Mergers & Acquisitions

This podcast discusses Professor Ferry's book in progress, Gold Matters: Elemental Worldmaking in Finance and Mining.  The conversation addresses the enduring significance of gold in both mining and finance, despite its formal detachment from global currency systems since the end of the gold standard, in 1971. Hosted by Daromir Rudnyckyj and Ferda Demirci, the discussion explores how gold is both a powerful symbol and material through which people construct meaning, value, and political relationships. Ferry describes the concept of “elemental world-making” to apprehend how both miners and financial professionals engage materially and symbolically with gold. She distinguishes between “intrinsicists,” who believe gold has inherent value, and “pragmatists,” who view gold's value as socially constructed. The exchange highlights how anthropology reveals dimensions of finance and extraction often overlooked by economics, such as embodiment, affect, and materiality. Ferry also reflects on the challenges of conducting ethnography in financial contexts and draws connections between gold and newer forms of value, such as cryptocurrency. She argues that the physical properties of gold—its weight, shine, and non-reactivity—continue to shape its role as both a financial hedge and symbolic icon. The episode underscores how gold serves as a lens to examine the entanglement of materiality, abstraction, and power in contemporary capitalism. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her work includes Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (Columbia UP, 2005); Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico Border (2013, Indiana UP); and La Batea (with Stephen Ferry) (2017), which won the 2019 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, among other awards.  She is co-editor of Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Temporalities (2010) and The Anthropology of Precious Minerals (2019). She is currently completing a co-edited volume, How Transparency Works: Ethnographies of a Global Value, with Filipe Calvão and Matthieu Bolay, and a single-authored book, Gold Matters: Elemental Worldmaking in Finance and Mining. Podcast Co-Hosts Ferda Nur Demirci, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, working in the Department of Economic Experimentation. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, resource extraction economies, and authoritarian governance, with a particular focus on the cycles of indebtedness affecting working-class families in Turkey. Her work has been published in both English and Turkish in outlets such as Antipode Online, Dialectical Anthropology, and 1+1. She is also a research associate in the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria.  Daromir Rudnyckyj, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory.  His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state.  Dr. Rudnyckyj's current project examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary monetary forms. His most recent journal articles include “Econography: Approaches to Expert Capitalism,” in Current Anthropology and “The Protestantism of Neoliberalism” in Culture, Theory, & Critique. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (Chicago 2019) and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell 2010), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society.

This podcast discusses Dr. Peebles's forthcoming book, The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons, co-authored with the artist and illustrator Benjamin Luzzatto.  The conversation centers around the book's groundbreaking proposal: a bank that would enable us to seize carbon from the atmosphere and offer a profound method for addressing climate change. Gustav draws on the anthropological archive to point out how currencies have been based on all manner of objects, from tobacco leaves and salt to gold and collateralized debt obligations. Building on Annette Weiner's famous argument about the “inalienable possessions,” Gustav points out that the key thing that this assortment of goods shares is a communal belief that such objects can harness and organize economic growth. Gustav describes how atmospheric carbon could be sequestered in the earth by millions of currency users and the communally owned banks they rely on. Dr. Peebles explains how developments in digital currencies and the biosequestration of carbon have, together, made a new and radical intervention in the climate battle possible: a nonproprietary currency backed by sequestered carbon. This new currency could be managed via Wikipedia-style open-source policies that privilege sustainability and equity over endless growth and pollution. Because it is backed by sequestered carbon, the use of the currency would draw atmospheric carbon out of the atmosphere and deposit it back into the ground, following a mirror trajectory of gold during the era of the international gold standard. More information about the book can be found here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049641/the-first-and-last-bank/    Gustav Peebles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Before that, he taught at The New School in New York City. His publications, including a book entitled, The Euro and Its Rivals, as well as a range of academic and popular articles, track credit, debt, money, and the diverse struggles to regulate and manage these vital economic phenomena throughout human history. Most recently, he has been exploring digital currencies, including work on the Swedish Central Bank's e-currency proposal, as well as a wilder idea that leverages digital currency as a potential tool for fighting climate change.  Timestamps Peebles' Bio – 2:28 The Core Argument of the Book – 7:08 Why Carbon is the First and the Last Bank? – 11:29 Treasure & Trash Continuum – 14:25 Inalienable Possessions, Banks and Currencies – 16:19 Peebles' Previous Works – 22:35 Community Currencies – 27:04 In Conversation with “Economics” – 30:37 Local Activism – 34:23 Carbon Banking vs. Crypto Currencies – 38:59 Series Co-Hosts Ferda Nur Demirci, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, working in the Department of Economic Experimentation. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, resource extraction economies, and authoritarian governance, with a particular focus on the cycles of indebtedness affecting working-class families in Turkey. Her work has been published in both English and Turkish in outlets such as Antipode Online, Dialectical Anthropology, and 1+1. She is also a research associate in the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria. Daromir Rudnyckyj, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. Dr. Rudnyckyj's current project examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary       References Weiner,

We often do not realize that deep down economics is a battleground of competing anthropologies: implicit or explicit theories of human nature, selfhood and subjectivity, quiet beliefs about how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. In this podcast we bring together researchers from different disciplines that study economic phenomena, systems, agency and behavior, ranging from historians and political philosophers to economic anthropologists and development economists, to scrutinize the protagonist of their discipline: who is the Real Homo Economicus? What kinds of creature are they? What drives their choices and behavior? Are we still talking about the same creature? To get the conversation started we use an experimental method: the Mythlab method. We use stories as a probe into economic thinking and quiet beliefs about the underlying anthropologies. In each episode we give our guest a story and see how they respond to it, and explore assumptions and associations in a playful way. In this fourth and final episode we play with fables, short moralistic tales, often featuring animals, but always addressing a deeper human truth. We talk about The Dog and the Piece of Meat, The Wolf and the Crane, The Hawk and the Nightingale, The Hen with the Golden Eggs, The Cricket and the Ant. What is the moral of these stories? What can animal stories tell us about human nature? And what kind of world is the world of the fable? I try to make sense of these fables with Huub Brouwer. Dr. Huub Brouwer is assistant professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tilburg University. His research is on theories of distributive justice, particularly on desert, responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism, and taxation. Huub is currently carrying out a 4-year research project on philosophy of taxation, funded by the Netherlands Research Council. (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/nl/medewerkers/h-m-brouwer) Hosted by Dr. Tazuko van Berkel [https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/tazuko-van-berkel#tab-1] and Connor McMullen. Edited and mixed by Connor McMullen. Mythlab team: Dr. Erik Bähre, Dr. Aiste Celkyte, Prof. dr. Lisa Herzog, Connor McMullen, Dr. Sara Polak The Mythlab-project is funded by the Dutch Young Academy.   The Dutch Young Academy (https://www.dejongeakademie.nl/en/default.aspx) is a platform of fifty inspired academics who conduct research, advise, share knowledge and bring people together, and who do all this while taking a special interest in young scientists and scholars. .player5176 .plyr__controls, .player5176 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player5176{ margin: 0 auto; } .player5176 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player5176 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.   References: The fables of this episode are taken from ancient fable collections attributed to Aesop, Babrius and Phaedrus.

