S4 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
᭧ 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2014/55S9-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/676327
Crisis, Value, and Hope:
Rethinking the Economy
An Introduction to Supplement 9
by Susana Narotzky and Niko Besnier
Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking
of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people,
the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This
rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living for
themselves and for future generations, involving not only waged labor but also structures of provisioning, investments
in social relations, relations of trust and care, and a multitude of other forms of social action that mainstream
economic models generally consider trivial, marginal, and often counterproductive. A holistic understanding of how
people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between
different scales of value. It is attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the
future has become synonymous with geographical mobility. It is attentive to the fact that making a living is about
making people in their physical, social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions.
Rethinking the economy is an ambitious project, and the
selection of the three themes of crisis, value, and hope with
which we seek to open up a broader debate is an indication
of the starting point: the crude realities of the many, those
of ordinary people. The focus on “common” or “ordinary”
people highlights the fact that those whose decision-making
capacities are restricted by their limited assets, be it in terms
of wealth or power, are nevertheless capable of developing
sometimes complex individual or collective strategies to enhance
their own well-being and the well-being of future generations.
Here we define “well-being” as the accomplishment
of socially reasonable expectations of material and emotional
comfort that depend on access to the diverse resources needed
to attain them. The context of a breakdown of expectations
that the global crisis has produced in many regions of the
world has reconfigured values and reshuffled the frameworks
of moral obligation. As a result, the imagining of possible
futures and how to make them happen has also changed. The
Susana Narotzky is Professor in the Departament d’Antropologia
Cultural i Histo`ria d’Ame`rica i A` frica of the Facultad de Geografı´a
e Historia of the Universitat de Barcelona (C/Montealegre 6–8, 08001
Barcelona, Spain [narotzky@ub.edu]) and a Fellow at the Amsterdam
Institute for Social Science Research (Postbus 15718, 1001 NE
Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural
Anthropology in the Afdeling Antropologie at the Universiteit van
Amsterdam (Postbus 15509, 1001 NA Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[n.besnier@uva.nl]). This paper was submitted 10 IV 13, accepted 6
III 14, and electronically published 18 VII 14.
materials that we seek to make sense of here weave together
these questions around the central question of making a liv-
ing.
The three interlinked themes of crisis, value, and hope
support a methodological perspective that underlines scale
while focusing on everyday practices and understandings.
“Crisis” refers to structural processes generally understood to
be beyond the control of people but simultaneously expressing
people’s breach of confidence in the elements that provided
relative systemic stability and reasonable expectations for the
future. “Value” indicates a terrain where people negotiate the
boundaries defining worth, operating at the intersection of
institutional top-down normative frameworks and collective
bottom-up meanings and obligations. Finally, “hope” points
to the tension between personal expectations, the capacity to
design projects, and the actual ability to accomplish them in
a given conjuncture. Although we want to privilege a bottomof-the-pyramid
perspective that centers on the majority of
common people’s everyday practices to earn a living, the use
of scale as a method immediately sets our inquiry in a field
of connections with other social actors, namely, those that
accumulate wealth, knowledge, and power and that can operate
at institutional and wide-ranging scales.
While our aim is to develop a theory of the social reproduction
of present-day capitalism, we think that this is only
possible by understanding that the separation between the
abstract model and its concrete manifestations is itself an
aspect of the dominant economic ideology that we need to
engage critically. Specific constellations of social relations and
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S5
cultural dispositions that make the fabric of everyday life
become structurally significant for capitalist accumulation in
their relation to each other. Historically produced regional
and local specificities regarding the form in which economic
practices are embedded are decisive in a complex process
articulating multiple agents and institutional arrangements in
a global space of accumulation. We think ethnography is a
precious instrument that draws attention to the historical
production of specificity and its role in structuring differ-
entiation.
How people make a living in different social and cultural
contexts has been of long-standing interest in anthropology.
Over the decades, anthropologists have generated a sizeable
corpus of ethnographic materials documenting the diversity
of practices and reasonings that earning a livelihood involves
in different situations. The issue has been addressed at different
moments in the history of the discipline through various
theoretical and methodological lenses. Some anthropologists
(Mintz 1986; Roseberry 1988; Wolf 1982) have focused
on the material conditions and social relations that made
production possible (e.g., access to resources, ownership),
while others have emphasized the circulation of resources and
the frameworks of obligation that mobilized transfers and
defined differential allocation (e.g., gift, commodity; Gregory
1982, 1997; Malinowski 1961 [1922], 1961 [1926]). Recent
works, however, have tended to view production and circulation
as inextricably entangled with one another in social
practice.
In the context of the gradual worldwide expansion of the
market system as the dominant mode of resource allocation,
exchange has come to dominate as both a concept and an
anthropological concern. Moreover, the rise to prominence
in the course of the twentieth century of economics as a
scientific discipline whose main goal is the creation of models
of market coordination based on calculability has contributed
to the market principle becoming a powerful metonym of the
economy. This has been facilitated by the expansion of market
principles to most social domains and areas of the world. In
turn, exchange and calculability have increasingly become issues
that anthropologists have had to address in order to
conceptualize value and valuation processes.
Anthropologists’ interest in exchange harks back to the
historical foundations of the discipline, particularly in the
works of Malinowski (1961 [1922], 1961 [1926]) and Mauss
(2003 [1923–1924]), and it has given rise to important debates
about value. Some of the most productive of the last half
century have focused on the recognition that people simultaneously
engage in different “spheres” or “regimes” of value
in their daily life (Appadurai 1988a, 1988b; Bloch and Parry
1989; Bohannan 1959). An important aspect of what makes
something valuable is its capacity to preserve, increase, or
transform its worth as it moves in time and space (Graeber
2001; Munn 1992), which often has the effect of altering scales
of value or constructing them in complex ways (Besnier 2011;
Guyer 2004; Thomas 1991). Here, however, we seek to go
beyond exchange as the main paradigm; instead, we investigate
the economy in terms of focusing on social reproduction,
that is, continuity and change of human collective lifesustaining
systems.
