“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman argues that economists and policy makers have deliberately mystified the current economic situation for political reasons and that the solution to our current woes is actually very simple: we need more government spending to boost demand. He plays off the above Mencken epigram, saying “For every simple problem there is an answer that is murky, complex, and wrong.”

It is interesting to compare the kind of economic fear mongering discussed by Krugman with the role of culture in Ebola fear mongering. In a recent interview with medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail she criticizes that “horrible and racist Newsweek” cover story on Ebola for the way it blames the spread of the disease on African “culture.”

Burial practices, wild meat consumption, and local reactions to quarantine and isolation have all been described as “cultural” problems that promote the spread of Ebola. As an anthropologist, I think that journalists should be careful when they use “culture” as a rationale. Culture is not an explanation. It’s something that needs further examination. Culture should not be a cudgel used to blame the victims of Ebola for their own suffering.

What struck me about these two discussions is the fact that, when seen side-by-side in this way, they highlight how willingly journalists (and the public) accept the economy as something which is complex and difficult to understand, but treat culture as a kind of self-evident set of practices and beliefs which, once identified, need no further explanation. As such, public intellectuals in economics (like Krugman) spend a lot of time trying to convince the public that economic problems are easily understandable, while a lot of the work we do as public anthropologists goes into trying to make complex what people believe they already intuitively understand.

Thinking about this led me to make some further disparate observations on complexity and public anthropology/economics which I gave up trying to work into a coherent narrative and instead present to you here in this handy list form:

1. While both the mathematical tools used by economists and the theoretical tools used by anthropologists appear as a foreign language to the untrained eye, there is a certain willingness to accept the necessity of translating human behavior into math while there is a strong negative reaction to the use of anthropological jargon.

2. Economic fear mongering can also take the form of simplistic economic truisms, such as the false analogy between national debt and household debt. But there is a difference between arguing that something is counter-intuitive and arguing that it is complex. I think Krugman does a good job of showing that the truism is wrong without resorting to a complexity argument.

3. Often the complexity that anthropologists want to talk about involves the impact of political-economic factors upon culture. This means that we are often arguing against our own particular claim to expertise (insofar as people see anthropologists as experts on “culture”). I think that one reason for Jared Diamond’s success is that (as Rex so eloquently discusses in his article in The Appendix) this is not a handicap for him since he isn’t really interested in “culture” in the first place.

If you put Ghani’s name into Amazon you’ll most likely get his 2008 book Fixing Failed States, and Google results focus on the TED talk summary of his book or his campaign website. Ghani’s book is blurbed by Francis Fukuyama and Hernando de Soto, thinkers anthropologists usually consider The Enemy. But anyone who looks back to his scholarly writing and intellectual influences will recognize him as a powerful anthropological thinker whose work exemplifies the best our discipline has to offer.

Ghani received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1982 (it’s a little unclear — I think he ended up depositing in 1984). There’s a PDF of the dissertation here  At that time the department was at the end of an era. For the past thirty years professors such as Morton Fried, Robert Murphy, and Marvin Harris created a department that was, by varying degrees, of leftist, ecologicaly determinisic, and focused political economy. All of these people worked with Ghani, as well as Joan Vincent, Richard Lee, Gerald Sider, and even Conrad “applied anthropology in a shoe factory” Arensberg.

Ghani’s Ph.D. was written about the same time as Eric Wolf’s Europe And The People Without History and takes a similar approach: it is a historical account of “production and domination in Afghanistan”, one that draws on the Annales school of history as well as materialist approaches to understand how geography, culture, and power came together to give Afghanistan the shape it did in the nineteenth century.

Ghani published a good deal about Afghanistan over the course of his career, which I can’t really assess here since that’s not my speciality. My favorite work of  Ghani’s has been his work on Eric Wolf, including a great interview with Wolf  (apparently online as a PDF) and an introductory chapter in the 1995 festschrift Articulating Hidden Histories.

Ghani’s scholarly work and political career seem a world away from life here in Honolulu. But it’s clear that his loyalty to his commitment to both studying and changing the world are as central to the discipline of anthropology as is his theoretically-informed and empirically rich ethnography. Its worth remembering that anthropology can be a place where remarkable people can get their start, and we should be proud when they leave academia to pursue their goals.

I was reading through some of the comments to Rex’s latest post about Jared Diamond, in which he ultimately argues that David Graeber’s Debt might be seen as the anti-Diamond (in terms of argument).  Debt, Rex argues, is one of the few “big picture” books that have been written by an anthropologist since Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, which was published more than 30 years ago (1982).  Three decades is a pretty long time (and we anthros wonder why so few people seem to know what we do).  Diamond gets a lot of attention from many anthropologists, in part, because he is writing exactly the kinds of books that we really do not produce anymore.

Personally, I think we give him a little too much attention and air-time when we put so much energy into combating his arguments.  If anthropologists disagree with the version of world history that Diamond is putting out there, my answer (as it was when I wrote this) is to write solid books that make our case.  Yes, of course that’s easier said than done–but please tell me one thing that’s truly worthwhile that doesn’t require a ton of work.  Nobody said any of this should be easy.  If we have different–or “better”–ideas, then we need to find ways to get them out there (through books, or blogs, or interviews or smoke signals or whatever).  Going directly after Diamond every time he publishes is kind of a dead end if you ask me.  It continually sets us up for claims that we’re just reacting because of jealousy or sour grapes.  The way around that is to jump in the ring, take part, and produce the kinds of books that mark the way to a different explanatory path.*

Debt, argues Rex, is one of those books.  And I think he’s right.  The book has indeed garnered a lot of attention both inside and beyond anthropology (and academia in general).  This is a good thing, since it can potentially lead to more discussion and debate.  Of course, when a book or author gets more attention, “discussion” can go in some very different directions, some more productive than others (Diamond is actually a pretty good example of this sort of thing).  And while Graeber’s book has received a lot of praise, it also has its critics.  Nothing wrong with that…in fact, this is also a good thing.  But, just as unthinking praise is pretty much a waste of time, so is baseless criticism.  It all depends, and it’s the risk we all take when we step foot into more public arenas.