We often do not realize that deep down economics is a battleground of competing anthropologies: implicit or explicit theories of human nature, selfhood and subjectivity, quiet beliefs about how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. In this podcast we bring together researchers from different disciplines that study economic phenomena, systems, agency and behavior, ranging from historians and political philosophers to economic anthropologists and development economists, to scrutinize the protagonist of their discipline: who is the Real Homo Economicus? What kinds of creature are they? What drives their choices and behavior? Are we still talking about the same creature? To get the conversation started we use an experimental method: the Mythlab method. We use stories as a probe into economic thinking and quiet beliefs about the underlying anthropologies. In each episode we give our guest a story and see how they respond to it, and explore assumptions and associations in a playful way. In this third episode we interpret a story about a mythical king who cuts a sacred tree and gets punished with insatiable hunger. The more he eats, the hungrier the king gets. The king turns to devouring his cattle, his estate, everything dear to him—until he ends up eating himself. What does this story mean? What does this story tell us about human nature? I try to make sense of the story with Erik Bähre. Dr. Erik Bähre is an economic anthropologist. He is associate professor at Leiden University with fieldwork experience in South Africa and Brazil. He works among others on money, finance, violence, solidarity, and personhood (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/erik-bahre#tab-1). Hosted by Dr. Tazuko van Berkel [https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/tazuko-van-berkel#tab-1] and Connor McMullen. Edited and mixed by Connor McMullen. Mythlab team: Dr. Erik Bähre, Dr. Aiste Celkyte, Prof. dr. Lisa Herzog, Connor McMullen, Dr. Sara Polak The Mythlab-project is funded by the Dutch Young Academy. The Dutch Young Academy (https://www.dejongeakademie.nl/en/default.aspx) is a platform of fifty inspired academics who conduct research, advise, share knowledge and bring people together, and who do all this while taking a special interest in young scientists and scholars. .player5167 .plyr__controls, .player5167 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player5167{ margin: 0 auto; } .player5167 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player5167 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.   References: The Myth of Erysichthon has come down to us via Callimachus' Hymn to Demeter (3rd century BCE) and Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 AD) (https://www.theoi.com/Heros/Erysikhthon.html).  

Rural speech is often denigrated, but how might it also be valuable? How might rural economies benefit from their linguistic diversity through tourism? In this third and final installment of our “Is Talk Cheap?” series on language and value, Kate and Ariana interview Dr. Thea Strand about a highly valorized dialect of rural Norway that won a national popularity contest and is increasingly being used commercially. Dr. Strand gives us some background on how the political and cultural history of Norway has produced a deep appreciation of dialect diversity and an ethos against language standardization. We talk about how the Valdres dialect is now used commercially for tourists in diverse places, from wayfinding signs on ski trails to advertising car washes at gas stations. Learn the significance of a single vowel in advertising a festival for fermented fish! We discuss hyperlocal language use, language change over time, and why some kinds of linguistic difference are available to use in marketing when others are not. In the last part of the episode, Thea tells us about her new research with Michael Wroblewski on another aspect of this rural economy: the decline of transhumance (the seasonal movement of grazing livestock) among local family farmers. Residents lament the resulting reforestation and their changing landscape alongside their changing dialect, underscoring how people experience economic transformations through landscape and language. Thea Strand is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research is sited in rural Valdres, Norway, examining language and political economy, broadly construed. She has studied changes in linguistic structure, value, and ideologies surrounding the distinctive Valdres dialect since the late 2000s. Her current project focuses on the deeply intertwined environmental, cultural, and linguistic effects of tourism development and declining transhumant farming in Valdres' mountain areas.   Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance.   https://econanthro.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/TheaStrand.mp3     References from our conversation with Thea Strand: Strand, Thea. 2024. A Winning Dialect: Inventing Linguistic Tradition in Rural Norway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.  Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges.” Social Science Information 16, no. 6 (1977): 645–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847701600601. Valdres Nature and Culture Park: https://www.valdres.no/ Rakfisk Festival: https://www.rakfisk.no/

In this episode, Kate and Ariana catch up with Montserrat Pérez Castro in the midst of her fieldwork in Mexico. Transnational food companies and palm oil mills employ sustainability workers to ensure they are ethically sourcing raw materials from farmers using sustainable practices. But what do industry insiders count and communicate as “sustainable,” and what kinds of value does this practice add? Pérez Castro describes her fieldwork and argues for why we need to think of sustainability workers in the palm oil industry as engaging not just in “practices” but in an important form of labor. Along the way, we talk about supply chains, transparency, secrecy, expertise, the meanings people attach to their work (or don't), the crucial differences between primary/industrial and charismatic commodities, interdisciplinary research, and the work of translation. Montserrat Pérez Castro is a PhD candidate in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society graduate program at Dartmouth College. She is interested in the relationship between desire, capitalism, and ethical-political imagination. Her previous research focused on class relations, affect, food practices, and urbanization. For her dissertation, she examines sustainability labor in the production of value in the palm oil supply chain in Mexico. Her research is at the intersection of economic anthropology, geography, political ecology and science, technology, and society studies. Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance. .player5008 .plyr__controls, .player5008 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player5008{ margin: 0 auto; } .player5008 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player5008 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. References from the conversation: Pérez Castro, Montserrat. 2023. "Plantationocene “On the Ground”." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/plantationocene-on-the-ground Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Sanchez, Andrew. "Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work", Social Analysis 64, 3 (2020): 68-94, https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.640305 Rofel, Lisa and Sylvia J. Yanagisako. 2019. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. Durham: Duke University Press