Making a Living
In rethinking the economy, our aim is to build on a wealth
of anthropological knowledge, both empirical and theoretical,
that has documented practices for making a living in different
parts of the world. We are particularly concerned with what
ordinary people understand by “a life worth living” and what
they do to strive toward that goal, particularly under conditions
of radical uncertainty (“crisis”). Our emphasis on ethnographically
grounded research aims to compare sociologically
and culturally what emerges as valuable across different
ethnographic cases (“value”). Finally, we recenter our understanding
of the economy around social reproduction, that is,
around the objective and subjective possibilities to project life
into the future (“hope”).
Social reproduction entails addressing different scales in
terms of which ordinary people evaluate the possibility of
continuities, transformations, or blockages. Residents of postwar
Sarajevo, for example, are deeply conscious of the lack
of “progress” in their current existence colored by the many
obstacles in the “road to Europe” in contrast to the accomplishment
of “normal” expectations and hope for a better
future that they experienced before the war, a contrast that
projects the future at different scales in each case (Jansen
2014). Social reproduction is selective, and an understanding
of it must contend with the boundaries of what needs to be
reproduced, boundaries that are the result of social negotiations.
What compels a focus on social reproduction is the fact
that anxieties about livelihood are often couched in terms of
the relations between generations, be it at the individual and
household levels (“Will my children find a job? Will I be able
to form a family?”) or at the level of the state (today’s youth
as a “lost generation”). These tropes highlight the centrality
of a time-space dimension in the way in which ordinary people
reason about well-being and its achievement. Past experiences
provide a horizon of expectations configuring present
aspirations and hopes for the future.
We propose to rethink practices of making a living, their
materiality, and the concepts that contribute to produce them
by asking the following questions: “How do ordinary people’s
experiences shape the livelihood projects that they undertake?”
and “How do material, social, and cultural realities
constrain these projects?” We think of “the economy” neither
as a reified domain of inquiry isolated from the rest of human
existence nor as a particular form of social action such as
calculability. Rather, we conceptualize the economy as consisting
of all the processes that are involved, in one fashion
or the other, in “making a living,” taken in a very broad sense
and stressing both the “effort” involved and the aim of “sus-
S6 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
taining life.” But making a living is equally about cooperation
and about being part of a collective that gives meaning to
life, makes it “worth the trouble.” We agree with Graeber’s
(2001) reinterpretation of the labor theory of value that defines
value as the spending of creative energy in producing
and maintaining society (68), but we also stress the insight,
found in numerous ethnographic accounts, that the way a
society enacts people’s worth is a clear expression of its economic
and political organization (Terradas 1992; Wolf 1999).
We thus need to understand what the significant differences—
boundaries, institutions, categories of people—those in power
strive to reproduce in order to maintain their worth and their
wealth.
This expanded understanding of the economy cuts across
a broad range of human activity beyond the purely material
and is attentive to different coexisting regimes of value. Making
a living does not only depend on people taking part in
the market by selling their labor for wages—or alternatively
by selling their products or services outside state regulatory
frameworks, using microcredit financing, or appealing to the
state or NGOs for subsidies. It also involves dynamics that
are not commonly thought of as “economic” or that are often
defined by mainstream economics as malfunctioning, deficient,
or signs of “developmental backwardness.” For example,
sacrifice among the Luo, for whom the domains of religion
and economic rationales overlap, forges connections
between material and immaterial entities and forces, past and
future, that are central to the production of a sense of belonging,
hope for the future, and physical and spiritual wellbeing
across generations (Shipton 2014). Even in the marketdominated
environments in which most people live today,
many livelihood resources are produced and circulate outside
or on the margin of market practices. They follow unpredictable
paths along provisioning circuits, alternating between
commoditized and noncommoditized valuation, dependent
on the framework of available opportunities, constrained by
political instruments, and regulated by different modalities of
responsibility (Besnier 2011; Narotzky 2012b). In times of
crisis, people operate with coping strategies that enable them
to locate increasingly elusive resources. These strategies may
include relations of trust and care, economies of affect, networks
of reciprocity encompassing both tangible and intangible
resources, and material and emotional transfers that are
supported by moral obligations. Many consist of unregulated
activities or activities that cannot be regulated (Hart 1973;
Humphrey 2002; Lomnitz 1975; Procoli 2004; Smart and
Smart 1993; Stack 1974). But these strategies can also have
the effect of defining and marginalizing categories of people
(e.g., on grounds of ethnicity, gender, or race) whose access
to resources will be violently curtailed (Li 2001; Sider 1996;
Smith 2011).
In order to make life worth living, people invest in multiple
aspects of existence that appear at first glance to have little
economic substance but end up having economic consequences.
Among the poor, social relations often constitute a
much safer “investment” than petty entrepreneurship, contrary
to the assumptions that underlie development policies
that prioritize microcredit and the entrepreneurial self. Thus,
poor Brazilians in the impoverished Pernambuco region affirm
that “money is good, but a friend is better”: while money
disappears as soon as it is earned, ties of friendship can be
counted on in times of need (de L’Estoile 2014). In a similar
vein, women in rural Tamil Nadu, who have long been acquainted
with a wide range of borrowing practices, including
those that the microcredit development programs promote,
know well that indebtedness generates recognition and support
(but also political patronage, forms of labor obligation,
and shame) through the wide social network that it presupposes
(Gue´rin 2014), while Latin American migrants in Barcelona
juggle complex dynamics of reciprocity, mutual care,
and financial transactions in order to “make it” under difficult
circumstances (Palomera 2014). But while people in situations
of serious precariousness are most adept at developing complex
coping strategies, the parsimony of the not so wealthy
but not poor is also constituted of multiple and diverse livelihood
projects. These dynamics have been analyzed extensively
in the context of family firms, ethnic entrepreneurship,
and industrial clusters in most regions of the world (Blim
1990; Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993; Smart and Smart 2005;
Yanagisako 2002). They have also received considerable analytic
attention in developing nations, where even doctors and
civil servants may moonlight as taxi drivers and small-scale
business entrepreneurs to secure their families’ economic
base, or where civil servants might become moneylenders or
the door to subsidies (Besnier 2009; Owusu 2008). Similarly,
in postapartheid South Africa, it is the new black middle
classes (as well as whites) who engage in what some term
“reckless borrowing,” bearing witness to the fact that these
salaried families need more than just the salary they receive
to maintain the consumption practices associated with their
class position (James 2014).
