A response to the promotional pack on Four Alternative Currencies and their Worlds.

In the late 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer studied the then new middle class in Berlin, asking why they were not more disruptive of the structures that bore down on them. I ask the same about insecure professionals in contemporary Berlin, using Kracauer's book Die Angestellten as foil. Kracauer demonstrated that, in the 1920s, they still perceived themselves as workers, albeit white‐collar and salaried

Experiments in money often recapitulate long‐standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures

In recent years, there has been rapid digitalization in agriculture, with India seeing a significant rise in agricultural technology (agtech) start‐ups. Many of these start‐ups promise to address the climate crisis by promoting the economic and ecological sustainability of agriculture through market‐driven business models. Using institutional ethnography and counteraccounting at an Indian agtech start‐up

Based on multisite ethnographic work between 2018 and 2020, this article examines entrepreneurship promotion policies developed by the Chilean state directed at Mapuche people. We direct attention to how the notion of authenticity works as a hinge between Mapuche people, historical heritage, nongovernmental organizations, and public policymakers in their promotion of microentrepreneurship as a form

How are taste judgments made and shared? Drawing on fieldwork among Ceylon tea brokers and buyers, the industry's de facto tea tasters, this article offers an ethnographic account of aesthetic judgment in practice. I ask, what makes a tea good? Tea tasters' unanimous response amounted to a market relativism of sorts that shifted attention away from the tasted object: “It all depends on the market.”

This article analyzes the politics of scale in global development by focusing on a sanitation program in western Kenya. It follows the daily work of a nongovernmental organization that seeks to provide access to chlorine dispensers to millions of people for the purpose of disinfecting water. By engaging with literatures on development and infrastructure, this article proposes reach as an analytic that

In this article, we examine what local well‐being means in the contexts of collaborative heritage management and national development in Mexico. Driven by the request of Lacandon Mayas (including the second author) who live in Puerto Bello Metzabok, Chiapas, Mexico, in 2018, we engaged in archeological consolidation and heritage management to promote local tourism and sustainable economic development

Does wage labor contribute to well‐being beyond providing an income? Well‐being can be understood in eudaimonic terms as the happiness derived from a socially valued life or in hedonic terms as the experience of pleasure. The eudaimonic–hedonic divide is replicated in competing progressive visions of the place of work in a good life. Laborist theories stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful

This article explores grogue, a sugarcane‐based distilled spirit of Cabo Verde, and its multifaceted and contested valuations in culture, livelihoods, and well‐being. Despite Cabo Verde's challenging climate, sugarcane agriculture remains significant primarily due to the importance placed on the local production of grogue. The study described in this article investigates how grogue is perceived and

Household economic studies of preindustrial societies have overlooked one very specific and common material aspect: thrift. This article introduces a theory of economic production for household analysis that focuses on the economic use of materials, space, and labor. This framework is especially integral to understanding emergence of hierarchies. In emerging hierarchies, craft production at the household

Despite efforts to improve outcomes, resettlement projects that aim to improve livelihoods and living standards of the displaced often do not achieve their goals. Could greater attention to the well‐being of the affected improve resettlement outcomes? This article considers standards of living and well‐being among one resettled group, the Bahingkolu of Manantali, Mali, relocated in the mid‐1980s by

This article explores how small‐scale farmers' shared moral understandings of land shape both land sales and land rental markets, in the context of the commoditization of agriculture in Nicaragua. The results here presented are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a subsistence farming community in the highlands of Nicaragua. This research shows that even in relatively commoditized market economies

How do humans develop hope in the face of seemingly irreparable harm against each other? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 30 BIPOC Christians and 40 White Christians whom they identified as long‐term allies, in this article, I consider how a slim minority of White Christians develop ways of hoping that sustain lasting antiracist engagement. I identify contributing factors to reorientations

Senegal has long relied on local communities to expand health services and improve health outcomes for citizens and is internationally lauded for its effectiveness in promoting good health and facilitating local trust. Here we examine how community health care emerges in Keur Toma, a rural Wolof town in the Senegal River Valley that relies on a global network of labor migrants to fuel its remittance‐based

This article examines two values that have long motivated work in economic anthropology: the value of denunciatory critique and the value of thinking otherwise. Through a retrospective analysis of research that I have conducted on consumer debt in Brazil, I offer two different versions of that research based on whether the story is driven by the first value of denunciation or by the second of thinking

The National Institute of the Popular Solidarity Economy (IEPS) in Ecuador was created to promote an alternative form of economy—the Popular Solidarity Economy (PSE). As a precarious institute with limited funding, IEPS staff worked hard to find alternative ways to support the PSE. In this article, I examine their work through the lens of valor agregado (added value), a commonly used local term for

This article examines the financialization and assetization of housing in an Eastern European context by focusing on the specific temporally bounded financial strategies to maintain housing as an asset and vehicle for social reproduction. It proposes the concept of liquid homeownership to account for the varied associations of housing with liquidity and the expectations of future increased exchange

