Economic Anthropology最新文献

Bitcoin, regarded as a decentralized currency of the future as well as a digital gold, faces various challenges, such as scalability, the geographical concentration of mining, its politically informed design and history, its high market volatility, and inequalities in the proportion of accumulation. However, the number of Bitcoin owners has risen exponentially, and relevant socioeconomic and political groups have become increasingly diverse. Consequently, this article argues that what has contributed to the global diffusion of Bitcoin and its embeddedness in different human societies is its practical indeterminacy. Practical indeterminacy characterizes the fundamentally undefinable, indeterminate nature of Bitcoin's value, as it can change its form depending on who it encounters. In terms of temporality, practically indeterminate Bitcoin can urge potential owners and users to compare their pasts and futures, thus driving them to perceive, own, and use Bitcoin for their own purposes. By paying attention to the agency of Bitcoin, practical indeterminacy explains how individuals form their own relations with Bitcoin and how these relations lead to Bitcoin's further sociocultural embeddedness. The proliferation of such a wide range of human–Bitcoin relations shows that Bitcoin is not only monetary but also cultural, as it offers different meanings to users and owners.

Rice was historically a “total social phenomenon” in Sierra Leone, molding rural identities through farming. Crop yields are rapidly declining, forcing change among people who once claimed to be “wealthy” from rice and now face severe food insecurity. In response to change, they can take out loans—offered by “strangers”—to continue farming rice, or they can “diversify” and farm alternative crops. Low rice yields largely condemn those who accept a loan to farming solely to pay their debts, a “poverty trap” that most cannot overcome. However, the majority of farmers in our study area accepted seed and tractor loans, arguing that rice is “the only way” to offer their children a better life through education—even as no children from the villages have procured waged jobs—as it is the only commercial crop that pays school fees. We argue that thinking in terms of fetishes offers a constructive analysis of the dissolution of total social phenomena. Devoting the next generation to the new “fetish” of education is paradoxically dependent on retaining one's commitment to the old fetish of rice, allowing the usurious stranger to profit from this paradox.

This special issue presents a collection of ethnographic and archaeological articles that consider how humans inscribe landscapes with diverse forms of value. From natural resources to real estate markets, from cherished homelands to foreign speculative investment, the way we approach landscapes offers insights into value systems as they map onto and emerge from biophysical terrains. We argue that the “landscapes of value” analytic foregrounds such materiality to embed cyclical value making within particular places and times. We introduce this special issue by discussing the articles' contributions along four overlapping processes of landscape valuation: commodification, exclusion, speculation, and simplification.

Brandon D. Lundy, Kennesaw State University

Andrea Rissing, Emory University

Bradley M. Jones, Washington University

Kelly McKowen, Southern Methodist University

Katherine E. Browne, Colorado State University

Mike Chibnik, University of Iowa

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Dolores Koenig, American University

Carolyn Lesorogol, Washington University, St. Louis

John K. Millhauser, North Carolina State University

Arthur D. Murphy, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

K. Anne Pyburn, Indiana University

Daniel Souleles, Copenhagen Business School

Rich Warms, Texas State University

Rick Wilk, Indiana University

Helen Hobson, Kennesaw State University

Economic Anthropology is published by the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) to make available research that is innovative and interdisciplinary and focused on economic and social life to serve scholars, practitioners, and general audiences. Contributors to the journal represent a wide range of disciplines including cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology, demography, economics, ecology, geography, and history. In 2017, Economic Anthropology doubled its annual publication list from one to two: a theme-based issue pegged to the SEA annual conference, and an open submission issue representing a wide variety of research engaged with economy and society.

Economic Anthropology was founded in 2013 during the transition from the SEA's independent status to a society within the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The premier issue was published in January 2014.

For the 30 years preceding the founding of the journal, the SEA published an annual volume of articles drawn from the SEA spring conference. Annual themes reflect issues of current debate and significance. Now with a high-quality online format, full indexing of articles, a forward-looking vision, and the support of Wiley publishing and AAA, the journal is able to reach a broad base of scholars and publics.

To further the goal of making the most current research available to a broad audience, Economic Anthropology emphasizes clear and accessible writing. Authors are encouraged to take advantage of the journal's online format and incorporate photos, graphics, and links to video or other related materials. The journal considers the work of scholars at all points in their careers, including advanced Ph.D. students.

Economic Anthropology promotes inclusivity, diversity, antiracism, and anti-colonialism. We therefore encourage our contributors to cite relevant publications of members of historically marginalized groups and scholars from countries where their research was carried out.