We wish to think about making a living without privileging
a particular domain of activity (exchange), a particular intentionality
of action (gain), or a particular valuation process
(calculation). We do want to stress that the practices we define
as economic have one important objective, namely, sustaining
life across generations. While our perspective can be thought
of as neosubstantivist, we would rather think of it as realist
and as emerging from a long intellectual history focusing on
how people cooperate or clash around the will to produce
and reproduce a livelihood.
This perspective is positioned at the crossroads of several
theoretical traditions. First, the political economic tradition
in its neo-Marxist and post-Marxist variants has inspired social
scientists to explain the unequal distribution of wealth
through an analysis of the historical processes that produced
relations of production, which can variously be cooperative,
conflictual, or exploitative (Roseberry 1988, 1989). This tradition,
whose relevance to the world’s present-day realities
has not waned, approaches social reproduction through the
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S7
lens of the structural dialectics that produces political and
economic differentiation (Harvey 2003; Mintz 1986; Wolf
1982).
Second, theoretical approaches that showcase moral economies
seek to understand the mutual obligations and responsibilities
that render exploitation acceptable, at least for
a time, and enable particular forms of socioeconomic differentiation
to endure (Moore 1978; Scott 1976; Thompson
1971, 1993). The moral dimensions of economic practices
have garnered increased attention in the last decade (Browne
2009; Edelman 2005; Fassin 2009; Fontaine 2008; Hann 2010;
Robbins 2009; Sayer 2000) as an alternative to rational choice
theory to explain the motivations that guide human behavior.
However, we want to stress the need to articulate this view
with political economy for it to have meaningful purchase.
Indeed, moments of disjuncture between new practices of
exploitation and past frameworks of responsibility capture the
moral aspects of the economy as they are being challenged
by those in power.
Finally, approaches from feminist economics constitute an
important basis for thinking about the “economy otherwise.”
Feminist voices have stressed that unpaid work and an ethics
of care are key to an understanding of economic processes
beyond self-interested individual maximization (Benerı´a
2003; Elson 2001; Lawson 2007; McDowell 2004; Nelson
2006). Central to well-being, care can be provisioned in or
out of market circuits of exchange, but it is also framed by
the tension between love and money (Ferber and Nelson 1993,
2003; Zelizer 1997). The practice of care involves a constellation
of agents that operate in domestic, market, state, and
voluntary sectors, forming what Razavi (2007) calls the “care
diamond.” The interdependence of these various agents
means that changes in care practices in one sector (e.g., the
household) are often related to changes in another sector (e.g.,
state services). In a similar vein, caregiving articulates with
care receiving along care chains that connect these multiple
agents (Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Parren˜as
2001; Weber, Gojard, and Gramain 2003; Yeates 2004). Feminists
have also problematized the unequal distribution of
intrahousehold resources and responsibilities, their relation
with life-cycle dynamics, and their articulation with inequalities
elsewhere in society (Dalla Costa and James 1975; Hareven
1977; Hartmann 1981; Narotzky 1988). The most important
theoretical breakthrough of feminist economics is
possibly the showcasing of relations of personal dependency
(as opposed to the imagined autonomy of the individual rational
actor) and of emotional value as central to social reproduction.
The tension between moral frameworks that
stress dependency and those that underscore autonomy underlies
contemporary practices of making a living.
The articulation of these three theoretical strands responds
to the scalar methodology. Care relations observable in the
household, for example, result from gendered frameworks of
moral obligation in a particular society. These are often produced
as local or diasporic expressions of the global movements
of social differentiation and wealth accumulation and
are subject to institutionalizing forces. For example, Polish
labor migrants from various parts of Poland and at different
times establish particular forms of care configurations with
families and friends, forms that are shaped by the economic
and political contexts of the decision to migrate (Pine 2014).
In a similar vein, Mexican labor migrants in California juggle
between different regimes of value that are interwoven with
different responsibilities to families back home, the need to
appear to have “made it,” and the political economic structures
of labor and migration policies (Villarreal 2014). While
feminist economics recenters the economy around the human
need of mutual support and political economy attends to the
movements that produce differentiation and enable wealth
accumulation and unequal distribution, moral economy inquires
into the grounds for claiming, the frameworks of entitlement,
and the design of reasonable expectations.
Crisis
Times of crisis expose the fragility of economic structures in
particularly dramatic fashion. At the same time, they drive
people, if not compel them, to adapt their old modes of
livelihood to changing conditions and to create new ones.
Crisis signals a breakdown in social reproduction, a mismatch
between configurations of cooperation that used to “work,”
by producing particular expectations and obligations and a
different configuration of opportunities and resources. As a
concept, crisis holds together two meanings of different orders
that defy resolution.
Crisis contrasts with forms of stability that enable the design
of projects and that support the trust that existing configurations
will enable the realization of those projects. Against
this idea of normality, crisis signals a rupture that emerges as
a menace at the same time that it forces ingenuity and creativity.
There is a long scholastic history of thinking about
rupture as being limited in time and eventually giving way
to stability that has informed both popular and analytic understandings
(e.g., Koselleck 2006). A faith in relative stability
achieved through monetary policy is the epistemological basis
of mainstream economics’ predictions about the future. The
observable reality, however, is that crisis may not be as exceptional
as economists assume, which explains why they are
often hard pressed to explain their failed predictions, as the
global economic crisis that began in 2008 has illustrated in
particularly dramatic fashion. In Marxist theory, on the contrary,
crisis is an inherent feature of capitalist structure, where
the drive toward profit making results in the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall and in overproduction, overcapacity, and
overaccumulation. Although cyclical in nature, these ruptures
become increasingly damaging to the resilience of the overall
system because they escalate the conflict among classes to an
irresolvable point that would push the entire system to its
breakdown. The temporality aspect of crises, however, needs
attention both in its popular and expert understandings,
S8 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
whether it appears expressed as a punctuated time of significant
turning points (Guyer 2007; Jansen 2014) or as an enduring
time of waiting (de L’Estoile 2014), whether the breakdown
is situated at the systemic or at the subjective level.
Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that instability
and uncertainty have been the norm in most social, cultural,
and historical contexts. Periods of stability, such as the moment
of economic growth and welfare expansion that followed
World War II in North America and Europe (France’s les
trente glorieuses) are in fact historical anomalies, which in any
case only benefitted a comparatively small portion of the
world’s population and were predicated on neocolonial extractive
practices that made life harder for many elsewhere.
