Suchergebnisse

Abstract

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Maps, Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Maps -- Part 1: Locations -- 1. Urban Hinterlands and Competitive Economies -- 2. The Challenges and Methods of a Restudy -- 3. Idere: An Invented Community -- Part II: Narratives -- 4. Newcomers and Novelties of the 1960s: Migrant Labour, Contract Farming and Other Innovations -- 5. Farming in the Peripheral Hinterland, 1968 -- 6. The Oil Boom: Transporters, Tractors and New Sources of Hired Labour -- 7. The Mid-scale Farmers -- 8. The Foothold of Corporate Agribusiness -- 9. Women's Entry into Farming -- 10. The Younger Generation of Men -- 11. The Small-scale Male Farmers in 1988 -- Part III: Synergies -- 12. 'Everybody's Farming Now': Agro-ecology in the Late 1980s -- 13. Collective Dynamics -- 14. The Niche Economy and Hinterland Change -- Appendix A -- Appendix B -- Bibliography -- Index

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.

Mauss's Essay on the Gift was the only article to be included when the journal L'Année sociologique was relaunched after the Great War. Prepared during 1923/1924, it appeared in 1925. The Essay was preceded by Mauss's eulogy to colleagues who had died since the last edition (1912), including five killed in action and its founder, Émile Durkheim (1917). Hundreds of pages of reviews followed, many written by Mauss himself. This article places the essay back in its original context by exploring the resonance of the whole issue with the Jewish ritual of chesed shel emet (generally translated into English as 'the true gift') which takes care of the body between death and burial. The three parts of the paper cover: the empirical method of The Gift (very briefly); the eulogy and the reviews; and the concept of chesed ('kindness') in Jewish thought. This reading follows Mauss's own method of combining empirical profusion with a hermeneutics of consonance.