In this episode, Dr. Kathryn (Kate) Graber and doctoral student Ariana Gunderson interview linguistic anthropologist Jillian Cavanaugh about all things language and value. Much of Dr. Cavanaugh's research in Bergamo, Italy, summarized here, has been on the political economy of code choice–that is, why people choose the ways of speaking they do, whether to access economic opportunities or to have a language of regional belonging, intimacy, and home. Turning to questions of authenticity and materiality, Dr. Cavanaugh discusses how to approach language not only as an expressive system but also as an embodied, material practice. We talk about how food gains value through the different kinds of linguistic labor that are undertaken in its production and ask whether language and food are analogous semiotic systems (spoiler alert: not quite). Thinking about her current work with small-scale, hyper-local sausage producers, Jillian discusses the roles of individual choice and consumption, and/versus the role of production in the construction of value. At the end, we talk about intersections between linguistic and economic anthropology in Jillian's role as President-Elect of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA). Jillian R. Cavanaugh is a linguistic anthropologist whose research, centered in northern Italy, has considered language shift and social transformation, value, language ideologies, materiality, gender, and heritage food. Her current research focuses on heritage food producers and the labor they undertake to make good, safe, and valuable food. She is interested in how people use the semiotic and material resources available to them to make sense of their pasts in order to live in the present and envision their futures. Her publications include Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) and Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge University Press 2017, co-edited with Shalini Shankar). Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Ethnos, among other venues. She received her PhD in anthropology at New York University and is Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center CUNY. Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance. .player4989 .plyr__controls, .player4989 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player4989{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4989 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4989 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.   References from our conversation with Jillian Cavanaugh: Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2009. Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town. Chichester, U.K: Wiley-Blackwell. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. "The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges." In Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gal, Susan. 1988. The Political Economy of Code Choice. In Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Monica Heller, ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 245–264. Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2023. “Authenticity and Its Perils: Who Is Left Out When Food Is ‘Authentic'?” Gastronomica 23 (1): 28–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2023.23.1.28. Cavanaugh, Jillian R., and Shalini Shankar. 2014. “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value.” American Anthropologist 116 (1): 51–64. Riley, K. C., & Cavanaugh, J. R. 2017. Tasty Talk, Expressive Food: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Food-and-Language. Semiotic Review 5: The Semiotics of Food and Language. Chumley, Lily Hope, and Nicholas Harkness. 2013.

In this conversation, Nikita Taniparti interviews Dr. Carolyn Rouse, who gives us a preview of her forthcoming book. Based on almost a decade of fieldwork in Lake County, CA, her book looks at an economy of care as opposed to an economy of things, and how the relations that emerge through care work are linked to life expectancy and health outcomes. Dr. Rouse explains her interlocutor's search for freedom, and the narrative threads of hope that emerge to bind a community together. Today's guest is Dr. Carolyn Rouse. She is the Ritter Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work is wide-ranging and has focused on issues of race, religion, inequality, political and economic development, and more. Her first book, Engaged Surrender: African-American Women and Islam (2004), is an ethnography of African American Sunni muslim women in Los Angeles, CA – the book shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligation. Her next book, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009) provides an examination of what it means that black Americans are sicker and die earlier than white Americans and the implications for health care in the United States. This book provides important framing to our discussion today, which is about Professor Rouse's forthcoming book on declining life expectancies of white Americans. Her book Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment, co-authored with John Jackson Jr and Marla Frederick and published in 2016, argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing perceptions of African Americans by claiming that they are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites, if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans' rights to citizenship in the United States. As a filmmaker, Prof. Rouse has also produced and directed numerous documentaries, including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Teaching Mental Illness in Bali (1998), Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015), and more. She is dedicated to expanding forms of visual anthropology, a theme that we'll touch upon a bit later in this episode. Her forthcoming book builds on her decades of research on racial disparities in health and medicine, development and policy efforts, and ongoing political and economic shifts in the US. The book project began when she visited Lake Country in Northeast California in 2016 to investigate research claims being made at the time that showed that life expectancies for white Americans was declining. Today she'll talk about that ongoing research and how it is linked to the emergence of hope, trust, and community. Links: https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/carolyn-rouse https://www.epicpeople.org/racist-by-design/ .player4979 .plyr__controls, .player4979 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4979{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4979 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4979 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.

In this conversation, Dr. Kelly McKowen explains Norway's system of social democracy and the privatization of welfare services for the unemployed. We talk about “business of unemployment” and how it is part of Norway's unique form of welfare capitalism. People in Norway feel a moral social obligation to get a job, which in turn speaks to the relationship between society and the state. Dr. McKowen also turns to highlight his upcoming research on the emergence of convenience as a value that might be upending certain service sectors. Today's guest is Dr. Kelly McKowen. He is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University and is also, more familiar to our listeners, the Book Review Editor for Economic Anthropology. His research and teaching interests include capitalism, the state, cash transfers, work value, morality, and more. His first book project is Down and Out in Utopia, based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Norway. The book examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in Norway in order to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral incorporation. His recent research includes writing about the “business of unemployment,” which we'll talk a lot more about in a moment, about unemployment and migration, migration and identity, work ethics and welfare regimes, and job-seeker training and neoliberalism. He teaches courses on the anthropology of business, economy and morality, and society and culture in contemporary Europe. Links: https://kellymckowen.com/ https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9655.13820 https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.13820 .player4962 .plyr__controls, .player4962 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player4962{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4962 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4962 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.

