Economic Anthropology最新文献

Throughout contemporary China, consumers have the option of purchasing food products from “traditional” Chinese wet markets or “modern” supermarket chains. Wet market vendors are economically disadvantaged as the operators of small-scale businesses with limited investment and high labor costs. Nevertheless, wet market vendors continue to thrive in urban China, despite the continued expansion of supermarket chains. This article combines ethnographic data and social network analysis to examine how social networks provide wet market vendors with some important competitive advantages. The article draws on fourteen months of fieldwork in Sanya City, China, and provides an analysis of the composition, structure, and strength of the network ties of 113 wet market vendors. Vendors tend to have strong and dense ties to individuals who help them establish their businesses. Vendors also rely on strong ties with regular suppliers to help them reduce costs and ensure a regular supply of goods. These strong ties are balanced by weaker ties with a diverse range of customers, including small businesses and household consumers. A combination of both strong and weak network ties contributes to the collective resilience of wet market vendors, allowing them to confront crises, reduce risk and uncertainty, and improve performance.

In this article, we examine what local well-being means in the contexts of collaborative heritage management and national development in Mexico. Driven by the request of Lacandon Mayas (including the second author) who live in Puerto Bello Metzabok, Chiapas, Mexico, in 2018, we engaged in archeological consolidation and heritage management to promote local tourism and sustainable economic development. This collaboration raised a series of ethical and practical questions of how to engage with the Eurocentric project of development. Addressing these issues has become critical, as the Mexican president's signature infrastructure project, Tren Maya (Maya Train), is designed to promote nationwide development via increased cultural heritage tourism in Chiapas and southern Mexico. Through critical reflection on experiences with Metzabok community members, we address Eurocentrism and colonialism by enacting a Lacandon (i.e., Hach Winik) buen vivir. This form of well-being is relational and communal and creates a common good that includes more-than-humans. Via this critical perspective, we argue that a decolonial project can use the tools of development as an initial step in creating Indigenous well-being.

Does wage labor contribute to well-being beyond providing an income? Well-being can be understood in eudaimonic terms as the happiness derived from a socially valued life or in hedonic terms as the experience of pleasure. The eudaimonic–hedonic divide is replicated in competing progressive visions of the place of work in a good life. Laborist theories stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful life. By contrast, for post-work theories, pleasure is important for well-being, and work is generally not expected to be pleasurable. Surprisingly, many of the participants in my study of diverse US job seekers described one or more of the jobs they had held as “fun.” Fun connotes enjoyment without deeper meaning, a hedonic rather than eudaimonic account of nonfinancial work rewards. What made a job fun were small work pleasures: enjoyment of the tasks and feeling competent at them, enjoyment of the physical work environment, or enjoyment of social relations on the job. These small pleasures could be found in both standard and nonstandard, precarious jobs. This study indicates the need for a labor politics that improves hedonic well-being on the job. It also expands an “anthropology of the good” to include ordinary enjoyment.

This article explores grogue, a sugarcane-based distilled spirit of Cabo Verde, and its multifaceted and contested valuations in culture, livelihoods, and well-being. Despite Cabo Verde's challenging climate, sugarcane agriculture remains significant primarily due to the importance placed on the local production of grogue. The study described in this article investigates how grogue is perceived and valued among Cabo Verdeans, questioning why it promotes connectivity, sustainable livelihoods, and identity as a cultural asset and how it is entangled in a complicated colonial legacy, harmful health and negative societal outcomes, and neoliberal designs to modernize and industrialize as a cultural liability. The researchers conducted a thematic analysis of news stories and their associated comments from A Semana, the premiere daily online Cabo Verdean newspaper, to explore grogue's production, distribution, consumption, regulation, and valuation. The findings demonstrate various value registers, including identity, place, economic development, health, and social well-being, all of which help shape Cabo Verdeans' perspectives on grogue. This article is a crucial starting point for future research aimed at developing a comprehensive understanding of artisanal spirits' proliferation and contested values. By investigating multivocal interests behind competing ideas of valuation or devaluation of grogue, the study contributes to understanding its impacts on Cabo Verdean society.

Household economic studies of preindustrial societies have overlooked one very specific and common material aspect: thrift. This article introduces a theory of economic production for household analysis that focuses on the economic use of materials, space, and labor. This framework is especially integral to understanding emergence of hierarchies. In emerging hierarchies, craft production at the household level can play a key part in the accumulation of power because the scale and type of craft production are moderated by the availability and abundance of material, space, and labor. Control of craft production can mean control of material, space, and labor, and thrifty control can increase production; this is key to emerging economies, particularly those located in a frontier area. Because women are often most associated with household labor, examining cultural definitions of thrift and waste provides a more complete understanding of household gender relations and reframes the importance of women's labor. Using an example from a 14th-century Mississippian frontier site in Virginia, I show that women engaged in craft production and that by using materials, space, and labor economically, they increased their power over time. An economy of production theoretical perspective highlights a significant factor, thrift, in household organization and agency.