Anyway, what brought me back to Rex’s post was a comment a couple of days ago by economist Brad DeLong.  Here’s what he wrote:

You do realize that Graeber’s “Debt” is an absolute empirical disaster when it gets to the post-WWII period, and that strikes all of us as the equivalent of the clock that strikes XIII in terms of making us suspicious of the rest of it?

Now, the first part of that statement is fair game, albeit a bit severe.  DeLong argues that the book is supposedly an “empirical disaster,” and then it’s up to him to demonstrate his argument.  I posted a comment asking Mr DeLong to share his assessment of the book (hasn’t happened yet).  But the second part of his charge is a bit suspect.  DeLong’s argument here is this: If there are indeed some errors or factual inaccuracies within any part of Graeber’s book, then this should make readers suspicious of every argument presented in the entire book.  To me, this is specious argumentation, as I doubt DeLong would extend this sort of critical claim to the work of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Joe Stieglitz, or hell, even himself.  This aspect of DeLong’s argument is absolutely bankrupt, meaning that he has literally gone Chapter 11 on Chapter 12 here.**

In a follow up comment, DeLong does indeed expand on what he’s talking about, explaining that he’s always looking for better books than Diamond’s Guns,Germs, and Steel and Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History to recommend to people (kudos to DeLong for valuing Wolf’s book).  He adds that he has considered assigning Graeber’s Debt to his classes because it has some “wonderful” passages.  However, DeLong explains,

The problem is that Debt also contains passages like:

“Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.”

and:

“When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation. How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror.”

and:

“One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of war and military power There’s a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him, there’s a man with a gun…. The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours’ notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world military system, organized around the dollar, together.”

that are completely, 100%, totally wrong analyses of important things like employment patterns in Silicon Valley, of the origins of Gulf War II, and of why the dollar is the world’s principle reserve currency and why China holds so much U.S government debt.

And that’s the point where I asked DeLong if he’d be willing to lay out his critiques a bit more.  Thanks to a helpful comment (thanks Pat!) and some time browsing on DeLong’s blog, it became pretty clear that his argument is actually based primarily in two reviews written about Debt a while back: One by Gabriel Rossman and the other by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber.  Both have a lot of good things to say about Graeber’s work: Rossman calls it “very impressive and thought-provoking” and Farrell takes the time to write about the aspects of the book he appreciated.  I recommend reading both of these posts–there was a pretty good discussion on Farrell’s in the comments section that is well worth reading through, since it gets into more depth about some of the arguments and disagreements going on here.  I will say that Farrell’s post does start off with a bit of an intellectual cheap shot when it calls out Graeber at the very start–the post would have been much better without that sort of thing.  In fact, I think the best part of his post is actually the back and forth going on in the comments section.

There are certainly things to debate here–about the role of violence and military force in the global economy, about Graeber’s “tribute” argument, or about just how much conscious intentionality there really is behind the global capitalist system.  Among other things.  Graeber’s book is by no means the end all, be all when it comes to understanding things like debt, money, or the global economics system.  But it does raise some pretty fascinating, insightful, and often provocative discussions about these issues, and it’s worth reading in its entirety (rather than just skimming through a few pages here and there and then jumping on one band wagon or another).  Read it, see what you think.  If you’re looking for a perfect book, well, good luck.  I have read my fair share of books, and I can’t name any that don’t have their shortcomings, flaws, or outright mistakes.  It happens.  Part of the work in reading and assessing books like this is trying to take everything into account without getting lost in some of the details or side arguments.  Or losing touch with the big picture (which is the point, after all).  The best part of reviews and extended discussions of any book, as I see it, is when the ups and downs of an author’s arguments are really explored, taken to task, and critically evaluated.  That’s the whole point, isn’t it?  That’s what the whole “knowledge production” thing is all about, right?

But let’s not let ourselves get sidetracked with what ultimately comes down to cheap shots and superficial argumentation.  That sort of thing is petty at best, and ridiculously pointless at worst.  And it just leads us to the kind of grade-school level debate that ends up going nowhere quite rapidly.  Which is, by the way, a form of “debate” that plagues the internetz.  DeLong’s “well if there’s one thing wrong how can we trust the rest of the book” sort of argumentation is one form of this sort of thing.  The “Apple” example (cited above) being a good case in point.  Ya, Graeber got that one wrong.  So what?–it’s not as if the sentence about the formation of Apple was a major beam in the overall structure of his argument.  Even Gabriel Rossman added a note to his post: “Struck through the bit about Apple because I think people make way too big of a deal about this. It’s an isolated mistake in a very long book, big deal.”

Sometimes, we gotta move on.  Be fair.  Pick our battles.

But yes, by all means, let’s all debate Graeber’s book–and others that try to tackle the complex, interconnected, often highly political issues that he addresses in Debt.  We need more of this, not less.  But we also need to avoid getting sidetracked by superfluous nitpicking, petty personal battles, and the like.  Frankly, I could care less about getting into some academic/personal brawl about who does and does not like who.  So, my point here is this: Cut the crap, get to the substance.  Because, in all honesty, I would much rather read DeLong’s actual critiques of Graeber’s work than see the drive-by, baseless critiques of the “Apple” variety that ended up on Rex’s post.  We can all do better than that…but it’s definitely a two-way street.

I think us anthropologists have engaged in this sort of thing when it comes to critiquing the economists as well (yep, me too).  In fact, I KNOW we have.  So let’s not pretend that we’re the empirically-grounded, ethnographic geniuses sitting outside the fray with little halos around our heads.  The disciplines of anthropology and economics have a long, often tense relationship with one another.  This has led to some pretty interesting debates and discussions, along with less than dignified interactions.  So where to next?