In this conversation, Dr. Tania Li talks to us about her long-standing ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia. It focuses on assemblages of land reform – who is included and who is excluded, the history of land reform movements in Indonesia, and the implications of such assemblages. In particular, Dr. Li talks about the capitalist relations that emerge when indigenous highlanders self-organize to institute property rights. We see that it is not as straightforward as conventional neoliberal narratives suggest. Today's guest is Dr. Tania Li, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. After her early research in Singapore, she has dedicated much of her career to researching land, labor, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity in Indonesia. She has written about the rise of Indonesia's indigenous peoples' movement, land reform, rural class formation, struggles over the forests and conservation, community resource management, state-organized resettlement and the problems faced by people who are pushed off the land in contexts where they have little or no access to waged employment, and more. Her most recent book, Plantation Life (2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi, examines the structure and governance of Indonesia's contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia; the book theorizes the notion of “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. Her book Land's End (2014) draws on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia and offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. This is the book that inspired the topic for this episode, so we'll be digging into this more in a moment. Some of her other books include The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (2007) which incidentally was a huge inspiration for my own journey into anthropology, her book Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (2011), co-authored with Derek Hall and Paul Hirsch, and Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production (1999). Her scholarship engages interdisciplinarily with geography, philosophy, religion, politics, and much more. I'm delighted but also honored to be able to interview her for this episode, and I know there will be more to talk about than we have time for, so let's get started. Links: https://www.taniali.org/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2021.1890718 https://www.taniali.org/papers/what-is-land-assembling-a-resource-for-global-investment .player4952 .plyr__controls, .player4952 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player4952{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4952 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4952 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.

Why are all our teachers quitting? From 2021 to 2022, straight after the pandemic 40,000 teachers in England left the profession before retirement, the highest number in a decade. Figures from the Department of Education also show unfilled teacher vacancies were at a record high and sick days taken were up 50 percent on pre-pandemic levels. But why? In this three-part podcast we will hear true accounts from staff on the front line spoken at the most frightening time of their careers. To maintain the anonymity of the people and the schools included in this research, the excerpts you will hear have been re-recorded with other people's voices, but these are their words and their stories. In the first two episodes of this podcast, we explored how and when the research was conducted and what that research revealed. In this final episode we highlight four key areas that contribute to low teacher retention levels and examine the impact of how teachers were seen, purely as a source of labour, not as people going through the same crisis. We end with a discussion on what needs to change, both at a policy level and generally in attitudes and expectations of teachers. We would like to sincerely thank all the teaching staff who took on this project during the most stressful time of their careers. We hope their voices have been heard. Host: Judith Koch Interviewees: Dr. Dinah Rajak, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan and Dr. Jenny Hewitt Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan Dr. Jenny Hewitt Dr. Dinah Rajak Producer: Elisa Kennedy and Judith Koch Music: Thanks to Universfield and Ashot Danielyan for the use of their music from Pixabay SFX – Freesound, Pixabay Newsclips – BBC, GB News, Sky   .player4943 .plyr__controls, .player4943 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player4943{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4943 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4943 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.

Why are all our teachers quitting? From 2021 to 2022, straight after the pandemic 40,000 teachers in England left the profession before retirement, the highest number in a decade. Figures from the Department of Education also show unfilled teacher vacancies were at a record high and sick days taken were up 50 percent on pre-pandemic levels. But why? Trust, Risk and Responsibilisation. These are the main findings that emerged from research conducted during the pandemic via audio diaries. Primary school teachers were asked to record their everyday experiences into an MP3 player allowing them to express whatever concerns or observations they had, whenever they wanted. The result is a first-hand account of life as a primary school teacher on the front line. In this three part podcast we will hear what their lives were like at the time, the pressures they were under and what they personally sacrificed to do the job. The findings of the research showed just how these three key areas contributed to the low rate of teacher retention, then and now. In order to maintain the anonymity of the people and the schools included in this research, the excerpts you hear have been re-recorded with other people's voices, but these are their words and their stories. Hosted by Judith Koch, a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of International Relations at Sussex University, she will be speaking to Dr. Dinah Rajak, Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Jenny Hewitt, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London who collaboratively designed and undertook this research. The first episode focused on the methodology used to conduct this research, exploring how audio-diaries accessed real-time insights on teaching staff's own terms, and practically how this research was able to be done during the lockdowns. This episode delves into the findings of this research and identifies the three keys issues that impacted hugely on how teachers did their jobs and still do – Trust, Risk and Responsibilisation. The final episode will look at future implications and policy recommendations. Host: Judith Koch Interviewees: Dr. Dinah Rajak, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan and Dr. Jenny Hewitt Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan Dr. Jenny Hewitt Dr. Dinah Rajak Producers: Elisa Kennedy and Judith Koch .player4926 .plyr__controls, .player4926 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player4926{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4926 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4926 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.

Why are all our teachers quitting? From 2021 to 2022, straight after the pandemic 40,000 teachers in England left the profession before retirement, the highest number in a decade. Figures from the Department of Education also show unfilled teacher vacancies were at a record high and sick days taken were up 50 percent on pre-pandemic levels. But why? In this three part podcast we will hear true accounts from staff on the front line spoken at the most frightening time of their careers. In order to maintain the anonymity of the people and the schools included in this research, the excerpts you hear have been re-recorded with other people's voices, but these are their words and their stories. Dr. Dinah Rajak Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan Dr. Jenny Hewitt Research conducted during the pandemic via audio diaries shows first hand the daily pressures put on teachers during that time. Voices from teachers who were afraid for their own lives but still went in to teach, staff who went to the houses of vulnerable students on Christmas Day, just to check they were ok and young and highly experienced teachers who left their jobs because they couldn't see a way out. Hosted by Judith Koch, a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of International Relations at Sussex University, she will be speaking to Dr. Dinah Rajak, Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Jenny Hewitt, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London who collaboratively designed and undertook this research. In this episode we look at the methodology used to conduct this research, exploring how audio-diaries accessed real-time insights on teaching staff's own terms, and practically how this research was able to be done during the lockdowns. The next episode will look at the findings and the final episode looks at future implications and policy recommendations. Host: Judith Koch Interviewees: Dr. Dinah Rajak, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan and Dr. Jenny Hewitt Producer: Elisa Kennedy and Judith Koch Music: Thanks to Universfield and Ashot Danielyan for the use of their music from Pixabay .player4912 .plyr__controls, .player4912 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; } .player4912{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4912 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4912 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.

