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ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES INTO POLICY, DEBT, BUSINESS, AND CAPITALISM

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RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY

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RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 40

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES INTO POLICY, DEBT, BUSINESS, AND CAPITALISM

EDITED BY

DONALD C. WOOD

Department of Medical Education, Akita University Graduate School of Medicine, Japan

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2020

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ISBN: 978-1-83909-659-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-658-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83909-660-0 (Epub)

ISSN: 0190-1281 (Series)

Contents

About the Authors

Guilherme L. J. Falleiros is a Social Anthropologist with a master’s dissertation and a PhD thesis on the A’uwẽ-Xavante people of Central Brazil (University of São Paulo). He has been an Independent Teacher and has also been doing independent interdisciplinary research comparing Amerindian, anarchist and republican polities, and socialities. He is enrolled as a Collaborator of the Centro de Estudos Ameríndios (Center for Amerindian Studies), University of São Paulo. He was a Member of the editorial committee of Revista Espiritualidade Libertária (Libertarian Spirituality Journal), publishing its second number (2010). He has been a Member of the academic committee of Palimpsestos: Revista de Arqueología y Antropología Anarquista (Palimpsestos: Journal of Anarchist Archeology and Anthropology) since 2016 of Editora Entremares’ (Entremares Publishing House) editorial board for current Social Sciences since 2018.

Emma Gilberthorpe examines the parameters of social organization, kinship, and exchange in contexts of large-scale resource extraction, with a particular interest in the implications of the cultural incompatibilities that exist between multinational corporations and small-scale societies. The majority of her work has focused on the social, economic, political, and environmental impacts of mining and oil extraction in Papua New Guinea. She has published widely on these issues (e.g., Development and Industry: A Papua New Guinea case study; Natural Resource Extraction and Indigenous Livelihoods) as well as on Corporate Social Responsibility (e.g., “Development on Whose Terms? CSR discourse and social realities in PNG’s extractive industries sector”) and the resource curse (e.g., “The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical perspectives on the resource curse.”

Sidney M. Greenfield is a Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Co-chair of the Columbia University Seminars on Brazil, Studies in Religion and Contents and Methods in the Social Sciences. He has conducted ethnographic research in Barbados and New Bedford, Massachusetts, but mostly in Brazil, and ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems ranging from family and kinship, patronage and politics, the history of plantations and plantation slavery, and entrepreneurship to Spiritist surgery and healing, syncretized Brazilian religions such as Candomblé, Umbanda and Kardecist Spiritism, and Evangelical Protestants in Brazilian politics. He has authored and/or edited nine books, produced, directed, and authored five video documentaries, and has published around 150 articles and reviews in books and professional journals. His most recent books include Evangelicos na Politica: Por Debaixo dos Panos (Evangelicals in Politics: What Happens Under the Sheets) – in Portuguese with Antonio Mourāo Cavalcante – Editora Universidade Federal do Ceará (2016); a second edition of Dr. Argeu: A Construção de um Santo Popular (Dr. Argeu: The Construction of a Popular Saint) – also in Portuguese with Antonio Mourāo Cavalcante) Editora Universide Federal do Ceará (2016) and Spirits With Scalpels: The Cultural Biology of Spirit Healing in Brazil. San Francisco, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008 (2012 available as an e-book.)

Junichiro Koji is an Associate Professor at the Department of International and Regional Studies, Hokkaido University of Education (HUE) in Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan. He holds a PhD in Political Science with specialization of Canadian Studies (University of Ottawa). Before joining HUE, he worked at the City of Montreal as a Research Officer in youth policy and Japanese Embassy in Canada as a Political Analyst. His research interests include Canadian and Quebec politics, comparative research between Canada and Japan, immigration and integration policy, diversity management policy, local and regional development policy, local citizenship, sister city relations (Hakodate and Halifax), university-community partnership, state–society relations, and governance. He is also active in community-engaged research on building a welcoming community for foreign residents as well as supporting local development in Esashi, a small municipality in Hokkaido, through university–community partnership.

Mathias Sosnowski Krabbe is currently working as a Research Assistant at the Department of Marketing and Management, University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and has previously worked as a Research Assistant at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Market and Management Anthropology from SDU and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Aarhus University. He has conducted fieldwork on gender roles in Hiroshima, Japan (2014–2015) and on student loan debt in Wisconsin, USA (2017). Besides higher education, his main topics of interest are debt, credit, money, and temporality, which he has recently engaged with through a project on credit in everyday life in Denmark.

Andrés Marroquín earned an undergraduate degree in economics from Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and a PhD in economics from George Mason University. His research has been on economic beliefs, economics and culture, institutional economics, entrepreneurship, and economic development. He has done fieldwork in Guatemala, Colombia, The Dominican Republic, China, and Haiti. He has studied institutions and economic performance in two mineral-abundant societies, Botswana and the Falkland Islands. He is an Associate Professor of Economics (of practice) at Mercer University in Georgia, USA. He is a Co-editor of two volumes (forthcoming) on Douglass North and James Buchanan.

Vassily Pigounidès received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Department of Social Sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Cachan and his doctoral degree from the Department of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He now works and lives in London as an independent researcher and translator, as well as a volunteer in several food-related projects. His current research interests centre on the politics of valuation, with a focus on pricing and business valuation.