Here’s what I think is most interesting about what’s going on with Debt: there are a lot of people, including anthropologists and economists, reading and debating this text.  All of the major arguments and disagreements aside, this is undoubtedly a success on an important level, since the book is speaking to various audiences that aren’t always in direct contact with one another.  So then, what to do at this crossroads?  Draw disciplinary lines in the sand and defend them at all costs?  Or something else?

Here I think the anthropologists and economists have a pretty nice opportunity, if some of them are willing to take it.  As I read through some of the reactions to Graeber’s book, I noticed that more than one person has expressed the view that they feel unable to assess some aspects of the book because it’s outside their area of knowledge or expertise.  That’s a pretty fair point to make.  For my own part, I’ll go ahead and admit that there are plenty of aspects of macroeconomics that I find perplexing, complex, and sometimes a bit confusing.  I’m not a macroeconomist, so that’s pretty understandable.  What this means is that when I read papers or books that delve into some of the details of economic theory or methods,  I sometimes end up doing a lot of research on the side to try to pick up what’s going on.  Not really a substitute for getting a PhD in econ, but hey, I do what I can.  It’s basically impossible to keep up with everything, especially at a certain level.  This is a long way of saying I can definitely understand the point these folks are saying when they admit they don’t know much about the politics and economics of ancient Mesopotamia.  That’s why we have archaeologists, historians, and historically-minded anthropologists like David Graeber, right?

So here we are.  Anthropologists and economists, together again.  We each have certain strengths we bring to the table, and we each have our shortcomings and weaknesses.  What are we going to do?  Are we going to dig our trenches and get ready for another round of endless disciplinary warfare?  Are we going to sit on the sidelines and be content with lobbing pot shots here and there?  Or are we going to honestly assess our respective strengths and weaknesses, get on with it, and shift the conversation in more a open, meaningful direction?  We could even consider–GASP!!!–some sort of collaboration?!?  Or we can stick to the same old divisions: the economists and their mathematical models on one side of the dance floor, the anthropologists and their tape recorders and notebooks on the other.  Another standoff?

Maybe not.  In the end, it’s up to us whether or not we decide to maintain the sort of relationship that was wrought by our economic and anthropological ancestors.  Because, no matter the distance they truly fall from the tree, there’s really no reason to let any more bad apples get in the way of the potentially meaningful–and necessary–conversations that we have in store.

Yes, this all sounds so kumbaya and polyanna and all that.  But–and this should really draw in you economists out there (joke)–there is indeed some self-interested behavior going on here: I want to know a little more about your methods, your models, and what “seigniorage” is all about, among other things.  So much to learn, so little time to download all of 20th century economic thought onto my Kindle.  But seriously, I have a genuine interest in learning more about how economists do what they do.

All of this, of course, is assuming that we do indeed have something to talk about, us anthros and econs.  It’s probably pretty clear by now that I think we do–but I am sure there are plenty of fine folks out there who disagree.  In fact, if you’d asked me about this several years ago I would have probably answered “An economist?  What could I possibly learn from an economist?”  We all have to reconsider our blind spots and biases, myself included.  So yes, I think that many anthropologists and economists could do well in comparing some notes.  In other cases, however, I think some of the divisions and chasms are quite deep, and extend to a more philosophical or political level.  And no amount of discussion is really going to bridge those kinds of gaps.  But then, those sorts of divisions go far beyond mere academic boundaries.  They have been around for a long time, they will persist, and they will undoubtedly lead to more of the same longstanding sorts of Cold War-esque statemates (about markets, states, capitalism, communism, and all the usual suspects).  Some folks want to keep holding onto the same old stories, no matter where the tracks seem to be heading.

In the mean time, those of us who are willing to open things up, listen to one another, and look in some new directions will do what we can.

What else is there?

*Such an effort might also help combat some of the seriously misinformed understandings of contemporary anthropology that happen to be floating around out there, this being a case in point (although I am not sure how much rational argumentation will help in that case, since Mr Khan seems to be dealing more with preconceived opinions than facts or evidence in his assessment of cultural anthropology).

**Chapter 12 is the primary chapter that DeLong and the other economists authors take issue with, as is explained soon after this paragraph.  Sorry, these things just come to me and I can’t help but allow my bad sense of humor to escape.  It’s like an evil dragon that refuses to remain in chains.  Apologies if my lame attempt at humor has caused you any sort of gastrointestinal distress.

Starting in the 1960s, Eric Wolf was already asking what Jared Diamond in the 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel called Yali’s Question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Answering that question, as Eric Wolf understood, means accounting specifically for how Europe went from being a land that in A.D. 800 “was of little account in the affairs of the wider world” (1982:71) to those effective polities that could launch overseas adventures. Diamond would have us believe that the answer lies in the shape of the continents, latitude and longitude gradients, and agriculture, particularly large domesticated animals. Although this much older story may account for the fact that many of the most powerful polities have been in Eurasia, it cannot account for the rise of Europe 800-1400 A.D.

Everyone agrees that geography matters. Eric Wolf’s survey of the world in 1400 is full of maps, descriptions of terrain, and accounts of available resources. But serious historians reject Jared Diamond’s rationale for the rise of Europe.

To truly get a grip on Yali’s Question, we have to turn back to Eric Wolf in 1982.

Go back to something written in 1982?  Is Antrosio crazy?  Actually, no, he’s not.  I think he’s onto something.  One question Antrosio asks is why Wolf’s work is not more influential today.  Maybe it was the ironic title?  Maybe it was the Marxian framework?  Was it the organization of the book?  Antrosio brings up one factor that’s pretty interesting:

Not long after Europe and the People Without History, the Writing Culture (1988) volume took a quite different tack from Eric Wolf’s vision. Anthropology seemed to be turning both elsewhere and inward upon itself, as the Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf Reply to Michael Taussig (1989) illustrates.

