Economic Anthropology最新文献

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.

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.