Economic Anthropology最新文献

In recent years, there has been rapid digitalization in agriculture, with India seeing a significant rise in agricultural technology (agtech) start-ups. Many of these start-ups promise to address the climate crisis by promoting the economic and ecological sustainability of agriculture through market-driven business models. Using institutional ethnography and counteraccounting at an Indian agtech start-up, this article illuminates social, economic, and ecological relationships that are obscured by one firm's accounting practices. It shows how, despite tech-entrepreneurs intending to help farmers, violence remains built into the design and effects of rapidly scaled-up (“blitzscaled”) sustainability programs. The article proposes violent sustainability as a concept to highlight the unintended harm caused to potential beneficiaries due to structural violence underlying tech-entrepreneurialism and inherent design flaws in blitzscaled sustainability programs. In doing so, it challenges the normalization and monetization of recurrent failures prevalent in tech-entrepreneurial ventures.

Based on multisite ethnographic work between 2018 and 2020, this article examines entrepreneurship promotion policies developed by the Chilean state directed at Mapuche people. We direct attention to how the notion of authenticity works as a hinge between Mapuche people, historical heritage, nongovernmental organizations, and public policymakers in their promotion of microentrepreneurship as a form of overcoming poverty and achieving full inclusion of Indigenous people in Chilean society. The negotiation processes concerning authenticity bring together people's aspiration to become entrepreneurs as authentic Mapuche and those seeking to initiate a “proper Mapuche business.” Authenticity, its recognition and contestation, appears as a central tenet in the formation of a particular entrepreneurial self that combines entrepreneurs' aspirations for a better life with a simultaneous seeking of an appropriate sense of being Mapuche, with acknowledgment from others. In the process, the meaning of authenticity goes beyond a primordialist understanding of the term, acquiring polysemy and affecting the arena of Indigenous entrepreneurship, as other aspects of contemporary Mapuche lives.

Over the last 16 years, Central American governments have increasingly embraced diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China to foster economic opportunities and national development. This analysis builds on ethnographic research in Costa Rica and Guatemala to trace the kinds of entrepreneurialism Central American governments are mobilizing to foment these transpacific commercial relations. This article explores those transpacific spaces and subjects deemed valuable for national development. Though a strong tradition of transnational business connects local ethnic Chinese Central Americans with firms in mainland China and Taiwan, these subjects have largely not been protagonists of incipient state-led initiatives. I argue that the racialization of Chinese Central American businesspeople as ethnic entrepreneurs has precluded them from serving as appropriate subjects of national development. Instead, Central American governments have relied on white elites to develop desired commercial relations and class interests in this new era of transpacific relations. As such, I emphasize the racialized and classed underpinnings of entrepreneurial identity, showing how it positions some as always already suspect economic actors, while others are seen as national subjects capable of a process of entrepreneurial becoming.

Over the last 16 years, Central American governments have increasingly embraced diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China to foster economic opportunities and national development. This analysis builds on ethnographic research in Costa Rica and Guatemala to trace the kinds of entrepreneurialism Central American governments are mobilizing to foment these transpacific commercial relations. This article explores those transpacific spaces and subjects deemed valuable for national development. Though a strong tradition of transnational business connects local ethnic Chinese Central Americans with firms in mainland China and Taiwan, these subjects have largely not been protagonists of incipient state-led initiatives. I argue that the racialization of Chinese Central American businesspeople as ethnic entrepreneurs has precluded them from serving as appropriate subjects of national development. Instead, Central American governments have relied on white elites to develop desired commercial relations and class interests in this new era of transpacific relations. As such, I emphasize the racialized and classed underpinnings of entrepreneurial identity, showing how it positions some as always already suspect economic actors, while others are seen as national subjects capable of a process of entrepreneurial becoming.

How are taste judgments made and shared? Drawing on fieldwork among Ceylon tea brokers and buyers, the industry's de facto tea tasters, this article offers an ethnographic account of aesthetic judgment in practice. I ask, what makes a tea good? Tea tasters' unanimous response amounted to a market relativism of sorts that shifted attention away from the tasted object: “It all depends on the market.” Following my informants' contention, I show how industry actors are able to enact a tentative resolution to the fundamental paradox inherent in the judgment of taste, namely, its ostensibly subjective nature and simultaneous claim to objectivity. “The market,” invoked time and again by tea tasters, and imagined as inherently objective, affords the seamless translation of taste judgments into prices, intelligible and shareable quantities, prompting a reimagining of taste as an economic fact.

This article analyzes the politics of scale in global development by focusing on a sanitation program in western Kenya. It follows the daily work of a nongovernmental organization that seeks to provide access to chlorine dispensers to millions of people for the purpose of disinfecting water. By engaging with literatures on development and infrastructure, this article proposes reach as an analytic that jointly attends to the aspirations, labors, and uncertain outcomes embedded in scale work. An ethnography of reach emphasizes the temporality of off-grid infrastructures to capture the ambivalent relationships between aspirations and results and between standardization and adaptation, as well as the unstable nature of care. This proves useful to theorizing expansion as potentially generative of, rather than only inimical to, the good life—thereby troubling the vision of scale making as replication often used to understand development projects and their consequences.

The articles that compose this special issue of Economic Anthropology represent a sample of the work presented and discussed at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology on the topic of well-being and the common good. I trace the roots of this conference theme in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and its connections to the literature on the “anthropologies of the good.” I then unpack three themes that emerge across the articles in this special issue: the value of tacking between objective measures and subjective meanings, the productive tension produced by investigating across scales, and patterned variation from which we can build an anthropological theory of the good.

Nordic welfare states are characterized by universal access to generous welfare services, including education, health care, and developmental support. These benefits are maintained through a shared commitment to economic reciprocity. While the centrality of reciprocity to moral and social life in Scandinavian welfare states is well established, it is less clear how citizens evaluate their own and others' reciprocity in daily life. How do everyday Danes come to know that they are reciprocating properly? What does it mean to ask “too much” of the welfare state? What are the consequences for those seen as unable to reciprocate? In this article, I examine how understandings of reciprocity emerge through welfare access and use. I argue that my Danish interlocutors approach reciprocity as an obligation to use welfare resources for the mutual benefit of citizen and society. This is a lifelong project that involves properly positioning oneself within a virtuous cycle of welfare beginning in childhood. Taking the experiences of parents raising children with Down syndrome in Denmark as an empirical point of departure, I argue that this logic of reciprocity is employed not only to justify one's own welfare use but also as an explanatory model for excluding others from benefits.

On one hand, Islamic banking and finance is an aspiration to radically transform banks and the financial system to conform with interpretations of Islamic ethics and morals. On the other hand, such high aspirations patently conflict with the existing global, US$3.6 trillion market dominated by profit-oriented private banks. These aspirations also potentially conflict with the technical details of how financial products are constructed to be “Shariah compliant.” How do Islamic financial practitioners reconcile their vision of the Islamic good society with the products and processes observed at work? One such theological tool and cultural concept is to interpret Islamic financial products as relying on hiyal, a legal stratagem used to provide remedies and alleviate predicaments, to provide an escape from the unlawful to the lawful. This essay summarizes how thinkers in Malaysia are developing the concept of hiyal either to critique or to promote Islamic finance. As a contribution to anthropological and postcolonial theorizing, the essay concludes by exploring how the concept of hiyal can help us understand contrivances, conspiracies, cons, and stratagems. This theoretical tool kit can assist social scientists in exploring the gap between people's economic behaviors and their aspirations for what a good economy should look like.