After the publication of Writing Culture, US anthropology did indeed veer off in another direction.  That book took us down a more reflexive road, one that has legions of detractors and defenders.  Personally, I think plenty of good came from the so-called postmodern turn in anthropology.  But maybe there is good reason to revisit Europe, retrace our steps a bit, and see what Wolf’s vision of anthropology offers us today.  A good idea.  Definitely check out the rest of Antrosio’s post–it’s worth it.

Now onto Keith Hart.  His post about the importance (and some of the shortcomings) of Karl Polanyi’s work is a good read for any of you economically-minded anthropologists out there.  Much of Hart’s post focuses on Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation.  Some might scoff at the idea of putting so much stock in book that was written back in 1944, but Hart makes it clear why his work still matters today.  I remember one of my colleagues in graduate school told me a story about a conference she attended.  During her presentation, a person in the audience was completely dismissive of the fact that she referenced Polanyi’s work.  It was “too old” and outdated, according to this person, to be of any import today.  Wrong.  This is just the kind of “intellectual deforestation” that rankled Eric Wolf.  Hart’s close look at Polanyi is a good reminder of just how important it is to study the ideas of those who came before us.  He introduces his post with this:

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of “market society”.  Theories are good for some things and not for others and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally in what I have learned from Polanyi.

Much of the post breaks down some of the dominant debates about “the market” and whether or not it is the epitome of all evil (as some seem to argue) or humanity’s unfettered force of salvation.  Hart writes:

The last two centuries have seen a strident debate between capitalist and socialist camps insisting that markets are either good or bad for society. The latter draws implicitly on the pre-industrial apologists for landed rule whose line was, broadly speaking, Aristotle’s. Karl Marx himself considered money to be indispensable to any complex economy and was radically opposed to the state in any form. However, many of his followers, when they did not try to outlaw markets and money altogether, preferred to return them to the marginal position they occupied under agrarian civilization and were less hostile to the state, pre-industrial society’s enduring legacy for our world. Polanyi falls within this anti-market camp since he acknowledged Aristotle as his master and considered “the self-regulating market’s” contradictions to have been the principal cause of the twentieth-century’s horrors.

A less apocalyptic version of socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon acknowledges the social damage done by unfettered markets (what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”), but would not wish to do away with the wealth they produce. Indeed the leading capitalist societies at one stage all signed up for the idea that states should try to contain the inequality and ameliorate the social misery generated by markets. The BRICS are entering this stage now. The emphasis has shifted over time between reliance on states and on markets for managing national economy, between social and liberal democracy of various colours. The general economic breakdown of the 1930s turned a large number of American economists away from celebrating the logic of markets towards contemplating their repair. This “institutional economics” persists as the notion that markets need self-conscious social intervention, if they are to serve the public interest. John Maynard Keynes produced the most impressive synthesis of liberalism and social democracy in the last century. Much recent writing on Polanyi would place him within this tendency rather than as a card-carrying anti-marketeer. He did recognize a role for the market and lined up with those who sought institutional means to correct capitalism’s ills.

While Hart draws a great deal from Polanyi’s work, he also takes great pains to remind his readers (here and elsewhere) to keep an open mind about the positive aspects of markets, rather than assuming that the market is some massive, singular blog of capitalistic destruction.  Specifically regarding the work of Polanyi, he writes:

It is odd that Polanyi sometimes reduces the structures of national capitalism to an apolitical “self-regulating market.” For his analysis of money, markets and the liberal state was intensely political, as was his preference for social planning over the market. His wartime polemic, reproducing something of his opponents’ abstractions, was more a critique of liberal economics than a critical account of actually existing capitalism.

That’s something to keep in mind when reading Polanyi’s work–and some of the various responses to that work over the years.  Read the rest.

I’d really just like to leave this post here and make you all go read Keith’s piece, but it is long, and experience tells me few readers ever click on the links, so here are a few highlights for you [below the fold]:

Modern anthropology was born to serve the coming democratic revolution against the Old Regime. A government by the people for the people should be based on what they have in common, their “human nature” or “natural rights”…

For Rousseau, the growth of inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency. His subversive parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality which could well serve as a warning to our world. “It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities”…

Perhaps this aspect of the book may be illustrated by introducing a recent short film. Paul Grignon’s Money as Debt (2006, 47 minutes) — an underground hit in activist circles — seeks to explain where money comes from. Most of the money in circulation is issued by banks whenever they make a loan…

He shows, forcefully and elegantly, how implausible the standard liberal origin myth of money as a medium of exchange is; but he also rejects as a nationalist myth the main opposing theory that traces money’s origins as a means of payment and unit of account to state power. In the first case he follows Polanyi (1944), but by distancing himself from the second, he highlights the interdependence of states and markets in money’s origins.

“A brief treatise on the moral grounds of economic relations” makes explicit his critique of the attempt to construct “the economy” as a sphere separate from society in general. This owes something to Polanyi’s (1957) universal triad of distributive mechanisms – reciprocity, redistribution and market – here identified as “everyday communism”, hierarchy and reciprocity. By the first Graeber means a human capacity for sharing or “baseline sociality”; the second is sometimes confused with the third, since unequal relations are often represented as an exchange – you give me your crops in return for not being beaten up. The difference between hierarchy and reciprocity is that debt is permanent in the first case, but temporary in the second…

The following extended reflection on slavery and freedom — a pair that Graeber sees as being driven by a culture of honour and indebtedness — culminates in the ultimate contradiction underpinning modern liberal economics, a worldview that conceives of individuals as being socially isolated in a way that could only be prepared for by a long history of enslaving conquered peoples. Since we cannot easily embrace this account of our own history, it is not surprising that we confuse morality and power when thinking about debt…

The gap between our approaches to making the economy human is therefore narrowing. Even so, there are differences of theory and method that point to some residual reservations I have about the Debt book. The first of these concerns Graeber’s preference for lumping together states, money, markets, debt and capitalism, along with violence, war and slavery as their habitual bedfellows. Money and markets have redemptive qualities that in my view (Hart 2000) could be put to progressive economic ends in non-capitalist forms; nor do I imagine that modern institutions such as states, corporations and bureaucracy will soon die away. Anti-capitalism as a revolutionary strategy begs the question of the plurality of modern economic institutions. As Mauss showed (Hart 2007), human economies exist in the cracks of capitalist societies. David Graeber seems to agree, at least when it comes to finding “everyday communism” there and, by refusing to sanitize “human economies” in their pristine form, he modifies the categorical and historical division separating them and commercial economies. Revolutionary binaries seem to surface at various points in his book, but an underlying tendency to discern continuity in human economic practices is just as much a feature of David Graeber’s anthropological vision…

For now I don’t really have anything to add to Keith’s piece, but I would be interested to read any comments our readers might have. Now I have to go read some of the many links and citations in the review…

See all articles in this series.