The Publisher, American Anthropological Association, and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained i

In 1969, in the name of development modernity and Canadian unity, the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau undertook the most extensive land expropriation in the history of the country, to build the largest airport in the world, Mirabel. The Canadian government expropriated approximately twelve thousand people and ninety-seven thousand acres of land for the project. Mirabel was a dramatic failure, for social, political, and economic reasons. This article focuses on the development discourse that the state used to promote its ambitions, the relation that expropriated farmers had to their private property, and the slow but eventually strong and successful resistance of owners whose lands the state requisitioned.

An Arctic agricultural frontier is opening as climate change threatens growing conditions in established zones of crop commodity production. Projections of northward shifts of viable agricultural land unleash fantastical interest in the improbable reality of “farming the tundra.” Expansion of Arctic agriculture has long figured in Alaska's history, including drawing settlers to the “Last Frontier,” where farmers face challenges of extreme conditions, weak infrastructure, and fragile markets. This article, based on joint 2019 fieldwork and ongoing ethnography of landscape change and comparative commodity frontiers by the authors, tracks this imaginative frontier to examine how and why diverse Alaskan agriculturalists seize upon emerging conditions of climate change. We propose “climate opportunism” to frame an understanding of how agriculturalists may gain from changing growing conditions, drawing attention to the values in and beyond monetary gain generated in the social space of frontier imagination and grounded projects of livability in the Arctic. Across differently situated cultivators (a multigenerational immigrant family farm, an Inupiaq Arctic agriculture project, an urban hydroponics enterprise), we find that the changing landscape intensifies investment in embedded local values, while opportunism practiced at various scales both underscores and potentially obscures inequalities in resource distribution and alternatives to apocalyptic narratives of change.

This article explores the shifting landscapes of light, labor, and value produced by the politics of electrification in Tanzania. Through engaging the anthropologies of infrastructure and electricity, it asks, how do people understand the relationship between electricity and value in the landscapes that sustain them? A brief outline of the history of electrification in Tanzania highlights its role in the production of place, and analysis of fieldwork with residents, leaders, and energy advocates between 2017 and 2020 reveals contemporary understandings of the relationship between electricity, value, and place. The article then chronicles recent government efforts to dramatically expand access to electricity, outlines the processes of selective grid expansion, and describes how people experience and understand its effects. I construct a theory of infrastructural triage to conceptualize the process of assigning degrees of urgency, priority, and value for developing infrastructure in particular spaces and for particular people and highlight its role in newly configuring the landscapes and timescapes in which people live and experience their everyday lives. In the process of enhancing the productivity and labor of some people but not others, electricity facilitates, obstructs, and marks flows of value across landscapes.

Peoples living in the Eastern Woodlands of North America domesticated a suite of small-seeded crops between five thousand and two thousand years ago, making this region one of roughly ten independent centers of domestication across the globe. In the Southern Appalachian region, foraging peoples began cultivating these native crops around thirty-five hundred years ago (during the Late Archaic period [3000–800 BCE]); by the start of the Early Woodland period (800–200 BCE), they had significantly altered their lifeways and surrounding landscape. This included a change in the physical landscape, as demonstrated by paleoethnobotanical data, with an increase in weedy plants at the expense of bottomland forests. Groups also significantly shifted their lifeways, becoming more sedentary, as evidenced by an increase in storage pits, more substantial structures, and the adoption of ceramic vessels. Storage pits also tend to be smaller, indicating a shift from community-based food procurement and storage to the household level. This may reflect the development of private property and distinctions among households with differential access. Community-based rituals, as evidenced in several caves and rock-shelters in the region, may have been established to strengthen group ties in the face of the broader changing social and physical landscape.

This article discusses how Sicilian oliviculturalists imbue value into their olivicultural landscapes. I combine a political ecology framework, attending to the impact of global political economy on local socioecological systems, with feminist theorizations of care to argue that while participants articulated varied values about place, livelihood, and landscape, participants nonetheless rejected an economistic valuation of their labor, livelihood, and landscapes. Instead, they embraced what I call a praxis of care. In describing this praxis of care, I draw on recent work on global environmental ruination and devastation as a result of capitalist overextraction to illustrate how Sicilian oliviculturalists conceptualize and experience ruined landscapes, specifically in the context of abbandono, “abandonment,” and their positioning in relation to contemporary iterations of the historical Southern Question.

This article uses anthropological and historical perspectives to explore ongoing conflicts over “managed retreat” and property values along the California coast. Proponents of managed retreat argue that coastal communities need to start planning for the impending effects of sea level rise, including retreating or relocating away from vulnerable coastal spaces. Some residents and organizations oppose such measures, often citing the need to protect coastal home and real estate values. One of the key arguments of some residents is that such coastal properties should be protected because they are so valuable. Drawing from sociological and anthropological theories of value, in addition to ethnographic research in California, this article explores how this situation in California came to be, what it can tell us about the politics of value and financialization, and finally, what it portends for the future as our highly financialized world faces the looming threat of climate change.