One of my favorite people to talk to is Dr. Carlena Ficano. Carli is a labor economist, an interest she marries with a passion for equity and inclusion, and for recognizing how corporate power twists economic theory into market imperfections. She is also one of the many people I met in undergrad at Hartwick College who didn't understand why I was a declared anthropology major instead of an economics major. Carli was the only one who made a good case for me to add an economics major to my anthropology major, and the rest was history. Carli and I have very different ways of looking at work, as researchers with disparate methodologies. She tends to wear her economics hat and I wear my anthropology hat. Yet we often see many of the same things from different perspectives. Anthropology usually invests its time in deep hanging out, which keeps us from making definitive statements about more than the very specific communities in which we work. Economists, on the other hand, use large data sets to run regression analyses and other types of quantitative methods. But rather than fighting about which perspective is more valid than the other, Carli and I discussed the ways in which these two perspectives could be married to offer a more robust picture of labor in the United States. Dr. Carlena Ficano is a professor of economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. Dr. Ficano received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, and studied anthropology and sociology during her undergraduate years. Dr. Ficano is a labor economist. In addition to her work with students at Hartwick, Dr. Ficano is thoroughly involved in economic development in rural upstate New York where she lives and works.   References: Monopsony - in economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. Smith, C. 2021. How the Word is Passed: A Reconing with the History of Slavery in America. New York: Little, Brown & Company.

One of the many fairy tales hegemonically attached to the world of work in capitalist economies is that all one need do is get a job and work hard, and those things will automatically lead to "the good life." But what, exactly, is the good life? Is it a universal term or does it mean different things to different people in different places? What are the narratives attached to the "good life" and what are the narratives that come into play when the fairy tale does not come true? Finally, what happens when employers and employees have different ideas about the role of work in worker's lives? In this brief, free-wheeling conversation, I discuss these questions and more with Dr. Christine Jeske, author of The Laziness Myth. Dr. Christine Jeske is an associate professor of anthropology at Wheaton College. Prior to coming to Wheaton, Christine worked in microfinance, refugee resettlement, community development, and teaching while living in Nicaragua, Northwest China, and South Africa. Christine is the author of three books and many articles for popular and academic audiences. Her most recent book, The Laziness Myth, considers what makes work desirable, how racism shapes work, and how people find hope in undesirable working conditions. https://econanthro.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ChristineJeske.mp3 References: The Laziness Myth: Narratives of Work and the Good Life in South Africa by Christine Jeske Jeske, C. 2018. "Why Work? Do We Understand What Motivates Work-Related Decisions in South Africa?" Journal of Southern African Studies (44:1). https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1403219 Ferguson, J. 2016. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jeske, C. 2022. "Introduction: Hopoes of and for Whiteness." Journal for the Anthropology of North America (25:2). https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12172

https://econanthro.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/KristenPhillips.mp3 Kristin Phillips, is associate professor of anthropology at Emory University. She studies inequality and activism on energy, food and environment in East Africa and the US South. Kristin won the 2020 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize for her book, An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun (Indiana Univ. Press).  Since 2017, Kristin has led two National Science Foundation projects on poverty and energy -- one in East Africa and one in the southeastern US.  Our podcast focuses on her study of energy poverty and activism in Georgia connected with policies of the state's dominant utility Georgia Power. See her article on this research in the February 2023 issue of Economic Anthropology (see references).   Host: Sandy Smith-Nonini, Ph.D.  an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Edited for sound quality by: Roque Nonini. Music by Ambient Space Background.  NOTE:  Kristin's  reference to an IRP in the podcast refers to a utility's “Integrated Resource Plan.” References: Bakke, Gretchen (2016). The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury.   Bryan, William, and Maggie Kelley. February 2021. Energy Insecurity Fundamentals for the Southeast. Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (Atlanta).  Cater, Casey P. 2019. Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.  Georgia Conservation Voters Education fund (2021). “Ratepayer Robbery: The True Cost of Plant Vogtle.” Atlanta: Georgia Conservation Voters.   Harrison, Conor & Shelley Welton (2021). “The states that opted out: Politics, power, and exceptionalism in the quest for electricity deregulation in the United States South.” Energy Research and Social Science 79: 1-11.   Luke, Nikki. 2021. “Powering racial capitalism: Electricity, rate-making, and the uneven energy geographies of Atlanta.” Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space.   Nolin, Jill. 2021. “Feds Side with Black Voters in Suit That Says Rights Violated by At-Large PSC Elections.” Georgia Public Broadcasting, July 29, 2021. www.gpb.org.  Phillips, Kristin 2023 “Southern politics, southern power prices: Race, utility regulation, and the value of energy.” Economic Anthropology. 10:197–212. Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Michael H. Dworkin. 2015. “Energy Justice: Conceptual Insights and Practical Applications.” Applied Energy 142: 435-444.   US Department of Energy. Low Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool. https://www.energy.gov/eere/slsc/maps/lead-tool. Accessed May 17, 2022.   

.player4482 .plyr__controls, .player4482 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4482{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4482 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4482 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element.  In this episode, Dr. Sandy Smith-Nonini interviews Dr. Tom Love, professor emeritus at Linfield College. Dr. Love discusses why energy is so important in studies of the climate transition, and why the field of anthropology is well-suited to the study of energy in terms of the field's history and premise. Economic anthropologists, in particular, are well positioned to explore the inter-disciplinarity of energy and the economy. Sandy also drew on Tom's past explorations of peak oil and more recently his involvement with colleagues in ongoing work in net energy (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) to interrogate why these debates remain highly relevant to the climate transition. Finally, Sandy talked with her guest about his most recent work as a co-founder and developer with other colleagues of the Planetary Limits Academic Network (PLAN) website – which is providing a forum for these discussions and for public scholarship. Guest Bio: Tom is emeritus professor of anthropology at Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon. He co-edited the Cultures of Energy reader with Sarah Strauss and Stephanie Rupp (Left Coast Press, 2013, 2016) and authored The Independent Republic of Arequipa (University of Texas Press, 2017). He co-edited with Cindy Isenhour a 2016 issue of Economic Anthropology on “Energy and Economy.” Tom has done field research on solar energy in rural Peru. He is a founding organizer with other scholars of PLAN –the Planetary Limits Academic Network website: https://planetarylimits.net/user/tomlove/. Music: Borough by Molerider at Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue). References: Campbell, C. and J. Laherrere. (1998). “The End of Cheap Oil,” Scientific American, Vol. 278, No. 3, 78- 83. Graeber, D. and D. Wengrow. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hornborg, Alf. (2016). Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wal Street. Palgrave. _____ & C. Isenhour. (2016). Energy and Economy: Re-cognizing High Energy Modernity as an Historical Period. In Love & Isenhour, eds., Economic Anthropology, 3:1 “Energy and Economy.” _____ & D. Murphy (2016). Implications of Net Energy for the Food-Energy-Water Nexus; An NSF-funded workshop, Linfield College, 14-16 January. Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso. Strauss, S., S. Rupp and T. Love, eds. (2013/2016) Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies. London: Routledge. Murphy, D.J.; et. al. (2022). Energy Return on Investment of Major Energy Carriers. Sustainability, 14, 7098. Wilhite, H. (2013/2016). Energy Consumption as Cultural Practice. In Strauss, S., S. Rupp and T. Love, eds. Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies. London: Routledge. Wilk, R. and Cliggitt, L. (2007/2008). Economy and Cultures, 2nd Ed. Taylor and Francis.