Under most circumstances, people must contend with the
unpredictability of their projects, making crisis rather than
risk an integral part of their horizon of expectations. However,
other than in extreme circumstances, they innovate practices
and institutions, often of an ad hoc character, that cushion
the effects of instability and enable a relative sense of continuity
over time.
An increasing proportion of the world’s population is unable
to achieve well-being or only achieve it precariously. At
the same time, while some institutions (e.g., state, family,
church) that regulate moral and political frameworks of responsibility
and support the transfer of resources are being
undermined in various ways, other institutional frameworks
(e.g., religious, ethnic, nationalistic) for guiding human behavior
and channeling goods are being created or reconfigured.
This creativity, however, may involve exclusionary
practices that create and demonize an Other (in terms of race,
gender, ethnicity, nationalism, or other forms of human difference),
which becomes the target of violence in struggles
over access to resources and respect (Gingrich 2006; Hage
1998; Holmes 2000; Kalb 2009). These effects underline the
need to understand the ingenuity and creativity, as well as
their potentially dark undertones, that social actors deploy in
coping with an environment that is largely not of their own
making but in which they have to live.
The current worldwide financial crisis of 2008, for example,
has produced uncertainty of both an economic nature
(shrinking resources, decreasing employment opportunities,
precarious job structure, failing credit, higher indirect taxation,
reduced state benefits) and a political nature (disempowerment,
loss of entitlements, “technical governments,”
democratic deficit) in the old centers of Western capitalism,
a situation that was long present in other spaces of capitalism.
This uncertainty affects people’s ability to reproduce materially
and emotionally, creating difficulties in forming new
families, maintaining existing ones, forming caring relations,
and feeling respected. Focusing on intergenerational relations
such as those expressed through transfers of tangible and
intangible assets (e.g., property, care, knowledge, skills, and
values) highlights the complexities of social reproduction on
different scales. Indeed, social reproduction can be defined as
continuity that brings generations together around microprojects
of making a living and enhancing future opportunities
and around macroprojects of social configurations of
power and asset distribution. At the same time, crisis may
create new understandings of “generations” that have implications
beyond the confines of intimate social groups, namely,
for the reproduction of society as a whole. In particular, the
realities of crisis and its discourse transform the material and
moral environments that support inter- and intragenerational
transfers.
In southern Europe, for example, crisis has now become
part of ordinary people’s everyday reality, one with which
they have to contend in trying to make a living and when
thinking about how to invest in the next generation. While
experts and governments insist that the crisis is an “exceptional”
situation, an interlude before things get back to normal,
for many people around the world, the experience of
chaos and permanent vital insecurity is the situation that
designs the field in which they need to play. In our view,
crisis—both as an experienced reality and as a folk and expert
conceptual category—is a good place to ground an inquiry
into the economy given its overwhelming presence in the lives
of many people around the world.
Value
In “Essai sur le don,” Mauss (2003 [1923–1924]) demonstrates
how different kinds of value-making practices (e.g.,
juridical, religious, economic, aesthetic) are valued and incorporated
in valuables, but he is also concerned with understanding
equivalence reached in exchange and thus grapples
with the tension between “values” and “value.” The other
tension he negotiates is between the material object and the
social relations it expresses. More recent ethnographies have
argued that these tensions are not resolved with the expansion
of capitalist market principles. In The Great Transformation,
what Polanyi (1971 [1944]) calls “fictitious commodities”—
namely, land, people, and money—appear as disembedded in
the process of market exchange, but in fact this disembedding
is artificial because they are really constituted in different value
frameworks. In his chapter on commodity fetishism, Marx
(1990 [1867]) approaches this insight in a different but complementary
fashion: things, people, and land are always embedded
in the social relations that produce them as commodities.
Both Marx and Polanyi see these transformations
of embedded values into exchange value as having a negative
effect on most people and, more generally, on social reproduction.
At the same time, because commodities are produced
through concrete social relations within particular regimes of
value, when they enter the market, the concrete values that
they acquire within these regimes increase their value in market
terms. For example, the “authenticity” of a rug produced
in a Turkish village as part of a dowry bestows on it added
market value when it reaches a New York gallery (Spooner
1988; see also Villarreal 2014 on the need to provide tourists
in Chiapas an “authentic” experience). More generally, the
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S9
question is whether and how multiple concrete values crystallize
in a unique value in exchange. Much of this is addressed
in exchange theory and the debate about the gift (Damon
1980; Godelier 1996; Graeber 2001; Gregory 1982, 1997;
Mauss 2003 [1923–1924]; Munn 1992; Robbins and Akin
1999; Strathern 1988, 1992; Weiner 1980, 1992), and it is tied
to the debate on money, special monies, scales of calculation,
conversions, and the entanglement of valuation practices
(Guyer 2004; Hart 2000; Maurer 2006; Zelizer 1997).
Anthropologists have underscored the fact that not all values
are commensurable, meaning that values cannot be
gauged against a single measure of value. Neither are values
always determined in exchange. For example, Godelier (1996),
following Weiner, stressed the difference between values that
are alienable through gift or exchange and inalienable values
that must be kept, and he saw in the latter the embodiment
of a society’s foundational core. In his distinction between
the “base” and the “market,” Gudeman (2008) differentiates
between value that cannot be measured (and is therefore incommensurable)
and value that can be (and is therefore commensurable).
Value is not measured when sharing is the dominant
form of circulation, which takes place in the base (e.g.,
within the household or the community). The need for comparison
and mutual evaluation emerges on the boundary of
the base as reciprocity or market exchange (e.g., between
households or communities). The market is the epitome of
commensurability. In the market, however, multiple scales of
value can be conflated into a continuous gradient while at
the same time people continue to value things on different
scales in what Guyer (2004) calls, in reference to Atlantic
Africa, “exchange performances” (97–98). While calculation
is central to exchange, it does not exhaust the range of valuation
practices. Judgments of worth may not depend on a
ranked scale of value that produces measurable qualification
but may rest instead on comparison and assessment by the
“reasonable agent” who is embedded in multiple, often incompatible,
value regimes. Moreover, things may be compared
“fuzzily” and traded suboptimally as being “good
enough.” Finally, what cannot be counted, compared, or exchanged
is often what people consider to be of greatest value
and essential to the continuity of the thread of life between
past, present, and future (Shipton 2014).