Anthony Rausch is a Professor at Hirosaki University, Japan. He obtained his PhD from Monash University and is interested in social science research on rural Japan. He has authored Cultural Commodities in Japanese Rural Revitalization (Brill, 2010), Japan’s Local Newspapers: Chihoshi and Revitalization Journalism (Routledge, 2012), and edited Japanese Journalism and the Japanese Newspaper: A Supplemental Reader (Teneo, 2014).

Irene Sabaté Muriel is a Social Anthropologist and a Lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona, where she teaches Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of Consumption, Urban Anthropology, and Anthropology of Social Movements. Her research interests include political economy, reciprocity, provisioning, work and social reproduction, housing, debt and credit relations, and financialization. She has recently published articles on the moral economy of home repossessions (History and Anthropology 2016), popular understandings of housing financialization (Critique of Anthropology 2016), the resignification of mortgage debts as illegitimate during the Spanish housing crisis (Etnográfica 2018), and governmentality through debt (Focaal 2019).

Ieva Snikersproge received her PhD in anthropology and sociology from The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She works on alternatives to capitalism in France. Her PhD focused on examining what kinds of alternatives emerge in different socio-economic contexts, how they articulate with the capitalist economy, and how these tentative alternatives revalue human activity, opening pathways for change. At present, she investigates an attempt to create a post-growth regional economy in Diois, a rural area in Southeastern France.

Michal Stein is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Ben Gurion University of the Nege, Israel. Her doctoral research investigates how Cubans in contemporary Havana engage in dance practices as they experience, make sense of, and negotiate the tensions of increasing tourism, marginalization, growing inequalities, macro political-economic transformations, and neoliberalization. Her research engages with race, gender, cultural commodification, tourism, mobilities, value, and neoliberalism literatures. She is also currently an Assistant Professor at Ben Gurion University, teaching a course on the anthropology of Cuba. In 2018, she published her documentary “Dancing Across Borders” about the lives and aspirations of dancers in Havana, Cuba.

Raja Swamy is a Social Anthropologist with an interest in the political economy and political ecology of natural disasters. He is presently working on his first book (University of Alabama Press), which investigates the impact of the 2004 Tsunami on economic development priorities in India’s Tamil Nadu state. Exploring the contradictory outcomes of humanitarian agendas subordinated to the demands of a World Bank-financed and state-led reconstruction project, this work attempts to bridge the gap between political ecology and disaster studies by drawing upon rich ethnographic studies of displaced and resistant artisanal fisher communities thriving on the margins of India’s globalizing economy. His recent research is on the contentious politics of recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas, and examines the impacts of the disaster and its aftermath on the city’s communities of color, many already struggling with long-term problems of toxicity and gentrification. He has published articles on the role of NGOs and humanitarianism in disaster reconstruction, the contested spatio-temporalities and resistance strategies shaping them, the discursive and practical import of terms like vulnerability, risk and opportunity, ecologically unequal exchange, the humanitarian gift economy, and the uses of heritage tourism development as a disaster reconstruction strategy.

John Vertovec is a PhD candidate in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University in Miami, FL, USA. His research in Cuba examines how structural conditions (e.g., state policies/regulations, resource scarcity, etc.) create different opportunities and challenges for a diverse group of entrepreneurs, and how these entrepreneurs conceptualize and utilize local and global resources to navigate these conditions. Since 2012, he has worked extensively with a wide range of entrepreneurs in Havana, from very small-scale formal and informal business owners to non-profit community projects who use entrepreneurial strategies to effect positive social change in local settings. He utilizes theories on intersectionality, informal economies, social entrepreneurship, and post-Soviet economic transformations to guide this research. In addition to his work in Cuba, he is also a member of other pan-Caribbean research teams that utilize ethnographic methods to address health vulnerabilities. With four pan-Caribbeanist scholars, he recently published the introduction to the special issue: “Applying a Caribbean perspective to an analysis of HIV/AIDS” (Global Public Health 2019), which establishes the importance of transdisciplinary multi-level approaches to HIV/AIDS that are macro-level in scope but simultaneously attend to how large-scale dynamics are inflected in situated contexts and histories.

Donald C. Wood is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Medicine, Akita University, Akita, Japan, where he has worked since completing a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo in 2004. Prior to that, he studied anthropology under Norbert Dannhaeuser and Jeff Cohen at Texas A&M University. He spent more than 15 years researching social conditions at the Hachirogata reclaimed land area in Akita Prefecture, which culminated in the publication of Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village, by Berghahn Books (NY) in 2012 (released in paperback in 2015). He has also investigated tourism and the effects of depopulation in the Akita region, and was a contributor to the multi-authored book, Japan’s Shrinking Regions in the 21st Century (Cambria, 2011). Recently, he has been conducting ethnohistorical research in northeastern Japan and contributing articles to Kyoto Journal, Sapiens, and New Politics.

List of Contributors

• Guilherme L. J. Falleiros

• Emma Gilberthorpe

• Sidney M. Greenfield

• Junichiro Koji

• Mathias Sosnowski Krabbe

• Andrés Marroquín

• Irene Sabaté Muriel

• Vassily Pigounidès

• Anthony Rausch

• Ieva Snikersproge

• Michal Stein

• Raja Swamy

• John Vertovec

• Donald C. Wood