Comments on: Blinded me with science!

By: Ozma

Ozma — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 23:36:55 +0000

Thanks Mrs. Coulter — I’ll check it out.

have you got a golden monkey?

By: Mrs. Coulter

Mrs. Coulter — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 03:33:05 +0000

You might want to include the Russian blat’ economy, which is basically an extensive network of favor-trading (though it’s a bit more complicated than that). An interesting book on blat’ is Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, by Alena V. Ledeneva.

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By: Ozma

Ozma — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:42:05 +0000

HI ckelty — well, as many of you probably already suspect if I *had* the syllabus in ready to go form I’d have put it up here already! :) But I promise I will — it’s got to be ready by the end of the month so the heat is on. Thanks for reminding me about Bill Maurer’s book — it was on my “to read” list over the summer and then fell off of it at some point as things tend to do. I’ll look up Allison Truit, too — thanks for the suggestions!

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By: ckelty

ckelty — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 02:38:48 +0000

Dude, you so have to read Bill Maurer’s recent book Mutal Life Limited which is all about the alternative economies. Also, on Chinese, or Vietnamese in particular, hell money, I recomment talking to Allison Truitt, who is at NYU as far as I know at996 at nyu dot edu.

You also have to post your syllabus, it sounds like a fantastic class.

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By: Ozma

Ozma — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 21:09:05 +0000

Jeremy & Timothy Burke — thanks for the suggestions of directions in which to look. Timothy B — I wonder if the local currencies you’re thinking of are the same ones Keith Hart was on about; I need to track down the ref. Anyway I’ll look into the whole series of things you suggest — though I’m starting to think it’s going to be one of those syllabi with “main readings” and “suggested readings”; there is so much.

Weirdness/alternative — yeah, totally. The issue is getting a title that doesn’t promise an old-fashioned economic anthro course (which this is not) while also piquing student interest. I’d started out with “anthro of local economies” but that seemed a bit flat. and although I am a big fan of my way or the highway as a life philosophy, I don’t intend to set that up as the framework for the course — in fact as all the terrif suggestions offered here suggest, there are many “ways” all going on at once in lots of different directions. I do think in this sort of course one has to take on homo economicus (or, now, homo freakonomicus) but more in the spirit of “free your mind” than “kill it like a bug!”. ie, students have to be able to see homo e/f as one possibility among many, not the default option.

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By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 20:54:06 +0000

Local currencies is one thing that I thought of. The town of Ithaca and a number of towns in the British Midlands in the early 1990s and 1980s had scrips that could be exchanged for labor between residents, I think. I recall that the British government actually wanted to tax these local barter practices.

The internal economies of virtual worlds like Everquest or World of Warcraft are a fairly heavily studied phenomena; there’s a lot of citations (including one from yours truly) I could send you.

Informal economies are a huge subject, lots of good literature. Also especially criminal economies: drugs, prostitution, tons of good ethnographic works, some old, some new.

Janet McGaffey has a couple of great monographs on social networks and transnational smuggling in and out of Central Africa; her recent book Congo/Paris teaches well, I think.

Gift economies old and new are obviously a major topic under this heading–you could do some readings on potlatch, etc. but interesting contrasts to the writing of some cyberculture scholars on gift economies within the wired world.

“Burial societies” and other kinds of informal credit unions in southern Africa seem interesting and relevant. Also problems of currency equivalence or articulation between local systems of value (like cattle in southern Africa) and cash economies–Keith Breckenridge had a good article a while back on that in CSSH.

Pyramid schemes, for sure. I wonder if there’s anything good that’s been written about the major national drama in Albania after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc that involved a huge pyramid scheme.

——-

One conceptual thought, though: with a lot of the language of “weirdness”, “alternative”, etc., you’re kind of preserving the notion that there are other markets/economies which are normal, standard, mainstream. I’m not so sure a lot of this activity is “weird”, in that sense: I think it’s part of what is mainstream. I think maybe you set up an opposition between your interests here and a book like Freakonomics, like it’s you or them, your way or the highway, homo economicus or homo non-economicus. I suspect that’s an unnecessary opposition that involves something of an exaggeration of the monolithic character of “mainstream” economic thought.