Insights from ecological economics have further complicated
the debate. What ecological economists have been dealing
with for some 20 years is the fact that the environment
is a site of competing values increasingly expressed in open
conflict. Different social actors produce and value a location
(e.g., as a livelihood resource, a marketable asset, a production
factor, a religious site, an aesthetic good) in terms of the
“goods” and the “bads” that can accrue from its use in various
ways. These conflicts strike the familiar chord of tensions
between values and value, which anthropologists have long
been addressing (Albert 1956; Munch 1970). In dealing with
valuation in environmental conflicts, ecological economists
reject the reductionism of commensurability, that is, the reduction
of the valuable object to a single measure of value.
Instead, they recognize value pluralism. They insist that incommensurability
does not imply incomparability but weak
comparability in which the choice between alternatives is not
based on a single measure of comparison. Even in the face
of incompatible values, valuation can lead to practical judgments
by reasonable agents. While commensurability is defined
in terms of trade-offs, that is, in a frame of exchange,
comparability is not dependent on trade-offs but on preferences
that are grounded in morality. Research on environmental
conflicts has focused on the possibility of accepting
compensation for a “bad” or on the willingness to compensate
for preserving a “good”: witness the “willing to accept–willing
to pay” tests used in impact evaluations or forensic decisions
(e.g., Exxon Valdez). Refusal to accept compensation at any
price expresses an absolute preference that is nontradable,
which is often supported by strong collective arguments of
an ethical or other nature that are focused on the future. For
African-Americans and Latino residents of southern Greater
Los Angeles, for example, having to live with polluted air is
not an acceptable price to pay for the promise of new jobs,
from which discriminatory hiring practices will exclude them
anyway (Brodkin 2014). Indeed, in order to compensate for
the destruction of certain values, these must be reduced to a
certain standard of value that will make possible the exchange
of the negative effect for an equivalent asset (e.g., monetary
compensation, community improvements, the promise of
jobs). Compensability rests on calculation in an exchange
frame, but value is not always a function of it (Funtowicz
and Ravetz 1994; Martı´nez-Alier et al. 1998; Spash 2000).
Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, Paige West
(2005) alerts us to the fact that indigenous processes that
make the environment valuable are often dialectical relationships
that produce identity and space simultaneously. Here,
the processes of valuation themselves are incommensurable
with the categorization system that sustains the economic
models of conservationists. “It is not that Gimi value forests,
plants, and animals in different ways from outsiders—they
do not necessarily ‘value’ them at all, because Gimi do not
separate themselves from their environment” (West 2005:
639). In Wukan, a fishing village in east Guangdong Province,
protests against landgrabs, analyzed by He and Xue (2014),
are not predicated on a sense of collective identity among
disowned peasants but are instead based on various agendas
that together generate a negatively defined and increasingly
marginalized peasant identity that is given legitimacy by a
reconstituted clan structure that brings together pre-1949 elements
with local forms of the state (cf. Brandtsta¨dter 2003).
Money figures centrally in the relationship between value
calculation and morality (Bloch and Parry 1989; Gregory
1997; Guyer 2004; Hart 2000; Zelizer 1997). It can be an
instrument of individual desire, which drives the imagination
of personal autonomy and worth, as easily as it can be an
instrument of collective dependency, which underlines how
we necessarily belong to each other (Graeber 2011; Hart
S10 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
2000). Money “keeps track” of what people do to each other
and is thus an instrument of collective memory. Its capacity
to become a “memory bank” is based on its ability to endure
and thus convey value through time. And this value seems
to refer centrally to “making society,” keeping it alive in time.
These dynamics are particularly striking in the case of other
kinds of valued objects, such as wampum among the Iroquois
and Melanesian valuables (Graeber 2001; Munn 1992). Social
reproduction thus comes back to the fore in an interpretation
of money as bridging between the individual and the collective,
autonomy and dependency, short-term transactional orders
and long-term ones. Money shares its capacity to be a
“store of value” with other kinds of valuables such as real
estate, highlighting the temporality of value and of the criteria
used in assessing worth through time as illustrated by the
attractiveness of home ownership as a saving and investment
strategy among Latin American migrants in Barcelona, made
possible in the 2000s by subprime mortgages, overindebtedness,
and intricate reciprocity obligations (Palomera 2014).
The temporality of value is particularly suggestive. In the
articles in this special issue of Current Anthropology that focus
on credit (Gue´rin 2014; James 2014; Villarreal 2014), we find
that beyond the accounting of debt interest through market
instruments, which are obviously time dependent, credit is
tied to a multiple-value assessment of investment in a better
future (Shipton 2014). Ordinary people’s everyday financial
practices thus often have ambivalent meanings. People may
think of them as an asset when they serve to attenuate other
forms of subordination (e.g., migration to escape one’s subordination
to a landlord or to kin) or enhance respect (e.g.,
enabling ceremonial expenses or consumption goods), even
when this perspective forces them to patronize a loan shark
or pawnshop. Alternatively, they can see them as a liability
when they give rise to an increased dependency that produces
shame and to material deprivation that results in their failure
to meet moral obligations. In precarious situations, social
valuation is often the premise that underpins practices of
investment, and credit is a tool that retains the ambiguity of
holding the unknown future as the measure of present actions.
This turns our attention to social worth, a central aspect
of our understanding of what the economy is about. Social
worth is how a society values people: the value of people, but
also the value obtained through people and the value invested
and accumulated in people. This perspective is informed both
by anthropological exchange theory, which links the accumulation
of value to personal worth, and by a reconfiguration
of the labor theory of value, which envisions people as the
origin of all value incorporated in commodities. Finally, social
wealth (“social capital”) appears at the core of economic practices
everywhere and is entangled with other forms of wealth
and their reproduction (Bourdieu 1980; Granovetter 1985;
for a critique of the “social capital” concept, see Narotzky
2007).
