Suchergebnisse

Foundations -- The themes of legacies, logics, logistics -- "Toiling ingenuity": food regulation in Britain and Nigeria -- Public economic cultures -- "The craving for intelligibility": speech and silence on the economy under structural adjustment and military rule in Nigeria (with Laray Denzer) -- Prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time -- From market to platform: shifting analytics for the study of current capitalism -- Cultures of calculation -- The eruption of tradition?: on ordinality and calculation -- Percentages and perchance: archaic forms in the twenty-first century platforms -- Intricacy and impasse: dilemmas of value in soft-currency economies -- Indexing people to money: the fate of "shelter" -- Toward ethnography and the people's economies -- Composites, fictions, and risk: toward an ethnography of price -- Soft currencies, cash economies, new monies: past and present -- Is the "real economy" disaggregating, disappearing, or deviating?

"Legacies, Logics, Logistics brings together a set of essays, written both before and after the financial crisis of 2007-08, by eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane I. Guyer. Each was written initially for a conference on a defined theme. When they are brought together and interpreted as a whole by Guyer, these varied essays show how an anthropological and socio-historical approach to economic practices--both in the West and elsewhere--can illuminate deep facets of economic life that the big theories and models may fail to capture. Focusing on economic actors--whether ordinary consumers or financial experts--Guyer traces how people and institutions hold together past experiences (legacies), imagined scenarios and models (logics), and situational challenges (logistics) in a way that makes the performance of economic life (on platforms made of these legacies, logics, and logistics) work in practice. Individual essays explore a number of topics--including time frames and the future, the use of percentages in observations and judgments, the explanation of prices, the coexistence of different world currencies, the reapplication of longtime economic theories in new settings, and, crucially, how we talk about the economy, how we use stable terms to describe a turbulent system. Valuable as standalone pieces, the essays build into a cogent method of economic anthropology."--Publisher's website.

The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria By Andrew Apter. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2005.

▪ Abstract  After 1989, the interpretation of a complex set of disputes and exigencies settled into a conventional narrative of paradigm shift, in which the intellectual past became essentialized as "traditional area studies" and "classic anthropology." This approach obscures the processes of engagement (including dispute) by which disciplinary change occurred. The Area Studies1engagement with interdisciplinary colleagues and voices from the "area" has been critically important over several decades. Necessarily, the intellectual terms for addressing other interlocutors about regional conditions and events have differed according to the experience of the area in changing universalist politics and analysis. The area/anthropology intersection is examined for Africa (where race is basic to disputes), Latin America (where the place of culture and race in political economic arguments is central), and Europe (where culture and nation are at issue). During the 1990s a collective approach to areas emerged. Anthropologists, and particularly scholars of Asia, played a major role. The varied angles from different areas are linked by a broadly shared concern with the formation of emergent political communities and with themes of governmentality. Although the wider circulation of these ideas is promising, does it risk losing the grounding and accountability that Area Studies imposed (like it or not)? The events of September 11, 2001 and those that followed have made starkly clear the poverty and the dangers of essentialism, and the importance of focusing on the loci from which terms of argumentation in relation to power arise. Middle Eastern Studies is briefly discussed as "epicenter" for defining such an approach.