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By: jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 20:38:50 +0000

this reminds me about the huge amount of literature in the late 70′s and early 80′s on the ‘informal economy’ . there were tons of studies of economic production that goes unmeasured and undocumented.

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By: Ozma

Ozma — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 16:53:34 +0000

just to clarify — I meant “political” in the elected officials, constitutional government, multiparty system, state and local authorities, administrative procedure, etc. etc. etc. sense — not the broad “related to the practical ethics of social interaction” sense. we are obviously political in the second sense, but are not trying to compete with the many excellent blogs out there dedicated to covering the first sense.

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By: Ozma

Ozma — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 16:36:09 +0000

Wimbrel — oh god. I had no idea that was a widespread phenomenon — I’ve totally done that. the angry moral god of the credit score is watching me and must be placated, etc.

Biella — thanks for passing along your syllabus! looks awesome! that’s what I’m talkin about! ;)

Ragout — I look forward to checking out the article you sent along. The New Orleans race thing — to be honest, and I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I think my own absence of commentary is due to an inability to say anything clever about it. I post when I think I have something new to say (often new only to me, but it’s good to find that out….). I’ve read a lot of commentary on the topic on other blogs about which I’ve thought “right on”, and like oneman I’ve felt a fair amount of helpless rage. The thing is, most of what needs to be said (and what is being said, on other sites) about the whole catastrophe is specifically political — not that that’s a bad thing, but this is (self-consciously) not a political blog.

One specifically anthropological thing I’ve thought about has been in regard to race, class, and rumors: the Guardian has been reporting that much of the terrible “savagery” in which poor black New Orleans residents run amok were reportedly engaging is turning out to be unsubstantiated:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1563470,00.html

And as all anthropologists know, you can always tell a lot about a society by looking at what kind of rumors that society considers credible and worth circulating…

But I don’t want to hijack this thread if people have other things to say about weird economies.

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By: oneman

oneman — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 15:22:37 +0000

I’ll tell you Ragout, I’ve thought about posting something on NOLA here, but in the first flush of outrage over the way things have been handled, anything I wrote would be more of a political rant than an anthropological assessment. I can’t speak for my fellow SM’ers, but I imagine they feel something similar. Now that things have calmed down — thousands of lives are no longer in direct danger, for instance — it might be easier to set aside some of that rantiness and say something anthropoliogically meaningful.

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By: Ragout

Ragout — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 06:22:11 +0000

Here’s a famous article you might find relevant:

R.A. Radford, “The Economic Organization of a Prisoner of War Camp.” Economica Nov 1945, pp 189-201.

Online here:
http://webster.commnet.edu/faculty/~jascot/poweconomics.htm

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By: Ragout

Ragout — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 05:55:21 +0000

I’m afraid I don’t have any useful references to offer you.

But I was wondering, given the tremendously insightful anthropological analysis of race and class that I keep reading about on this blog, how come no one’s written about New Orleans?

I only mean this half-sarcastically. Surely anthropologists have some insights about the behavior of the police and national guard? About the treatment of poor black residents of New Orleans by their wealthier white neighbors? About any of the dozens of race and class issues raised by Katrina?

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By: Wimbrel

Wimbrel — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:20:29 +0000

An acquaintance of mine was recently looking into the (online) behavior of “credit rating maximizers.” There are apparently all sorts of paid services that allow you to check your rating X times daily, correlate credit profiles from multiple agencies, that sort of thing. The users of these services apparently also coordinate timed letter campaigns, and even have code names for the different types of formula letters they send out. Hours of toil each day, all in the quest of a few elusive points to brandish in one’s signature line.

I don’t have any substantial references, but the relevant websites and forums might make good ethnography practicums for students.

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By: Biella Coleman

Biella Coleman — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 22:41:58 +0000

hey ozma,

along with free and open source software which was mentioned abover there is computer hacking in general. here are some resources and perhaps later i can send you some more specific ones too:

http://digitalgenres.org/files/syllabi/final_hacker_syllabus.pdf

looks like a fantastic! course!

biella

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By: Ozma

Ozma — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 22:02:25 +0000

speaking of freaky, I just cross-posted with Rex and it looks as though we’ve made more or less the same point. his doesn’t have a rhyme in it, though.
;)

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