commercially valuable artefacts of all time, reveals a comprehensive ideology of how life and material wealth should be valued. Titanic works through key themes in economic anthropology: social inequality, class struggle, gift/commodity distinctions, the meaning of money, and inalienable possessions. Titanic demonstrates that the tension between ethical values and economic value can be resolved when short-term individual gains are transcended by a mutuality of being that reaches beyond death. Titanic proposes that American capitalism can integrate core cultural values with economic freedom and self-realization.