Economic Anthropology最新文献

The crises of our times cannot be overstated. We have endemic war, massive displaced populations, pandemics, the disappearance of middle classes globally with the vast increase in hyperwealthy and impoverished populations, environmental catastrophes, and the proliferation of authoritarian—trending fascist—leaders whose policies demonize large swaths of national populations, distracting people from their exploitation by the ruling classes.

Economic anthropologists, working across intellectual disciplines with other political-economic scholars, have described both these horrifying evolving realities and the ways in which global movements have arisen to combat them. But we need contemporary clarity of analysis to account for the full interdependent set of negative political-economic and cultural shifts so that we may expose them to build a more just and equal global order. And the first necessary analytic move is understanding the rise of global capitalist neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an intellectual/political stance that presumes that capitalist trade “liberalization”—the end of all state regulations on business and, indeed, the end of all state-run business—will lead inevitably to market growth and, ceteris paribus, to optimal social ends. As has now been amply documented, neoliberalism took hold across the globe over the last two generations (Harvey, 2005; Went, 2000). Globally, neoliberal policies forced the privatization of state-run utilities and services and withdrew support for independent labor organizing/unions, thus backpedaling from welfare state (or semiwelfare, in the US case) provisions and regulations that ameliorated the naked operations of capital and provided widespread social safety nets. In the Global South, neoliberal ideology was implemented through World Bank/International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programs” that demand that states denationalize industries, end protectionist policies that had safeguarded native industries, open their markets to international trade, and ruthlessly cut back social programs. In some cases, as in the People's Republic of China, neoliberal policies stimulated economic growth, but at the cost of increasing inequality and heightened populations in poverty.

Despite the immense social suffering resulting from its implementation, neoliberal ideology gained enormous purchase worldwide through its celebration of rapid technological change; through the spectacle of new cornucopias of globally traded goods and individualized consumption—furthering the commodification of identity that Marx first analyzed; through faux-populist rebellions against “useless government bureaucracies”; and finally, through neoliberalism's novel melding of neoclassical economic theory with an identity politics reading of civil liberties. That is, neoliberal ideology incorporates the notion of various populations’ civil but not economic rights.

At the same time, we

This article analyzes business owners' complaints about fiscal relations in a specific conjuncture. After decades of radicalizing productivism in Germany, the entrepreneurs' narratives are infused with ideas of an endangered fiscal community. Threats are perceived as coming from the undeserving poor and wealthy people who presumably both trick the system. The pivot of fairness and justice centers on imaginaries of productivist deservingness. The business owners' reactions to those they portray as unproductive or undeserving range from cynical resignation to fantasies of coercion. Critical to understanding why the complaints play out in specific ways is, as we argue, the entanglement of imaginaries of reciprocity in processes of redistribution that accompanied neoliberal welfare retrenchment. We analyze two forms of entangled understandings: solidary redistribution as owing others and fair reciprocity as willingness to perform. Productivist deservingness becomes the central element of bargaining about the legitimacy of tax avoidance, the necessity to enforce the productivity of the poor, and the police as the last barrier against class warfare.

Drawing on ethnographic research at an anti-fracking encampment at Preston New Road (PNR) in Lancashire, England, this article explores activists' perceptions of work and responsibility. I examine their protest activities and explore how work is understood, disrupted, and contested; what this means for my interlocutors' engagement with monetary compensation; and how this is reinforced by the extractive nature of the activity they are contesting. I show how through protesting, monitoring, and maintaining a presence on site, interlocutors worked to ethically and materially disentangle themselves from the reality fueled by hydrocarbon extraction. While paid work was deemed ethically problematic in this context, at stake for my interlocutors was the web of relationships in which financial and practical support was received and shared. By drawing on research on activism and dynamics of prefiguration, I show how the work of activism at PNR was predicated on balancing agency with responsibility in a complex and powerful web of responsible relationships. Reconciling agency and responsibility was integral to the ethical orientations on which the anti-fracking community was built and the realities it aspired to create.

This article addresses a failed tax lottery in the country of Georgia's rapid yet shaky political and economic development. The purpose of a tax lottery is to formalize transactions and increase tax compliance. It aims to motivate consumers in any commercial transaction to ask for a receipt qua lottery ticket and ensure that businesses pay taxes due. Tax lotteries thus have a dual function: more revenue is collected from businesses, and consumers do soft policing work while also having a chance to win. Taxation and gambling are two very different ways of exchanging. Gambling is mostly voluntary, effortless, and playful, whereas taxation is dull government revenue collection. Yet both gambling and taxation are ways to understand any society and its political life through its reciprocal qualities and redistributive effects. Drawing on anthropological research studying taxation and gambling, this article is a Schumpeterian analysis, as it provides an inlet into how Georgians regard their society. Studying this tax lottery provides an opportunity to rethink the relation between redistribution and reciprocity, and I argue that to understand how citizens accept the redistribution of taxation, we have to attend to its reciprocal qualities.

The article analyzes struggles about distributive justice in Austria, one of the wealthiest countries globally, and proposes a reinforced focus on how metaphors of redistribution and reciprocity create fiscal imaginaries. It analyzes how politicians, lobbyists, and activists strategically mobilize these metaphors in corporate and wealth taxation debates. Campaigns against wealth taxation portray wealth taxation as negative reciprocity and a threat to an imagined middle class. Those arguing in favor of them create images of unjustly appropriated value that needs to be redistributed. The article analyzes those shifts between notions of redistribution and reciprocity and the fiscal imaginaries created through these debates. Notably, the article argues for the necessity to embed discursive analysis within an understanding of contemporary capitalisms. It contrasts the fiscal imaginaries with challenges of fiscal relations, most importantly the distributed character of capital accumulation and the dilemma of the tax state, as governments orchestrate accumulation to capture parts of its value generated via taxation.