.player4489 .plyr__controls, .player4489 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4489{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4489 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4489 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. In today's episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Dr. Allison Alexy on her work that explores the intersection between intimacy and the economy. As a cultural anthropologist focusing on contemporary Japan with interest in ideals and experiences of family lives, constructions of intimacy, and legal anthropology, Dr. Alexy is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Through the lens of family life, Dr. Alexy's ethnographic research investigates changing norms around the social and legal constructions of gender contextualized within the rapid societal changes of recent decades. Her research makes clear that what might seem like private or personal family issues both reflect and significantly influence broader political and social trends. With Emma Cook, Dr. Alexy has co-edited the volume Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict, and with Richard Ronald, she has co-edited the volume Home and Family in Japan: Continuity and Transformation. As part of her commitments to supporting emerging scholars and further diversifying research fields, she serves as the series editor from Asia Pop!, a book series focused on popular culture, at the University of Hawai'i Press and hosts the podcast "Michigan Talks Japan." Dr. Alexy's most recent book, Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan, considers how people negotiate freedom, happiness, and connections through divorce. It was published by the University of Chicago Press and is also available through open access. Since a Chinese version has been published by the East China Normal University Press, Xinyan also invited the Chinese translator of Dr. Alexy's book to join the conversation. Amy Xu is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology department at Brown University. References: Cook, E. E. (2016). Reconstructing adult masculinities: part-time work in contemporary Japan. Routledge. Hoang, K. K. (2015). Dealing in desire: Asian ascendancy, Western decline, and the hidden currencies of global sex work. University of California Press. Koch, G. (2020). Healing labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy. Stanford University Press. Host: Xinyan Peng Guest: Dr. Allison Alexy Research Assistant: Wenzhao Chen Audio Editor: Seyma Kabaoglu

.player4494 .plyr__controls, .player4494 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4494{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4494 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4494 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. In this episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Kimberly Chong about her book Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Dr. Chong speaks about how management consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. Effective management consultants, Dr. Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of local culture and society, while at the same time framing their work in terms of global “best practices.” Providing insight into how global management consultancies refashion Chinese state-owned enterprises in the reform era, Dr. Chong explains both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization, and how ‘global' management consultants perform their expertise in the particular terms of China's national project of modernization. References: Bogdanich, Walt, and Michael Forsythe. (2022). When McKinsey comes to town: The hidden influence of the world's most powerful consulting firm. Doubleday. Boyer, Dominic, and George E. Marcus. (2021). Collaborative anthropology today: A Collection of Exceptions. Cornell University Press. McDonald, D. (2014). The firm: The story of McKinsey and its secret influence on American business. Simon & Schuster. Ortner, S. B. (2016). "Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1), 47-73. Host: Xinyan Peng Guest: Dr. Kimberly Chong Research Assistant: Wenzhao Chen Audio Editor: Seyma Kabaoglu

.player4496 .plyr__controls, .player4496 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4496{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4496 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4496 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. In this episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Dr. Mike Prentice, who is currently a Lecturer in Korean Studies at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Dr. Prentice has been trained as a linguistic and cultural anthropologist, and his research broadly focuses on genres and technologies of communication, organizations and corporations, and work and labor cultures in contemporary South Korea. Dr. Prentice's book Supercorporate: Distinction and Participation in Post-Hierarchy South Korea, examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in 21st-century South Korea: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Dr. Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. 03:32 The Study of Supercorporate 08:43 Hierarchy and Distinction 19:31 Powerpoint Cultures 25:10 Infrastructures of Distinction 34:50 Methodology of Corporate Fieldwork 47:57 Socialization, Shareholder Meetings, and Golf References: Irvine, J. T. (1989). "When talk isn't cheap: Language and political economy." American ethnologist, 16(2), 248-267. Janelli, R. L., & Yim, D. (1995). Making capitalism: The social and cultural construction of a South Korean conglomerate. Stanford University Press. Host: Xinyan Peng Guest: Dr. Mike Prentice Research Assistant: Wenzhao Chen Audio Editor: Seyma Kabaoglu

.player4498 .plyr__controls, .player4498 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4498{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4498 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4498 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. In this episode, Tanya Matthan speaks with Dr. Caroline Schuster about her research on themes of finance, gender, and development in Paraguay. Dr. Schuster elaborates on the surprising intersections between speculative fiction, feminist anthropology, and graphic novels. In particular, we discuss the inspiration for her forthcoming collaborative graphic ethnography on weather insurance and the challenges and possibilities of building a more accessible and engaged economic anthropology through the medium of comics. GUEST BIO Dr. Caroline Schuster is Associate Professor at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology; as well as Co-Director of the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies at the Australian National University. Dr. Schuster's research interests include value, credit and debt, development policy and NGOs, finance and climate change, gender and kinship with a regional focus on Latin America. Her first book, Social Collateral: women and microfinance in Paraguay's smuggling economy (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic account of microcredit and collective indebtedness in Paraguay's triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Her forthcoming book is a graphic novel titled Forecasts: A story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster, along with the illustrators Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Development and Change, to name a few.