Keith Hart's magisterial, eclectic essay “The Rise and Fall of National Capitalism” takes on a dizzying array of topics, from the nature of money to the concept of the nation to the tension between “shareholder value” and “corporate social responsibility” to the mutual admiration society of celebrities, economists, politicians, and journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The essay must be

This article defines social and financial money as distinct institutions that account for different realms of value. I present a fundamental dichotomy among economists' where orthodox theory defines money as a medium of exchange whereas heterodox chartalist economists characterize it as a unit of account. I argue that (pre)historical data provides clear evidence in support of the heterodox position

Metrics and other forms of quantification as technologies for rendering knowledge as measurable, usually quantitative “data,” in simplified, legible, and portable ways, have become increasingly central within discussions of the economy, and these quantitative tools have equally become the subject of anthropological discussion and critique. The motivations behind and effects of numbers in the field

In this article, I analyze the arguments marshaled in favor of and against the project to build a new port on the Danube River in the wetland area popularly referred to as Belgrade's Amazonia. Building on scholarship on ascribing value to infrastructures and the environment, I use the term estimation to highlight ambiguity in the process of ongoing and open-ended valuation. Estimation denotes a rough

Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) in the US and Europe. While social scientists classify heterogenous practices as AFNs, their participants share the desire to work against the existing food system, and efforts to access food from outside this system. Many analysts have captured these features of AFNs by using concepts from Karl Polanyi's The Great

Presented as the eyes, ears, and voice for the Canadian Armed Forces in the Canadian Arctic, Canadian Rangers within the first Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1CRPG) are applauded as being positive and progressive examples of state-Indigenous relations. Located in almost 70 communities across the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Yukon and Atlin, British Columbia (BC), Canadian Rangers in 1CRPG are

This article compares two East African unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs and how they have been interpreted by their target populations. While the US-American NGO GiveDirectly focuses on poor households in Western Kenya in an allegedly unbureaucratic and digital way, the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) distributes cash transfers in a bureaucratic and analogue manner in Tanzania. While

Anthropologists have spent tremendous effort developing value theory. We might generally understand value theory as a form of social theory concerned with what groups of people find important or worthwhile in life; how those groups of people, via their relationships, identify, seek, and create that which is valuable; how ideas of value and worth inhere in people and things; and how those people and

A condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as “guests” of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan-Arab

For many middle-income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an ever-increasing number of low-income families, the electricity bill—filtered through the racialized materiality of poor-quality housing stock and antidemocratic price regulation—represents something more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and a deep spin of vulnerabilities. This article

According to the cultural consensus model of business ownership in the United States, business entities seek to grow both in organization size and in revenues. To borrow the framing used by Patrick Bigger and Morgan Robertson (2017), business firms create value for their owners and/or shareholders through growth and maximization of profit, but the underlying societal value of business growth is the

The decline in the number of Native Hawaiian–owned kuleana properties is partly the result of legal frameworks surrounding heirs' property adjudication, which does not easily allow families with multiple owners to collectivize their interests. As a result, families are made vulnerable to land dispossession by developers' use of quiet title and partition actions through the courts. Based on fieldwork

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American “way of life.” Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we

Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co-opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber's relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very

This article examines the valuation struggles around Argentina's Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social (AUH), a large conditional cash transfer (CCT) program introduced in 2009. Thinking about value as a verb invites us to move away from reified notions and to consider the work differently positioned social actors do to value and devalue specific ideas, practices, people, and things

In designating its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations invoked the “water–energy–land (WEL) nexus” to emphasize the interconnections between different policy sectors and accentuate the importance of an integrated approach to human and environmental welfare. Identifying the WEL nexus draws attention to the interplay of technical and moral values, the intersections or overlaps between

Is life “priceless,” or can life be bought and sold like a commodity? Anthropological theory has not yet been able to integrate incommensurable value with commensurable value. But such an integrated theory of value exists—not explicitly in theory but implicitly in everyday ethics and fictional narratives. I analyze how the movie Titanic, one of the most commercially valuable artefacts of all time,

This article analyzes business owners' complaints about fiscal relations in a specific conjuncture. After decades of radicalizing productivism in Germany, the entrepreneurs' narratives are infused with ideas of an endangered fiscal community. Threats are perceived as coming from the undeserving poor and wealthy people who presumably both trick the system. The pivot of fairness and justice centers on

Drawing on ethnographic research at an anti-fracking encampment at Preston New Road (PNR) in Lancashire, England, this article explores activists' perceptions of work and responsibility. I examine their protest activities and explore how work is understood, disrupted, and contested; what this means for my interlocutors' engagement with monetary compensation; and how this is reinforced by the extractive

This article addresses a failed tax lottery in the country of Georgia's rapid yet shaky political and economic development. The purpose of a tax lottery is to formalize transactions and increase tax compliance. It aims to motivate consumers in any commercial transaction to ask for a receipt qua lottery ticket and ensure that businesses pay taxes due. Tax lotteries thus have a dual function: more revenue