David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Simon Callow jump aboard ambitious project to broadcast Herman Melville’s classic novel in its entirety – 135 chapters over 135 days

As I discussed in my last post, one of the central arguments in Debt is the constant tension between debt as a finite, calculable thing as defined by money (and backed by the authority of the state), and debt as an infinite moral obligation which can never be repaid. This tension is central to Moby Dick. Here, for instance, is a passage about captain Ahab from the end of Chapter 41:

They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

Or, in Ahab’s own words from Chapter 36:

If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!”

And here is David Graeber:

On the one hand, one presents whale teeth or brass rods because the murderer’s kin recognize they owe a life to the victim’s family. On the other, whale teeth or brass rods are in no sense, and can never be, compensation for the loss of a murdered relative. Certainly no one presenting such compensation would ever be foolish enough to suggest that any amount of money could possibly be the “equivalent” to the value of someone’s father, sister, or child.

Of course, Ahab might do well to take heed from what Graeber says next, which is that a revenge killing “won’t really compensate for the victim’s grief and pain either.”

Speaking of the literary aspects of debt (and revenge), I see that Graeber makes mention in several places of Margaret Atwood’s book, Payback which came out in 2008. I haven’t read that yet, but it has been on my list for a while. I see that it is also available as a series of podcasts and a documentary film.

Beggs seems eager to prove is that Graeber creates a straw man out of economic theory, but in doing so he himself makes a straw man out of Graeber. He starts by conceding that some forms of economics are overly individualistic:

The most simplistic renditions of neoclassical economics may reduce all human interactions to self-interested exchange.

He then promptly points out that this critique is not new, and that the importance of social structure “could almost be seen as a constant in social theory since the classics.” Here is where it gets interesting:

But most of these other approaches to grand socio-history differ from Graeber’s in treating these levels as structures, and not simply as the practices that create them. They are made up of complex, evolving patterns of relationships that cannot be reduced to or derived from deliberate individual or interpersonal action. They emerge, as Marx put it, “behind the backs” of the very people who collectively create them. They become the social contexts that frame our actions, the circumstances not of our choosing within which we make history. They are collective human products, but not of ideological consensus – rather, they are the outcome of often competing, contradictory pressures.

Graeber, in contrast, stays mainly at the level of conscious practice and gives a basically ethical vision of history, where great changes are a result of shifting ideas about reality.

Whether or not you agree with Graeber’s overall argument about the history of debt, this is a laughable characterization of what Graeber is doing in this book which is precisely to highlight the “competing, contradictory pressures” which have shaped human history. Moreover, in doing so, Graeber deploys a concept of ideology based “complex, evolving patterns of relationships that cannot be reduced to or derived from deliberate individual or interpersonal action.” A model I will argue is directly drawn from Marx.

Let us start with those “competing, contradictory pressures”… Here’s a quote from the end of Chapter 3:

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

So, according to Graeber we simultaneously see ourselves as individuals who owe each other nothing (Romney’s “we built that”) and in debt to the state till we die (Obama’s “they didn’t build…that”), but this is a “false dichotomy” which presents us with two sides of the same coin.

Or how about Graeber on Christianity (Chapter 4)?

One of the things that makes the Jesus of the New Testament such a tantalizing character is that it’s never clear what he’s telling us. Everything can be read two ways… This is a vision of human life as inherently corrupt, but it also frames even spiritual affairs in commercial terms: with calculations of sin, penance, and absolution, the Devil and St. Peter with their rival ledger books, usually accompanied by the creeping feeling that it’s all a charade because the very fact that we are reduced to playing such a game of tabulating sins reveals us to be fundamentally unworthy of forgiveness.

He goes on to show many of the same contradictions exist in other world religions as well. But over and over again he emphasizes that (as in this quote from Chapter 5) “we are not talking about different types of society here…but moral principles that always coexist everywhere.” What he is talking about is what he sees as a fundamental set of “competing, contradictory pressures” universal to all societies, which take different forms depending on the particular balance of power. And different societies use different means to prevent their society from changing from one form into another.

For instance:

communistic relations can easily start slipping into relations of hierarchical inequality… Genuinely egalitarian societies are keenly aware of this and tend to develop elaborate safe­ guards around the dangers of anyone–say, especially good hunters, in a hunting society-rising too far above themselves; just as they tend to be suspicious of anything that might make one member of the society feel in genuine debt to another. A member who draws attention to his own accomplishments will find himself the object of mockery. Often, the only polite thing to do if one has accomplished something significant is to instead make fun of oneself.

There are plenty of quotes like this from every chapter, so that anyone who has actually read the book is likely to wonder whether Mike Beggs wasn’t writing based on a pre-defined narrative in which Graeber = anarchist = “has no theory of social structure”? Or, perhaps, he is simply mired in an outdated view of structuralism unsullied by later, processual, approaches such as that of Bourdieu? Graeber’s approach certainly seems influenced by Bourdieu and he quotes approvingly of Bourdieu’s description of gift giving as requiring “infinite artistry.” As Bourdieu says in his critique of structuralism, “timing is all-important.” In pointing this out, Bourdieu was not reducing structure to human agency, but simply pointing out that structures are always incomplete and that these gaps (such as the gap in time between receiving and returning a gift) offer space for human agency.