.player4500 .plyr__controls, .player4500 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4500{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4500 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4500 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. In this podcast, Tanya Matthan speaks with Dr. Taylor Nelms about his research within and outside the academy. In particular, we discuss his ongoing research on and with credit unions, and its relationship to his disciplinary training as an economic anthropologist. Dr. Nelms shares his insights on mentorship, graduate school curricula, and the futility of insider/outsider distinctions vis-a-vis the contemporary academy. GUEST BIO Dr. Taylor C. Nelms is an anthropologist and ethnographer with fifteen years of experience studying money, technology, and banking in the United States, Latin America, and around the world. He is currently the Senior Director of Research at the Filene Research Institute, an independent, non-profit think tank focused on consumer and cooperative finance, especially credit unions. At Filene, Taylor manages a team of researchers and a portfolio of partnerships with leading scholars to pursue research that explores people's changing economic lives and the business of financial services. Before joining Filene, Taylor worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Irvine, where he received his PhD in Anthropology. He also holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University.

.player4502 .plyr__controls, .player4502 .StampAudioPlayerSkin{ border-radius: px; overflow: hidden; } .player4502{ margin: 0 auto; } .player4502 .plyr__controls .plyr__controls { border-radius: none; overflow: visible; } .skin_default .player4502 .plyr__controls { overflow: visible; } Your browser does not support the audio element. In this podcast, Tanya Matthan speaks with Tami Navarro about her research on financialization, development, and racial capitalism in the US Virgin Islands. Dr. Navarro discusses her positionality as an ‘insider' shapes her work on the economic and social life in the Caribbean which ranges from more traditional academic publishing to co-hosting a podcast on community, storytelling, and diasporic Black feminism. Their conversation addresses the challenges of writing home, working in the neoliberal academy and engaging diverse audiences as well as the value of anthropological lens in these turbulent times. GUEST BIO A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Tami Navarro is Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the Co-director of the Transnational Black Feminisms working group at Columbia University. She is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021) which has been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.

In this recording from the Society for Economic Anthropology's 2022 annual conference in Copenhagen, Aneil Tripathy asks economic anthropologist Heangjin Park, assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University, what brought him to economic anthropology. Heangjin was first drawn to economics when he learned about supply and demand as a fourth grader in elementary school. However, in a college economics class he came to doubt neoclassical economic interpretations about demand. He found refuge in economic anthropology, with concepts that highlight interconnection such as the gift economy and social takes on economics

In this recording from the Society for Economic Anthropology's 2022 annual conference in Copenhagen, Aneil Tripathy asks conference organizer and philosopher, Morten Sørensen Thaning, Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, what economic anthropology means to him. The value of economic anthropology for Morten lies in the limits of philosophy. Anthropologists can push philosophers past pre given universals, and our research and writing help refine concepts and ideas. Morten values much work in economic anthropologists as case studies that challenge and refine key concepts useful for understanding our world and activity that is associated with economics.

In this recording from the Society for Economic Anthropology's 2022 annual conference in Copenhagen, Aneil asks conference organizer Matthew Archer, Assistant Professor in Sustainability at the University of York, what economic anthropology means to him. Matthew outlines how he moved at the beginning of his PhD from an economics track to economic anthropology. An early mentor, Karen Hébert, told him that economics is full of assumptions, and anthropology is very good at questioning these assumptions. Matthew describes a moment in his masters program in environmental economics when he realized that the prices used in economics are deeply flawed. In his subsequent research on tea supply chains and sustainable finance, Matthew continues to question data driven sustainability solutions, to try to imagine and support alternative approaches.

In this recording from the Society for Economic Anthropology's 2022 annual conference in Copenhagen, Aneil asks Cindy Isenhour, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change at the University of Maine, what economic anthropology means to her. Cindy gives both a personal and an academic response to the question. Her personal response charts her journey from graduate school to becoming a professor and economic anthropologist, which was guided by welcoming and supportive mentors in the Society for Economic Anthropology. Cindy's academic response emphasizes that economic anthropology allows researchers to focus on movement. Much of economic anthropology centers on how ideas, people and things are exchanged and move from place to place and this allows us to understand culture change and societal shifts.

Aneil's second recording from the Society for Economic Anthropology's 2022 annual conference in Copenhagen is with Brie Berry, an economic and environmental anthropologist at the University of Maine's Center for Sustainability Solutions. Brie charts her career journey towards economic anthropology, and how the sub-discipline informs her research on the circular economy. For Brie, economic anthropology allows her to make sense of the complex relationships between people and stuff, and how they create livelihoods and lives that achieve wellbeing. Economic anthropology allows Brie to make sense of social and environmental values that traditional economics can ignore.

Aneil's first recording in this series is with Daniel Souleles, one of the organizer's of this year's meeting and an economic and political anthropologist at Copenhagen Business School. Recorded at Dan's most recent field site, the Massachusetts Capitol Building, Aneil and Dan talk about his take on economic anthropology and the perspective that guides his past research on financiers in private equity and his current project on how bills get passed in Massachusetts.

In this podcast Jenny speaks with Sibel Kusimba about her book Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution. Sibel explains how digital finance draws upon longstanding practices of reciprocity and exchange in Kenyan society, but she also discusses some of the ways digital money is reconfiguring social lives and relations. Their conversation highlights how anthropological perspectives can enhance understandings of the way money takes on multiple meanings in social life.

In this episode Jenny Huberman speaks with Jim Smith, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Davis, about his new book, The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern Congo. Their conversation focuses on people who are the very center of powering the digital age but who most listeners will likely know little about: the artisanal miners and traders who work in the forests of Eastern Congo to extract minerals that are used to produce many of the digital technologies we reply upon today. Jim explains how the extractive industry of artisanal mining not only keeps the wheels of digital capitalism spinning, but also becomes a generative practice through which miners imagine and construct social lives and relationships that defy many of the dominant logics of capitalism. In so doing, he makes a powerful case for the role anthropology can play in enhancing and complexifying our understandings of capitalism in the digital age.