The article analyzes struggles about distributive justice in Austria, one of the wealthiest countries globally, and proposes a reinforced focus on how metaphors of redistribution and reciprocity create fiscal imaginaries. It analyzes how politicians, lobbyists, and activists strategically mobilize these metaphors in corporate and wealth taxation debates. Campaigns against wealth taxation portray wealth

This article contributes to contemporary ethnographies concerning poverty and digital financial inclusion in Europe. More specifically, it explores how poor Roma families engage with digital banking cards at home in Romania and when they travel to work in the informal economy in Denmark. The analysis conceptually unfolds “access” as a framework for financial inclusion and applies it to an empirical

Although there are many studies on informal workers juggling multiple jobs, how workers differentiate their jobs economically and morally is less examined. Based on 18 months of fieldwork among urban middle-class entrepreneurs in Brazzaville, this article argues that entrepreneurs in the informal economy work on multiple projects that complement each other in terms of economic gains and moralities

Child sponsorship has been a wildly successful fundraising strategy for humanitarian and development organizations since the Cold War. This article examines the formative period of child sponsorship's growth and early humanitarian marketing strategies using the case of the now evangelical humanitarian giant World Vision in the 1950s and 1960s. Using archival sources from this period, I identify three

Urban-to-rural migration is a rising trend across industrialized countries, the significance of which is not interpreted unanimously. The explanations tend to fall into two competing groups: (a) an alternative to capitalism or (b) perpetuation of the status quo, where, on one hand, the richer participants effect a green lifestyle choice, while the poorer participants follow a coping strategy, on the

Bitcoin, regarded as a decentralized currency of the future as well as a digital gold, faces various challenges, such as scalability, the geographical concentration of mining, its politically informed design and history, its high market volatility, and inequalities in the proportion of accumulation. However, the number of Bitcoin owners has risen exponentially, and relevant socioeconomic and political

Rice was historically a “total social phenomenon” in Sierra Leone, molding rural identities through farming. Crop yields are rapidly declining, forcing change among people who once claimed to be “wealthy” from rice and now face severe food insecurity. In response to change, they can take out loans—offered by “strangers”—to continue farming rice, or they can “diversify” and farm alternative crops. Low

Editor Brandon D. Lundy, Kennesaw State University

This special issue presents a collection of ethnographic and archaeological articles that consider how humans inscribe landscapes with diverse forms of value. From natural resources to real estate markets, from cherished homelands to foreign speculative investment, the way we approach landscapes offers insights into value systems as they map onto and emerge from biophysical terrains. We argue that

In 1969, in the name of development modernity and Canadian unity, the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau undertook the most extensive land expropriation in the history of the country, to build the largest airport in the world, Mirabel. The Canadian government expropriated approximately twelve thousand people and ninety-seven thousand acres of land for the project. Mirabel was a dramatic failure,

An Arctic agricultural frontier is opening as climate change threatens growing conditions in established zones of crop commodity production. Projections of northward shifts of viable agricultural land unleash fantastical interest in the improbable reality of “farming the tundra.” Expansion of Arctic agriculture has long figured in Alaska's history, including drawing settlers to the “Last Frontier,”

This article explores the shifting landscapes of light, labor, and value produced by the politics of electrification in Tanzania. Through engaging the anthropologies of infrastructure and electricity, it asks, how do people understand the relationship between electricity and value in the landscapes that sustain them? A brief outline of the history of electrification in Tanzania highlights its role

Peoples living in the Eastern Woodlands of North America domesticated a suite of small-seeded crops between five thousand and two thousand years ago, making this region one of roughly ten independent centers of domestication across the globe. In the Southern Appalachian region, foraging peoples began cultivating these native crops around thirty-five hundred years ago (during the Late Archaic period

This article discusses how Sicilian oliviculturalists imbue value into their olivicultural landscapes. I combine a political ecology framework, attending to the impact of global political economy on local socioecological systems, with feminist theorizations of care to argue that while participants articulated varied values about place, livelihood, and landscape, participants nonetheless rejected an

Drawing from fieldwork in Kurdistan's Duhok Province between 2013 and 2018, this article scrutinizes the notion of “homeland” through a focus on three ways in which land is valued—as territory, resource, and landscape. Territory, control, and sovereignty over land are claimed in the name of an ethnically defined national whole, yet when approaching land as resource and landscape, we see fissures and

This article uses anthropological and historical perspectives to explore ongoing conflicts over “managed retreat” and property values along the California coast. Proponents of managed retreat argue that coastal communities need to start planning for the impending effects of sea level rise, including retreating or relocating away from vulnerable coastal spaces. Some residents and organizations oppose

Editor Brandon D. Lundy, Kennesaw State University

While we might feel small, separate and all alone, Our people have never been more closely tethered The question isn't if we can weather this unknown, But how we will weather this unknown together. —Amanda Gorman, “The Miracle of Morning”