Economic Anthropology最新文献

The National Institute of the Popular Solidarity Economy (IEPS) in Ecuador was created to promote an alternative form of economy—the Popular Solidarity Economy (PSE). As a precarious institute with limited funding, IEPS staff worked hard to find alternative ways to support the PSE. In this article, I examine their work through the lens of valor agregado (added value), a commonly used local term for how economic value is created. Government bureaucrats intervened primarily by creating an audience that was interested in the social aspects of the alternative economy. Because valor agregado ambiguously refers to both monetary and social value, it helped the PSE better integrate with the wider economy. With this approach, I offer a potential new path for analyzing government support for alternative economies. By refocusing our attention on key actors' understandings of value creation, anthropologists can sidestep questions of whether alternative economies have been “co-opted” by capitalism and instead examine the necessary interfaces between these alternatives and the mainstream.

This article examines the financialization and assetization of housing in an Eastern European context by focusing on the specific temporally bounded financial strategies to maintain housing as an asset and vehicle for social reproduction. It proposes the concept of liquid homeownership to account for the varied associations of housing with liquidity and the expectations of future increased exchange value that play an essential role in shaping financial decisions in the present. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bucharest, the article argues that upper-middle-class mortgage borrowers strategize their leveraged housing investment by navigating between two future horizons. To ensure that housing is an asset in the long term, mortgage borrowers prefer to evacuate the long-term of the mortgage contract through medium-term financial strategies of early repayment. Given the importance attributed to future liquidity from homeownership for providing for old age or securing children's future, the article argues that liquid homeownership, at least for ordinary homebuyers, is a reflection less of short-term financial interest and more of a long-term social reproduction need, pointing to the complex intermix of financial calculations and domestic concerns in the context of financialization of housing.

For three millennia, there has been a conflict between landed military power (the traditional enforcers, now nation-states) and urban commerce (capitalists, now a lawless global plutocracy). This ancient battle was resumed by the European Renaissance, culminating in industrial revolution around 1800. This seemed at first to be a victory of the money interest over landed power. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the capitalists discovered that they could not manage without crowd control by the traditional enforcers, a compromise between money and landed power (business and government) that unleashed “national capitalism” in political revolutions involving the leading powers of the last century. These generated mass production and consumption at home and a global takeover by European colonial empires, both enabled by a bureaucratic revolution first proposed by Hegel. National capitalism—a merger of industrial capitalism and the “nation” by strong states attempting to modify the former's contradictions through central bureaucracies acting in the interest of the citizen body—became the main form of society after the Second World War, first through developmental states varying from socially responsible capitalism in the United States through social democracy in Europe to communism in the Soviet bloc, with the newly independent former colonies divided between the antagonists in the Cold War. Undermined by financial imperialism in the last four decades, this system is now failing, but humanity is far from achieving a world society to replace it.

Keith Hart's magisterial, eclectic essay “The Rise and Fall of National Capitalism” takes on a dizzying array of topics, from the nature of money to the concept of the nation to the tension between “shareholder value” and “corporate social responsibility” to the mutual admiration society of celebrities, economists, politicians, and journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The essay must be read as part of Hart's project over the past few years of synthesizing his past work and conveying through multiple publications, venues, and media his universalist, humanist view, which is above all against parochialism in all its forms (including the disciplinary parochialism of economic anthropology and anthropology more broadly) to meet the exigencies of the current moment—a moment centuries in the making.

He has approached this task in several ways, recently and emblematically in the publication of his book Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes (Hart, 2022), which he described at the launch at the London School of Economics as an attempt to realize the poles of individual and society as a dynamic yet integrated whole (Hart, 2023).

Hart's universalist vision, and his Gramscian blend of “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,”¹ takes form in this essay of an account of ways in which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the nation-state as an ideological and institutional form has acted as a more or less functioning stage manager for a particular phase of capitalism that Hart terms “national capitalism.” This phase, through a bewildering series of forces, but perhaps especially changing technologies and politics surrounding money and its particular currency forms, is now drawing to a close, with no clear sense of what is to come.

What is to come is not yet completely clear, in Hart's view, partly because, as he says in the second paragraph, “folk models lag behind world history in the making” and partly because most people are trapped within narrow understandings of their identity, circumstances, interests, desires, sectors, academic and nonacademic fields and disciplines, and so on. The essay is diagnostic: it seeks to provide a heuristic, temporal frame to unite and make sense of disparate happenings and phenomena. It is also hortatory: “Humanity,” says Hart, “is sleepwalking into what could be a terminal disaster,” and this essay is meant to be an alarm clock.

There are many paths to follow in this essay; I will focus on just three: temporal choices, materials and money, and what kinds of politics is called for in response.

Hart's essay relies on timelines. He identifies several key switch points in the past 150 years, including the consolidation of “national capitalism” in the 1860s, the first span of “financial imperialism” from the 1880s to 1914, and the second from the late 1970s–1980s to the present (although the key conjuncture in

This article defines social and financial money as distinct institutions that account for different realms of value. I present a fundamental dichotomy among economists' where orthodox theory defines money as a medium of exchange whereas heterodox chartalist economists characterize it as a unit of account. I argue that (pre)historical data provides clear evidence in support of the heterodox position. The unit of account function of money is exemplified by how wampum accounted for social debts and was expanded to also serve financial functions by European colonial governments. The heterodox position is further evidenced with the metal coins that denominated Rome's financial money that transitioned to serve primarily social purposes in early Anglo-Saxon Britain. Focusing on the accounting function of social and financial monies transcends the Polanyian special-versus-general-purpose framework that often still structures archaeological practice. With this framework of money defined by what gives it value, I then evaluate recent claims that financial money was integral to the political economies of Bronze Age Europe. I conclude that the adoption of the orthodox assumption that money is primarily a medium of exchange inhibits understanding of what money is and how the political economies of ancient societies were organized.