In this episode, Jenny Huberman speaks with anthropologist, media scholar, and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Mary L. Gray. They discuss Mary's highly acclaimed book, Ghost Work: How to prevent Silicon Valley from creating a Global Underclass, which she co-authored with Siddharth Suri. Their conversation explores the experiences of on-demand platform workers, as well as the way the platform economy is changing conceptions of work and employment more generally. In discussing how digital technologies are radically reconfiguring work for millions of people around the globe, Mary also challenges the idea that digital technologies will inevitably render human labor obsolete in the future. Humans, she reminds us, do certain kinds of work that cannot be attended to by A.I. or other automated processes, and thus, they are likely to remain “in the loop” for many years to come.

In this episode, Jenny Huberman speaks with Jathan Sadowski, a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University and author of Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World. They discuss how digital capitalism is both similar to and different from, previous forms of capital accumulation and domination and they discuss some of the ways smart technologies are used to facilitate these processes. While Sadowski offers a trenchant critique of the way smart technologies are used to enhance corporate technocratic power, he also provides listeners with some paths for resisting, if not reforming capitalism in the digital age.

Is work (as we know it) on its way out? Some certainly think so, and they have not hesitated to envision the kinds of lives and societies that would be possible in a world that is founded not on formal wage labor but something like universal basic income. But here is the thing: ethnographers in different parts of the world have found that many of the people who would benefit the most from such a shift are still very much committed to employment—they want money, but they would prefer that it be a wage and not a cash transfer. In this episode, Kelly chats with Dr. Liz Fouksman about enduring attachments to formal wage labor and what she calls the "moral economy of work" in South Africa and Namibia. Liz Fouksman is a Lecturer in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research in the School of Education, Communication, and Society at King's College London. Her scholarship has appeared in various outlets, including Economy and Society, World Development, and Africa.

In this episode, Kelly catches up with Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane about their landmark 2016 volume, Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence. Pulling together disparate threads of an emergent anthropological interest in unemployment, Kwon, Lane, and their contributors helped define a critical subfield in the wake of the global financial crisis. Revisiting the volume from the perspective of 2021 reveals a remarkably prescient book with questions and theoretical interventions that have only become more illuminative with time. Jong Bum Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Webster University. His scholarship has appeared in various journals, including American Ethnologist and Critique of Anthropology, and he is the co-editor of Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence (Cornell University Press).         Carrie M. Lane is Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her scholarship has appeared in various journals, including American Ethnologist and the Anthropology of Work Review. She is the author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press) and the co-editor of Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence (Cornell University Press).

In this episode, Kelly chats with Ilana Gershon about unemployment and the post-pandemic workplace in the United States' knowledge economy. Nearly five years after the publication of Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today, Gershon revisits the genesis of that project, reflects on the endurance of the neoliberal conception of the self, and shares that her post-pandemic project points toward a rethinking of the American social contract. Ilana Gershon is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her research on neoliberalism and new media has been published in the discipline's leading journals, including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and American Ethnologist. She is also the author of the three monographs, including most recently, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today (2017).

In this episode, Ipshita talks with Dr Courtney Lewis about the ways in which entrepreneurship is conceived and practiced in the Native Nations. Drawing on her ethnographic work with Cherokee small business owners and a recent project with indigenous food entrepreneurs, Courtney discusses the challenges that indigenous entrepreneurs face as well as the ways in which their entrepreneurial labor intersects with ideas of community, economic development, and sovereignty. We also discuss the complexities inherent in working as an ethnographer and particularly, an anthropologist amongst native communities and what are some steps anthropologists can take to establish trust, transparency, and an ethical commitment. Dr Courtney Lewis is currently an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina – Columbia. A citizen of the Cherokee nation, Dr Lewis' overall work is in economic development for Native Nations in the United States and, consequently, issues of sovereignty related to economic sustainability and stability. Her research areas include economic anthropology, Indigenous rights, economic justice, political economy, economic sovereignty, public anthropology, food and agricultural sovereignty, Native Nation economic development, American Indian studies, race and entrepreneurship, and economic colonialism. Dr Lewis is the author of 'Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty', published in 2019, which is based on her ethnographic work with indigenous small businesses. In Fall 2022, Dr Lewis is joining the Anthropology faculty at Duke University.

In this episode, Ipshita talks to Professors Walter Little and Lynne Milgram about their long-term research on social entrepreneurship. Walt's work with indigenous peoples in Guatemala and Mexico and Lynne's focus on women workers in Philippines lay the ground for a rich conversation and help rethink the globally standardized ideas on what constitutes social entrepreneurship. We also discuss the links between social entrepreneurship and ‘development' and explore the ways in which ethnographic work and economic anthropology help scholars transcend static frameworks of analysis and gain a deeper sense of the distinctive needs, motivations and values that peoples and communities bring to entrepreneurial labor. Walter E. Little is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany, with a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies the social and political economies of Latin American indigenous peoples, particularly in Guatemala, Mexico, and in the Albany, NY region. His multi-sited ethnographic research combines political economy and interpretive perspectives in order to better understand the politics of identity, economic development, cultural heritage and tourism in urban places, and the everyday practices of handicrafts production and marketplace interactions. He is the author of numerous articles, books, and reviews, including Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity (2004), which won Best Book of 2005 from the New England Council for Latin American Studies, and Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013), coedited with Karen Tranberg Hansen and B. Lynne Milgram, which won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize. Walt is also the author of Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics, co-edited with Cristina Panella (2021). B. Lynne Milgram is Professor of Anthropology at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Her research on gender and development in the northern Philippines has analyzed the cultural politics of social change with regard to women's work in microfinance, handicrafts, and in the Philippine-Hong Kong secondhand clothing trade. Milgram's current SSHRC funded Philippine research investigates transformations of urban public space and issues of informality, extralegality, and social entrepreneurship with regard to street vending, public markets, and food provisioning systems. Additionally drawing on transnational trade network scholarship, recent projects also analyze the northern Philippines' emergent specialty Arabica coffee industry and artisans' use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to market their crafts. Milgram has published this research in refereed journal articles and book chapters and in five co-edited volumes, including Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches (2009, with Katherine E. Browne), and Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013, with Karen Tranberg Hansen and Walter E. Little).