You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Throughout history, societies have had to decide whom to 'sacrifice' and whom to help in times of disaster. This volume examines how elite groups attempt to maintain power through the use of particular economic, political, and ideological instruments and how both ruling elites and common people endeavor to create meaningful traditions while enduring hardship.The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters demonstrates how vulnerability is economically constructed, primary producers adapt their production regimes, how traders and merchants adapt their practices, and how political economic objectives play out in recovery efforts.
This new volume from SEA illuminates the importance of gender as a frame of reference in the study of economic life. The contributors are economic anthropologists who consider the role of gender and work in a cross-cultural context, examining issues of: historical change, the construction of globalization, household authority and entitlement, and entrepreneurship and autonomy. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers in anthropology and in the related fields of economics, sociology of work, gender studies, women's studies, and economic development. Published in cooperation with the Society for Economic Anthropology. Visit their web page.
According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people’s economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.
Workers both in and out of the home, small business owners, federal and tribal government employees, and unemployed and underemployed Lakotas speak about how they cope with living in communities that are in many ways marginalized by the modern world economy. The work uses interviews with residents of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations.
The essays in the book analyze cases of cooperation in a wide range of ethnographic, archaeological and evolutionary settings. Cooperation is examined in situations of market exchange, local and long-distance reciprocity, hierarchical relations, common property and commons access, and cooperatives. Not all of these analyses show stable and long-term results of successful cooperation. The increasing cooperation that is so highly characteristic of our species over the long term obviously has replaced neither competition in the short term nor hierarchical structures that reduce competition in the mid term. Interactions based on strategies of cooperation, competition, and hierarchy are all found, simultaneously, in human social relations.
In Economics and Morality, the authors seek to illuminate the multiple kinds of analyses relating morality and economic behavior in particular kinds of economic systems.
The idea of a moral economy has been explored and assessed in numerous disciplines. The anthropological studies in this volume provide a new perspective to this idea by showing how the relations of workers, employees and employers, and of firms, families and households are interwoven with local notions of moralities. From concepts of individual autonomy, kinship obligations, to ways of expressing mutuality or creativity, moral values exert an unrealized influence, and these often produce more consent than resistance or outrage.
This book concentrates upon how economic rationalities have been embedded into particular historical practices, cultures, and moral systems. Through multiple case-studies, situated in different historical contexts of the modern West, the book shows that the development of economic rationalities takes place in the meeting with other regimes of thought, values, and moral discourses. The book offers new and refreshing insights, ranging from the development of early economic thinking to economic aspects and concepts in the works of classical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Karl Marx, to the role of economic reasoning in contemporary policies of art and health care. With economic rationalities as the read thread, the reader is offered a unique chance of historical self-awareness and recollection of how economic rationality became the powerful ideological and moral force that it is today.