Despite efforts to improve outcomes, resettlement projects that aim to improve livelihoods and living standards of the displaced often do not achieve their goals. Could greater attention to the well-being of the affected improve resettlement outcomes? This article considers standards of living and well-being among one resettled group, the Bahingkolu of Manantali, Mali, relocated in the mid-1980s by construction of the Manantali Dam. Anthropological approaches to well-being that include a greater understanding of people's own conceptions of well-being and consider well-being in relationship to their social and physical worlds help elucidate why the Bahinkolu are unsatisfied with their well-being despite higher standards of living. Because they can no longer grow enough for food self-sufficiency, they must encourage family members to work elsewhere, thereby risking the sustainability of the family as a single economic unit. In this context, household heads feel constant anxiety about their ability to maintain a cohesive household. The Bahingkolu publicly maintain that they are “victims of the resettlement” as a strategy to gain more resources for the community. To improve the generally negative consequences of involuntary resettlement, planning should expend more effort to appreciate the conceptions of well-being among the affected.

This article explores how small-scale farmers' shared moral understandings of land shape both land sales and land rental markets, in the context of the commoditization of agriculture in Nicaragua. The results here presented are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a subsistence farming community in the highlands of Nicaragua. This research shows that even in relatively commoditized market economies, shared yet contested ideas around the ethics of a community moral economy stall and constrain the local marketization of land. Social relationships, ideas of a sacred origin of land, and expectations about the duties of landholders toward their community peers undermine the capitalist dynamics of supply and demand. This ethical challenge to capitalist market expansion into land markets enables the survival of small-scale subsistence farming. These findings are important, as they show how land markets are shaped by differing perspectives on historical dynamics of land tenure, class differentiation, and the everyday moral economies in which competing ideas of obligation, solidarity, and fair prices are articulated.

How do humans develop hope in the face of seemingly irreparable harm against each other? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 30 BIPOC Christians and 40 White Christians whom they identified as long-term allies, in this article, I consider how a slim minority of White Christians develop ways of hoping that sustain lasting antiracist engagement. I identify contributing factors to reorientations of hope, focusing on a type of catalytic event that I analyze as a form of exchange. As economic anthropologists from Marcel Mauss to David Graeber have elaborated, structures and moralities of gift giving reveal and define relationships. I extend that theory to argue that experiences of exchange relationships in turn shape the ways people hope. I trace a logic of exchange that interlocutors conceptualized using the term grace, an incongruous, freely given gift that anticipates future relationship in the context of unrepayable debt. As White Christians became highly aware of the systemic and historic immensity of racial injustice, their combined awareness of indebtedness and grace became formative to new kinds of relationship and hope. In response, they imagined and pursued a society in which love and repair across chasms of past harm are not taken for granted but are not impossible.

Senegal has long relied on local communities to expand health services and improve health outcomes for citizens and is internationally lauded for its effectiveness in promoting good health and facilitating local trust. Here we examine how community health care emerges in Keur Toma, a rural Wolof town in the Senegal River Valley that relies on a global network of labor migrants to fuel its remittance-based economy. Largely through its hometown association and the migrant men abroad who fund it, Keur Toma has built and sustained the local health infrastructure and staffing essential to achieving health care accessibility, providing consistent investment and critical stop-gap funding when government assistance falters. Following Robbins's call for investigating “an anthropology of the good,” we highlight the deeply rooted sense of care and obligation to kin and community that fosters the translocal ties that make Keur Toma's health care possible in the state's absence. We highlight what Ngom calls “sanctified suffering”—which valorizes personal fortitude and the ability to endure hardships for family and community, shaped by traditions of solidarity, mutual aid, and Islamic morality—and its role in migrants' hometown commitments to building stronger communities.

This article examines two values that have long motivated work in economic anthropology: the value of denunciatory critique and the value of thinking otherwise. Through a retrospective analysis of research that I have conducted on consumer debt in Brazil, I offer two different versions of that research based on whether the story is driven by the first value of denunciation or by the second of thinking otherwise. In doing so, I suggest ways to address the limitations of both anthropology focused on denunciatory critique and the more recent development of an “anthropology of the good” by outlining what I call an anthropology of wisdom.