The worth of people is dialectically tied to how people
organize themselves in their aim to sustain life and possibly
produce a good life. For example, young Malagasy migrant
women have to balance their understanding of their value as
providers of sexual, reproductive, and caring labor to the
Frenchmen they marry with their value as providers of the
resources that they secure through low-wage labor to folks
back home (Cole 2014). When they lose their worth, the
questions that people ask are “How is this possible?” “What
made it happen?” “Who is responsible?” and “What is to be
done?” Ordinary people search for logical connections and
often focus on power (be it magical, divine, plutocratic, or
political) as the force that determines their worth. And power
is a means-ends relation defined by its efficacy, linking human
and other entities in a causal connection. The logical connections
in terms of which people understand these questions
are often couched in terms of the responsibility of powerful
agents to care. For example, they think of the state as having
a responsibility to care for them, and when the state cuts
welfare benefits, they interpret these cuts as the state’s failure
in its basic obligation. When laid off, it is the boss’s failure
to care that is at stake. In Western cultural frameworks and
probably others, care implies dependence, but it must also be
counterbalanced by recognition of autonomy, which is the
basis of responsibility and of social and economic adulthood.
Personal worth is contingent on a delicate balance between
the two (Dubois 2014; Gallie and Paugam 2002). Perceived
as a kind of moral obligation predicated on the recognition
of human worth, care makes life worthwhile at the same time
that it provides ways of accessing resources (food, housing,
subsidies, employment, information, comfort, etc.).
Hope
The economy is about projecting into the future. People’s
economic practices have a clear temporal orientation to horizons
of expectation that are framed by past experiences and
the mythical reconfigurations of memories of that past (e.g.,
the idealization of a past when “things were better” or the
vilification of a past “when everyone went hungry”). This
temporal orientation may consist of individual aspirations
that find leverage in established expectations but seek to go
beyond them toward a general improvement of life opportunities.
The “American dream,” for instance, articulates an
individual form of aspiration to a collective configuration of
hope relating to the well-being of the entire society and in
turn to a particular form of relations of production and distribution,
namely, historically, Fordism (on free-market utopianism,
see Harvey 2000:173–179). But the dream of a better
future can be expressed in many other ways. In mainstream
economic models, it is expressed as growth and the optimal
allocation of resources. In humanistic models, it is expressed
as a flourishing of human capabilities and worth (GibsonGraham
2005; Hart, Laville, and Cattani 2010; Nelson 2006).
In everyday practice, ordinary people translate these models
as projects for making life better for the next generation, but
of course what “better” means is bound by time and space.
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S11
In many societies, people equate hope with displacement
in the belief that geographical mobility may translate into
social mobility, it is hoped, in the right direction (e.g., Cole
2014; Palomera 2014; Pine 2014; Villarreal 2014). In these
situations, migration can be understood as a material projection
into a future that is located somewhere else. This
material projection can acquire an ideational life of its own
and become a migratory disposition that reduces the future
to mobility (Kalir 2005), although as Pine (2014) demonstrates,
it can acquire in the same society different configurations
(e.g., the motivations to migrate, the prospect of returning,
the distribution of responsibilities) at different times.
A migratory disposition can flourish even against ample evidence
that mobility does not deliver its promises or, worse,
that it creates a situation in which mobile people who do not
“make it” are forced to cope with sometimes appalling living
conditions that are preferable to the shame of returning empty
handed, as is the case of the Mexican migrants in California
with whom Villarreal (2014) worked. Migrants may develop
among themselves an “economy of appearances” whereby
they know but tacitly agree not to discuss that the success
stories they tell each other and others back home stretch the
truth. This is the case of Malagasy migrant women leading
unglamorous married lives in provincial France, whose success
narratives are not questioned when they make return
visits to Madagascar as long as they behave as migrants are
expected to behave, displaying wealth and nurturing social
relations (Cole 2014). In other circumstances, the feeling of
“pattering in place” (Jansen 2014) or “waiting” (de L’Estoile
2014) becomes the metaphor of blocked expectations, while
the “road to Europe,” in the case of Sarajevans, or the state’s
development projects, in the case of Brazilians in the Northeast
Region, expresses the hope of individual and collective
social mobility (see also Ferguson 1999; Guyer 2007). These
dynamics demonstrate both the power and the fragility of the
equation of hope with movement.
What, then, produces a sense of the future or its opposite,
the sense of not having a future, of the closing of the horizon
of expectation? What kinds of resources enable what futures
to emerge? As one feature of the imagination, hope constitutes
an important asset when material resources are lacking in the
present, although complete deprivation often hampers the
possibility of imagining a future. For Bourdieu (2003), in a
situation where the lack of a future becomes an expanding
experience for many people, it is the relative autonomy of
the symbolic order that can “provide some margin of freedom
for a political action that may reopen the space of possibilities”
(336). Harvey’s “dialectical utopianism” in turn points to the
need to materialize “in institutional, social, cultural and physical
realities” alternative imaginings of society that enable oriented
trajectories toward a better future (Harvey 2000:182–
196). Political mobilization hence hinges on the production
of this margin of freedom through the material enactment of
symbolic struggles that produce new spaces for hope. Thus,
what Brodkin (2014) aptly terms “economic citizenship”—
to identify the hope that hard work will provide economic
security, well-being, and basic respect—is the driving force of
union mobilization among low-level workers in a university
hospital in the American South and environmental grassroots
mobilization in the industrial fringes of Greater Los Angeles.
This analytic notion also captures Guangdong peasants’ claim
for recognition of the worth of their work and social identity
in the face of the dispossession of their land by corrupt urban
developers and local state agents (He and Xue 2014).
In Me´ditations pascaliennes, Bourdieu (2003) makes the
point that people’s practical sense of the future, their hopes
of a better life, and their investments in terms of continuous
oriented action are attuned to the objective possibilities allowed
by the social and economic framework of their existence.
The habitus here is the expression of the limits that
frame future expectations and therefore condition the modes
of mobilization in the present for a future. Social differentiation
is thus structurally incorporated when future expectations
and decisions about personal investments take form.
The practical ability to make the future—the capacity to imagine
it in the present—depends on the everyday material experience
of uncertainty. If every investment in the future is
associated with uncertainty, it is generally understood as a
bounded space of uncertainty, limited and regulated by a
particular habitus that provides a horizon of expectations.