Let us now turn to the second point, Graeber’s concept of ideology. In fact, I think that much of the above discussion already goes a long way towards disproving Beggs’ account of Graeber’s theory of ideology, but since Beggs evokes Marx, it is worthwhile to look at Marx’s theory of ideology. Even better, let’s look at Graeber’s account of Marx’s theory of ideology since it happens to coincide very closely with my own.

I draw the following from “The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity,” the introduction to a special issue The Commoner. (You can download the PDF here.)

But what sort of theory of symbolism, exactly, is Marx working with? The best way to think about it, perhaps, is to say that, like his theory of productive action… Money has meaning for the actors, then, because it sums up their intentions… However, it can do so only by integrating them into a contrastive totality, the market, since it is only by means of money that my individual actions and capacities become integrated as a proportion of the totality of everyone’s.

Marxist ideology is not some kind of “false consciousness” which is simply imposed upon people by the media, it is the product of their lived experience within market based societies. Markets make us see the world in a certain way because markets involve us in certain forms of social action that lend themselves to see the world in a market-oriented way. Marx argues that we suffer from commodity fetishism in seeing our own labor as simply another commodity, bought and sold on the market like any other, when in fact the sale of labor in the marketplace is dependent upon a set of hierarchical power relations in which some people (the working class) must sell their labor to other people (capitalists) in order to survive.

One of Graeber’s great triumphs in Debt (building on his earlier work) is to apply this essentially Marxist notion of ideology to pre-market economies. Although I feel that Graeber has done himself a disservice in the strident tone he has frequently used in replying to critics online, I feel sympathy for him because critics seem to continually try to fit him into a predefined conception of “anarchism” that misunderstands the analytical depth of his argument. He sees these misunderstandings as intentional, but I think it just comes from their own ignorance of certain intellectual traditions which are well established in anthropology but less so in other disciplines; especially economics and political science, which is a shame since this book is partially an attempt to bridge the gap between those disciplines.

His anarchism, it seems to me, lies not in a rejection of social structure or the importance of markets, but in shifting the location of ideology from markets themselves to the state violence he argues is essential to preserving markets, even in pre-capitalist economies. I don’t know if I fully accept this argument, but it deserves to be discussed for what it is. It is, first and foremost, a theory of “the social contexts that frame our actions, the circumstances not of our choosing within which we make history.” Too bad Mike Beggs couldn’t see that.

UPDATE: After posting this I realized I’m not entirely satisfied with the formation I used in the last paragraph: “shifting the location of ideology from markets themselves to the state violence he argues is essential to preserving markets, even in pre-capitalist economies.” This isn’t right. It would be better to say that Graeber focuses on the ideology associated with the rise of money, as opposed to the rise of market based labor relations, and that money has risen in many different ways in pre-capitalist economies, under many different forms of labor relations. The role of violence is essential for his argument, and is tied closely to slavery and debt bondage, but I think I’d like to wait for another post to talk about it. Till then I’ll leave it at that.

Ryan’s recent post on money and its flows and blocks  prompts me to post this, something I wrote a few weeks ago in response to a request from colleagues in Leiden for their  ICA magazine, which is published by study association Itiwana of the department of cultural anthropology and development. After my post on brands and the UK riots they thought I could write something about brands.   Being in Tanzania which is buzzing with money talk,  prompted in part by its new status as  a destination for mining and gas companies in the current  natural resource rush, I wrote instead about how development is being re-branded. 

The 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals is fast approaching. Few  countries in Africa  are expected to meet the targets.  Income poverty, food insecurity, rising inequality and poor health remain problems for the most of the continent.  Despite shifts towards democratic politics in many countries, civil conflict and political instability  are  entrenched  in others as legacies of colonial state  building and post independence power struggles.  Such conflicts, as in Mali and  the Sudans,  are fueled by the rising value of  resources  associated with particular regions within a global market that is revaluing Africa as a potential source of minerals, gas and oil  and as a  high growth location with an expanding  middle class. 

Annual growth rates  for African economies have averaged six or seven percent for much of the decade.  The extent to which growth is a consequence of political stability and sound macroeconomic management is open to question. A more pressing explanation for the recent transformation in Africa’s economic fortune is the global increase in demand for its natural resources enabled by regimes of economic management  which are increasingly open to foreign investment and partnerships.

This   continental push to promote the commercialization of  what can be claimed as `natural’ resources within a context of on-going economic liberalization is legitimating an emerging discourse about the wealth of African nations and the urgent need for investment  as the magic bullet which can liberate this capital and create national prosperity. The regionalization agenda which fosters economic integration is aggressively promoted by governments and donors, along with initiatives aimed at strengthening property rights, enabling foreign direct investment and transforming communications infrastructure. 

China’s  new position as the potential economic savior of a continent   signals  fundamental  shifts in the political ordering of international development. The poverty discourse  central to the MDGs and,  arguably, to the constitution of countries in sub Saharan Africa as  fitting subjects of development  intervention is  increasingly contested, not only  by politicians and media commentators across the continent,  but by  an authoritative cadre of technical experts promoting market led development. Development is being re-imagined not as a consequence of social sector spending but as an effect of marketization.

States across the  continent are  seeking to present themselves as  entrepreneurial and investment friendly. Tanzania is no exception.  Like Uganda, it has practically shifted the orientation of its poverty reduction strategy towards economic growth. The government of President Jakaya Kikwete, now in its second term, is pursuing  a policy of Kilimo Kwanza,  farming first, seeking to marketize agriculture and to promote `a green revolution’ with the support of  major donors including the World Bank.  While  the country continues to rely on donor support for around thirty percent  of its national budget, rationales for intervention are  now situated within  a discursive package that is market led.  Donor funded workshops  buzz with talk of  value chains and market information.

