Stephen Gudeman

Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood

Gudeman argues that economies and economic theories are social constructions, and that the central processes of making a livelihood are culturally modelled.

The Demise of a Rural Economy : From Subsistence to Capitalism in a Latin American Village

1. Anthropological economics and a small village2. An economy evolves3. Household production: subsistence and surplus4. The production process5. Organizing a labour force6. The seeds of a transformation7. Horizons and reflections

An ethnography of neoliberalism: Understanding competition in artisan economies. Commentaries. Author's reply

Both a method and a goal of neoliberal policy, competitiveness structures ever more economic practices while consolidating cultural and community commitments. Current anthropological models treat competition narrowly as a reflection of economic inputscapital, innovation, and talent. In contrast, I show that, first, competing successfully is predicated less and less on economic factors and increasingly on expressiveness and communication. Second, competition entails not so much individualism as positioning and thus is best understood as a structural relationship among competitors. Third, the essential cultural work of competition is not to sweep away inefficient conventions but rather to reconcile the painful inequalities emergent within a community with its professed shared values. To support these claims, I analyze artisan economies, a sector of the global economy that has been surprisingly, if not always happily, revitalized by neoliberal policies. Concentrating on indigenous artisans in Ecuador, I examine how people use words, art, crafted objects, and consumer goods to construct competition as an economic and moral field and place themselves within it.Both a method and a goal of neoliberal policy, competitiveness structures ever more economic practices while consolidating cultural and community commitments. Current anthropological models treat competition narrowly as a reflection of economic inputscapital, innovation, and talent. In contrast, I show that, first, competing successfully is predicated less and less on economic factors and increasingly on expressiveness and communication. Second, competition entails not so much individualism as positioning and thus is best understood as a structural relationship among competitors. Third, the essential cultural work of competition is not to sweep away inefficient conventions but rather to reconcile the painful inequalities emergent within a community with its professed shared values. To support these claims, I analyze artisan economies, a sector of the global economy that has been surprisingly, if not always happily, revitalized by neoliberal policies. Concentrating on indigenous artisans in Ecuador, I exam...

Necessity or contingency: mutuality and market

Karl Polanyi bequeathed to anthropology the concept of the embedded economy. First developed in his book, The Great Transformation (1944), to describe the transition from “pre-industrial” to industrial life, Polanyi subsequently used the idea of embeddedness to understand ethnographic (“primitive”) and historical (“archaic”) economies. In the ethnographic cases, reciprocity is the predominant transaction mode; in the historical contexts, redistribution primarily governs the transaction types. In modern societies, however, disembedded markets dominate transactions. Despite his earlier historical presentation, Polanyi offered a static typology of economies that has usually been set within a binary opposition: either material life is embedded within social relationships or it is disembedded as anonymous exchanges. For Polanyi, the historical reversal of the necessary (society) and the contingent (the market), which occurred with the emergence of industrial society, was a one-time event that was accomplished at great human cost. Granovetter (1985) modified the stark opposition by observing that many economies are more embedded than economists perceive, whereas material life is more disembedded than anthropologists allow. But neither he nor Polanyi developed the theme that the embedded/disembedded pair or mutuality and market, make up the dialectic in economy. In contrast to Polanyi, a neoclassical economist might argue that real markets sometimes include mutual commitments, but these ties are imperfections in an ideal model. To the extent that personal relationships, misperceptions, emotions, and imperfect information influence price-setting, markets are less efficient than they might be and mutuality ought to be eliminated.

Gender, market and community on femecon in May and June 1994

In this analysis we resituate the “Debating Markets” text found in Feminist Economics 2(1) within the flow of conversation found on Femecon in May and June 1994, from which it was extracted. We then compare quantitative, thematic and stylistic features of the entire corpus. Three dominant themes are a market debate, a community debate and a collective action. We examine gender in relation to participation in these discussions and in relation to Femecon as a feminist community and a place for building a feminist economics.

Morgan in Africa

Jack Goody. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology #17,1976. xiii +157 pp. Figures, tables, appendices, notes, references, index.

Money and Abstraction

14.95 cloth,

Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life, edited by Christopher T. Morehart and Kristin De Lucia

4.95 paper.

Review Article: Piketty and Anthropology

Since the 1980s, the economy of the United States has been shaken by crises, mostly centering around the financial domain. Recessions and depressions are hardly new, but this period witnessed the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s (in which the government intervened), the sudden fall of Long-Term Capital Management, which was quickly covered by the banking sector, and the dot-com stock bubble in the 1990s. They were harbingers of the next decade when in 2008 the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, and a financial bubble led to an economic crash in the United States and throughout the world that reminded many of the Great Depression. The effects persisted into the next decade. Around the globe, unemployment rose, wages were frozen, homes were repossessed, economic inequality grew, and many experienced heightened emotional distress. The financial sector almost was brought to a halt in the United States, and from Iceland, to Ireland, to Italy, to Greece, and across the Euro zone, the banking sector almost collapsed. To quell the financial crisis and counter the commercial recession, the United States and other countries relied on government spending and stepping into markets to stabilize them. The United States adopted a two-pronged approach to combating the crisis. The Federal Reserve pumped money into the financial sector via banks and commercial debt. To combat the commercial recession, the government engaged in massive deficit spending to revive the production and consumption of goods and services. We avoided the term, but the U.S. government partially nationalized the automobile and banking sectors. The mortgage crisis that left some people without houses received far less attention. In spite of the distress it brought, I was fascinated by the crisis. It reflects my cross-cultural model of five economic spheres. The spheres overlap and are connected through media of exchange. As capital develops, they are increasingly abstracted from material life in the house and community but mediated through the use of money. The uses of money change with this abstraction. It remains a media of exchange, a unit of account (or tool for commensuration), and a store of value. With capitalism and the expansion of the financial spheres, however, specification or definition of money becomes fuzzy as other implements from credit cards, to gift cards, to coupons assume new uses.

Hybridity, hegemony, and heterodoxy: A new world

The concept of surplus has a long history in anthropology and economics. Economists talk about consumers or producers of surplus when a buyer purchases for less than what was expected or a seller r...