This is what Bourdieu (2003) terms la causalite´ du probable
(causality of the probable; 332) in which “will adjusts to possibilities”
(312) and can even be represented through accounting
practices and calculation devices such as the spreadsheet
(Miyazaki 2006). However, absolute uncertainty inhibits
the capacity to produce everyday reasonable expectations and
expresses the breakdown of social reproduction and the moral
economy that holds it together. Thus, the ways in which people
get hold of their future through political mobilization in
the present is structurally tied to the limits of uncertainty that
are materially produced by economic and political structures,
institutions, and agents.
“Ordinary People,” Models, Ethnographic
Methods, and Scale
Our focus on “ordinary people” is based on two related motivations.
One is the rather obvious fact that the people whose
lives are most affected by the economic turmoil of the new
millennium are not only those who occupy a global “bottom
of the pyramid” (Cross and Street 2009; Errington, Fujikura,
and Gewertz 2013) but also those who were previously “making
do,” often with expectations of upward mobility. The latter
are now finding that the practices that had enabled them to
manage in the last couple of generations are increasingly elusive.
These are the lower-middle classes, the working poor,
the “missing class” (Newman and Chen 2008), those that live
in “fear of falling” (Ehrenreich 1990) or, more fashionably,
the “99%.” Here we are not replicating anthropology’s historical
turn from the “savage slot” to the “suffering slot”
S12 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
(Robbins 2013), but we are instead focusing our attention on
the large demographic base whose economic downturn is a
particularly striking motivation for reconsidering the econ-
omy.
The second motivation for focusing on ordinary people is
a matter of both theoretical and social import. Rather than
privileging expert models produced by economists and put
into practice by states and superstate entities, we aim to explore
critically the relationship between these models and the
on-the-ground economic practices of those whose main objective
is the pursuit of livelihood (Narotzky 2012a). Anthropologists,
sociologists, and historians have critiqued the
power of expert models and of the material, social, and cognitive
devices they deploy to produce particular realities that
ordinary people have to deal with (Callon 1998; Carrier and
Miller 1998; Elyachar 2005, 2012; Miller 1997; Mitchell 2002;
Perelman 2000). For example, economic policy makers in
France make policies that frame the way in which “streetlevel
welfare bureaucrats” will deal with welfare recipients who
are under constant suspicion of being welfare cheats, while
in fact recipients are simply trying to coordinate sources of
income with the demands of the moral economies in which
they are embedded. At the same time, expert models that
appear to be oriented toward the maximization of the state’s
social resources have an increasingly important moralizing
function legitimating underpaid and precarious forms of employment
(Dubois 2014). The critique of expert models being
out of touch with everyday realities, of course, has a long
intellectual genealogy harking back to Gramsci’s “philosophy
of praxis” and his distinction between traditional and organic
intellectuals (Gramsci 1987) and the power of hegemonic
discourse (Roseberry 1994).
The epistemological perspective we advocate engages with
the complex reality of the elusive materiality of models. First,
models are abstract discursive accounts that produce an authoritative
logic of causality. Second, economic models are
formal (mathematical) renderings of discursive models that
obscure their political objective in technical formalization.
Third, models are instruments for the exercise of power. In
short, models are attempts to control a messy reality through
abstraction: control through knowledge production and epistemic
dominance and control of human action through the
performative force of not only the designs themselves but also
the relations they privilege. Models produce an ideological
context that channels action toward the continuity of particular
forms of differentiation. They can be thought of as devices
enacting hegemony (Williams 1977) or as producing
habitus in both scholarly practice and ordinary life (Bourdieu
2003). While posing as descriptions of observed reality, models
are projects that design the future through a mix of memories
of past experience and willful imagination. The concept
of “economization” provides a promising window on the way
in which models and economic realities are intertwined by
bringing together the processes (behaviors, institutions, material
devices, etc.) that configure what both scholars and lay
people perform as economic. It assumes that the economy
does not preexist economic action but rather that it is constituted
by it (C¸ alıs¸kan and Callon 2009, 2010). Beyond economization,
however, the design of economic models, whether
expert or folk, is the effect of human political struggles in
which power relations are enacted and that result in producing
differences that limit people’s opportunities for making a liv-
ing.
The methodology best suited for an investigation of these
complexities is ethnography. Ethnography enables the exploration
of how models are constructed and the processes by
which some are vested with authority while others are not.
It also enables us to explore how people can undermine or
sidestep hegemonic models in the actual conduct of their lives.
Ethnography helps us grasp the everyday realities of model
making and their ramifications across what is defined as “economic”
to encompass the social, the private domain of households
and families, the culture of corporations, the shop floor,
the trade union, social mobilization, and scholarly debate.
Ethnography approaches models as sites of struggle in defining
relevance. Ethnographic comparison plays a crucial role
because it enables us to engage with the fact that models are
detachable abstract objects capable of circulating across geographical,
social, and cultural landscapes while at the same
time yielding power only as concrete and unique manifestations
of historical, social, and cultural realities.
This engagement with life as it is lived exposes the variable
power of models and their entanglement with everyday life,
particularly the tensions that arise in the design and actualization
of models on different scales. Such is the case, for
example, in Dubois’s (2014) analysis of the fundamental gap
between the design of French welfare policies, the instantiation
of these policies during the control interviews of recipients,
and the pragmatic uses of welfare benefits in the conduct
of recipients’ daily lives. Models can also clash across improbably
distant national contexts, with policy debates in one
country affecting the local lives of ordinary citizens in another.
For example, in the aftermaths of China’s entry into the World
Trade Organization in 2001, cottage industries and small firms
in Europe were affected by a technical debate among politicians
and economists about how to define China’s economy
(as a market-system or non–market-system economy) and
how to calculate the value of its commodities in order to
decide whether its exporting practices were fair or not. Locally,
workers, petty entrepreneurs, and large industrial and commercial
firms’ agents voiced different definitions of the globalized
dynamics at stake, calling “dumping” what others defined
as cheap imports and asking for state- and European
Union–level protectionist measures (Narotzky 2009; see also
Neiburg 2011 for struggles around inflation indexes in Brazil
and He and Xue 2014). Ethnographies of socialist and postsocialist
regions have provided particularly rich insights into
the tensions that enactment of models as well as the struggles
over their local definition produce at different scales (Burawoy
and Verdery 1999; Humphrey 2002; Mandel and Humphrey
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S13
2002; Verdery 1996), as Pine (2014) and Jansen (2014) demonstrate
vividly with ethnographic materials from postsocialist
Poland and Bosnia respectively.