The more conventional investments in the social infrastructure of schools and health facilities financed by the Tanzania Social Action Fund  have been superseded by  what are designed to be income generating investments for farmer groups to enhance their own livelihoods.  Phase Three of this program, shortly to be implemented, is structured around an assumed transformation from indigence to entrepreneurship, enabling self reliance through savings and micro finance as the poorest get, in a phrase equally at home in US discourses of welfare reform, `a hand up not a hand out’.

The aspirations of private sector advocates, within and outside government, increasingly  converge with  the policy positions of development partners as development is re-branded  globally to occupy a new market position.  In Tanzania, as elsewhere, financialization, as means and end,  plays a central role in this convergence.   International accounting firms fight for market share of development implementation within extended contracting chains that  conflate financial  and political accountability. Civil society organizations are brought into being to play specific roles in monitoring public expenditure, along with new organizational forms and participatory practices.   Public expenditure tracking,  known as PETS, has a  set of methods  into which civil society volunteers must be  enrolled through seminars and allowances. Techniques equally at home in the world of market research  comprising score cards  and surveys  come to have political clout as modalities through which dissatisfaction with government can be articulated.

Outside these transient relations held tenuously  in place through development funding streams, a range of private institutions  are seeking to establish the architecture through which the financialization of Tanzanian  social life is possible.  The limited reach of existing banking infrastructure and the Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies creates potential opportunities for  new kinds of  financial  institutions. These include  private financial institutions providing loans  to  formal sector workers,  specialist microfinance lenders such as Pride,  and the money transfer services provided by mobile telephone companies, of which the market leader is Vodacom’s Mpesa.  The proliferation of  formal and informal financial services, and those which straddle  this divide,  is staggering.

Savings and loan groups are rapidly proliferating in both urban and rural areas, notably those organized on the  Village Savings and Loan model  promoted by the NGO Care International. These groups consisting of around  thirty members are a fascinating  organizational form,  using strategies of ritualization and formalization to ensure regularity of savings and financial transparency in a group structure where all transactions  take place at weekly meetings and hence in public. Group members  buy weekly shares up to a limit  of five  intended to  ensure that large profits cannot be made and to  restrict  the exploitative potential of  the better off making money from lending to their poorer neighbors. Savers lend to members of the group at a rate of interest  designed to  increase the value of the savings share.

Groups operate on an annual cycle  after which accumulated interest is divided among members according the  value of their purchased shares.These  `care groups’ as they have come to be  known in some districts are  wildly popular because they allow people to borrow money at limited rates of interest,  particularly useful in helping meet big expenses such as  school fees, funeral contributions and hospital  costs.  They also provide a predictable return on savings, depending on the extent of borrowing  within the group.  An additional  weekly contribution functions as a kind of social insurance for group members who are paid a  sum of money should they fall sick or  lose a close family member.

These kinds of groups are heralded by promoters as  a locally available form of micro financial institution serving the previously excluded, a social institution for the promotion of fiscal responsibility and the discipline of saving not so much as an end in itself but as the precursor to enterprise.  Savings  groups thus conceived may indeed be foundational to a new culture of economic change. They  also enable  a range of distinct practices which support  radically different cultures of economic practice, cultures which  simultaneously promote and obstruct the aspirations of  Tanzania’s economic transformation.

In Ulanga district, Southern Tanzania,  where I have been doing some fieldwork, a  large number of `care groups’ have been established over the past two years,  with the majority now entering their second  savings and loans cycle. Despite the core organizational  template which specifies  numbers of members and the management structure, the  practice of groups varies widely, even within the same geographical area. In addition to variations in the value of shares purchased and the timing and duration of loans,  some groups insist on   compulsory  borrowing as well as saving as a  condition of membership as a means of increasing the value of savings for all the members of the group. Many groups also insist that members purchase  necessities like laundry soap  from the group at a price which is the same as or higher than market prices  in order to increase group profit and hence the value of the shares which are divided at the end of the cycle.

Borrowing is socially construed as an emergency response to hardship   but valued as the means of increasing savings.  In this enactment of savings and loans  the group itself is the enterprise and saving  framed as entrepreneurial activity which generates a return for individual members.  The income generating strategies of group members focus on  gathering  sufficient cash to  make savings, in actuality purchasing  regular shares,  because  this is likely to  accumulate more value than  alternative forms of enterprise, including agricultural investment. Participating in `care groups’, for  people with cash to make regular  contributions,  is fast  becoming a recognized means  of making money   make money. Consequently,  traders and  middle income people  in the villages close to the district capital   are joining multiple groups, allowing them to them to escape the  limitation on share purchase within a single group and to access the kinds of loan amounts which can  yield profitable returns.

That money generates money though such practices does not equate to  the kind of financialization envisaged by the architects of Tanzania’s new development order,  a world premised on depersonalized economic action within a market frame.   `Care groups’ in  performing the social relations through which money begets money, via shares invested by group members and the interest they pay on loans , permit individual profit so long as costs are shared to some extent by members of the group.  Organized around distrust rather than trust groups rely on  the visibility of transactions made in public  and  the simple technology of the specially constructed cash with three separate locks for which  separate keys are distributed among ordinary members.  Such practices  make explicit the social labor required to make money do savings work and the essential embedding of money within  social relations.  It is this embedding which accounts for the success of  mobile money services in much of Africa rather than mobile banking- what people are interested in  is the capacity to transfer money between situated persons not the potential of investing money in abstract institutions. 

Political emphasis on accountability dovetails with cultural preoccupations around relations and money , articulated as concerns with the illicit appropriation and consumption of public resources which are  highly personalized.   The organizational structure of `care groups’ taps into fundamental cultural concerns about groups and individuals, collective responsibility, equity and enrichment in ways that permit adaptation to support  core ideals.  As anthropology consistently demonstrates, values rather than value are foundational to understanding economic practice in any context.  This is not a matter of resistance to global capitalism or neo-liberal economics so much as an assertion of  what   values count.