In ethnographies, issues of scale emerge in situations in
which ordinary people experience their opportunities of livelihood
as pertaining simultaneously to various domains of
practice. An example is that of people provisioning food as
marriage prestation at the same time as they are consolidating
exchange partnerships with their allies and reproducing the
cosmological covenant with ancestors and the land (Malinowski
1935). When a young man is pushed to migrate as
an unskilled laborer or as an aspiring athlete (by the state,
his family, or his desire to “make it”), he is engaging with
the material opportunities and moral frameworks of the international
(or regional) labor market, of his local community
resources and priorities, of his family’s assets and expectations,
and of his personal capacities and desires (Besnier
2012). These different scales inform one another on a continuous
basis, but they also acquire relative stability through
institutional and technical devices. There is no transcendent
overarching logic that can explain economic practices at either
the micro- or macrolevel, as neoclassical market models do.
The best we can probably do is to observe analytically how
various scales are defined and how they articulate in practice
(Swyngedouw 2004).
Contemporary economic relations partake simultaneously
of multiple scales of value and institutional frames. This simultaneity
often creates complex and contradictory environments
in which people make judgments about what they can
or should do to make a living. These judgments may be
informed by conflicting moral obligations between agents that
may call for very different kinds of action. The importance
and entanglement of diverse economies in the real world calls
for a breakdown of the conceptual straightjacket that has kept
them apart as separate phenomena, foregrounding some and
marginalizing others (Escobar 2004; Gibson 2014; GibsonGraham
2005; Santos 2006). While economic pluralism is
important, the coemergence and interaction of these “diverse”
economies is equally important. As Marxist articulation and
dependency theories have long stressed, difference is produced
dialectically in the context of structures of power that permeate
different scales (Wolpe 1980).
Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking
the Economy
The articles in this special issue of Current Anthropology were
developed from papers originally presented at the WennerGren
international symposium “Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking
the Economy,” which took place in Sintra, Portugal,
September 14–20, 2012. They address many questions that
bring together the three themes of crisis, value, and hope
around the assessment of value and the worth of people. They
explore how the practicalities of juggling with different regimes
of value involve not only the transactions and circulation
of objects of value but also the creation and maintenance
of social relationships and the emergence of particular
social identities that are crucial resources in times of need.
The production and circulation of resources and the shifts
between different fields of value affect social relations, and
identities emerge in the context of the social relations these
processes create. The differently situated agents will use various
types of rationalities to access and utilize resources. Often,
these different logics come into conflict with one another.
At other times, emotions such as shame act as regulators of
material and social dynamics.
The capacity to access different kinds of valuable assets is
intimately related to temporality, particularly when the relationship
between the present and the future is rife with uncertainty.
But this temporality can be complicated in that the
certainties for the future that people had in the past can
become the yardstick for the uncertainties that people experience
in the present. Past, present, and future are related
to one another in multiple ways in people’s understanding
of their experience and in their definitions of projects for the
future. At the same time, different temporalities interact with
one another and with the assessment of the values that people
give to different resources and to the channels that might help
getting hold of them. What effect does radical uncertainty
about livelihood have on people’s everyday practices of making
a living?
In regions of the world where agents believe that geographical
mobility will translate into socioeconomic mobility, many
kinds of evaluation are involved in decisions to migrate or
stay put. Different regimes of value operate in this decision
making and in the new social and economic relations that
mobility engenders. Hope provides a contour for the experience
of geographical mobility and the socioeconomic mobility
that it is expected to generate. Frustrated hopes and
shame operate sometimes as a hindrance of mobility and can
aggravate a sense of crisis and worthlessness. But immobility
may also be a metaphor for a radical uncertainty that inhibits
hope.
A classic tenet of political economy is that different parties
assign different value to their contribution to production.
These differences are at the root of inequality and are intimately
tied to conditions of insecurity for those whose worth
is not recognized. At the same time, these differences can be
put to work and can set the framework for conflict and mobilization,
which can be collective, individual, or brokered by
third parties such as labor activists, entrepreneurial middlemen,
or union organizers. Uncertainty, then, may transform
into a project for the future and motivate people to mobilize
for that aim. Sometimes nonrecognition becomes the ground
for political action, but this is not always the case. Mobilizing
for recognition or for claiming resources or entitlements rests
on particular forms of identification and creates forms of
identification that did not previously exist.
Finally, value is the focus of institutional power because
institutions are predicated on defining boundaries around
S14 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
what constitutes value and who is worthy. Social reproduction
is stabilized and regulated through the definition of these
boundaries, which produce continuity in the patterns of resource
distribution and social worth. In times of crisis, institutions
and their relationships to the citizenry are reconfigured,
and this reconfiguration often takes the form of
judgments about the morality of particular people, their statuses,
or their actions. Thus, moments of crisis result in the
realignment of institutions and their agents’ relationships to
ordinary people. Ordinary people’s ability to reconfigure or
bypass the formalizing power of institutions in their search
for a better future is a form of struggle aimed at redefining
the forms of political responsibility and moral obligation of
the powerful.
Making a living is about “making people” in their physical,
social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions. It is
about the forms of human interaction that make different
kinds of resources available, although often unequally,
through social relations of production, distribution, and consumption.
It is about struggles and stabilization around the
worth of people and how to make life worth living. It is this
effort to make life that we term “the economy.”
Acknowledgments
We thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation, particularly Leslie
Aiello and Laurie Obbink, for funding and organizing the
Sintra symposium and the participants in the symposium for
their valuable input. In addition to the authors of the articles
in this special issue of Current Anthropology, participants in
the Sintra symposium included Stephen Gudeman, Gavin
Smith, and Janet Roitman. We also thank six anonymous
reviewers for their helpful comments. We acknowledge funding
provided by the European Research Council in the form
of two Advanced Grants, “Grassroots Economics: Meaning,
Project and Practice in the Pursuit of Livelihood” (Narotzky)
and “Globalization, Sport and the Precarity of Masculinity”
(Besnier). Susana Narotzky’s work was also supported by an
ICREA-Academia fellowship (2011–2015) from the Generalitat
de Catalunya and a grant (CSO2011-26843) from the
Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain.
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