The small background images on credit cards are a way in which people can personalize their credit cards and express a small part of their identity (along with everyone else who chooses the same theme, of course).  My Visa has a nice image of a Hawaiian seascape and sunset.  Very tranquil and beautiful.  It’s so I can feel like I’m on vacation from reality while I’m amassing debt, I suppose.

Well, the NPR Planet Money blog has a new piece about the latest version of the Mastercard in Germany: The Karl Marx MasterCard.

From Planet Money:

The German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz recently launched a Karl Marx credit card. The bank let people vote online for 10 different images, and Marx was the “very clear winner,” beating out a palace, a castle and a racetrack, among others. Reuters has more on the story.

The reader’s suggestions for potential taglines for the card are my favorite parts of this.  Here’s one good one:

@planetmoney From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. For everything else, there’s #marxcard

-Peter Sahlstrom

Check out the rest of the readers taglines at Planet Money.  Some are really funny.  I love it when little everyday things are so loaded with meaning.  Granted, Marx is an extremely controversial individual in human history…but it’s pretty ironic that a big bank has decided to finally give him his due credit.

(insert laugh track)

Ok, I’m done, I promise.  If you have any ideas for taglines, post them here and at Planet Money.

The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity.

Granularity

Granularity is the reduction of symbols to binary-type simplicity such as lines of computer code or small economic integers. Granularity means to break down money or media into symbolic and quantitative units for digital delivery and reconstitution. Granularity and networks are what gives bit-based media and money its mobile advantage over its cousins–film stock that needs to be “bicycled” to theaters and precious metals that need to be stored in fortified treasuries. Granularity is the physical principle that allows the discourses of money and media to meet. With granularity come two conflicting social worlds –the financialization as well as the democratization of media and money.

More philosophically, the media/money verisimilitude reveals the already tenuous analytical separation of thought and action, discourse and practice, and rationalities and tactics.

Financialization and Democratization of Money/Media

Digital money and mobile media, in a state of fine granularity, are symbolically opened for innovative as well as manipulative financialization and potentially wide democratization. Granularity, by refining things into ever-smaller units, increases the opportunities for access to previously closed systems. On the one hand, this can be empowering as peer-to-peer media and financial transactions can increase and, for a time, transpire under the radar of regulators and speculators. On the other hand, media/money granularity can also result in “flexible accumulation,” the post-nation manufacturing of information/financial/mathematical tools such as seen in the derivatives market that is increasingly difficult to regulate, litigate, or access if you are a citizen.

Digital Money as Democratizing

The granularity of digital money can create opportunities for access by materially poor people to small investment-able capital. This form of capital democratization is dependent upon new technologies and networks. Digital money, largely a numerical system within ornate cultural contexts, is easily made granular and digitally shared via phone or internet from person to person, micro-lender to person, and employer to person. Such transactions on unregulated communication networks has democratized new forms of money sharing, saving, and transfer.

While it isn’t popular in the United States, mobile granular financing has exploded in Kenya. For instance, Vodaphone affiliate Safaricom started m-Pesa, a mobile money transfer in Kenya in 2003. M-Pesa has 12 million users out of 17 million mobile phone users representing 70% of the mobile market in Kenya and 21% of the Kenyan GDP flows through the system, wrote mPay Connect founder Menekse Gencer in 2011. It works and it’s profitable for Vodaphone shareholders. And yet its commercialization balances any breathless optimism about m-Pesa’s democratizing impact.

This democratization of capital provides an opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with the overbearing symbology that is money. It also invites us to reconsider basic issues of financial autonomy and agency. How will mobile money challenge, magnify, or articulate with local customs? As digital currencies evolve will they be pegged to national or international banks? How will they be regulated and by whom? How are they insured and what backs their legitimacy? As these pragmatic questions are answered and applied digital money will likely move further from democratization and nearer to financialization.

Financialization of Digital Money

Few have bank accounts but the 1.7 billion materially poor people will have a cell phone in 2012. This phone can be used to make calls, many can take photos and videos, upload them to the internet, and, increasingly, receive and give money. Even before this form of digital money there were banks micro-lending. Following CK Prahalad’s claim that the collective material wealth at the bottom of pyramid can make development profitable, a number of microfinance organizations went into non-profit “business.” Kiva, who started in 2005, the same year as YouTube, is the most recognizable microlender for Westerners. Kiva founders were inspired by a talk by Muhammad Yunus at Stanford. Yunus, of course, started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the first microfinance organization. Kiva, Grameen, Yunus and the following, Banco Compartamos, are all vigorously successful and have all claimed to alleviate poverty. Such philanthrocapitalism is rich with contradictions. The World Bank, for instance, is the largest micro-lender in the world. The problematic financialization of granular money is evident in Banco Compartamos that started as a non-profit micro-lending bank to materially poor Oaxacans, took a shot at becoming private in an IPO, raised a billion dollars, and made its shareholders wealthy. Yunus was outraged by the high interest rates and simple bald privatization of the now profitable banco.

While the granularity of digital money can create capital access and capital democratization, it can also create access for corporate financialization. By financialization I refer basically to commercial or market tactics and discourses; of tacking profit generating financial instruments onto each grain of digital money and a charge onto each node it its circuitous pathway through the technological and social network. This is an important facet of “flexible accumulation” which refers both to the global mobility of capital as well as the instrumentalization of social life.

Mobile Media Democratization

The democratization of digital money is spiritually linked to the tactical and discursive interventions of local entrepreneurs who “hacked” into public systems –satellite television, electricity, water– that had been privatized. My research into the history of cable and satellite “guerrilla television” producers reveals how techniques and rationalities are mobilized by marginalized producers to gain access to systems of media power closed by economic or political power. The process goes something like this. A disruptive network communication technology evolves out of tinkerer communities (radio, cable television) or large-scale federal investment (satellite, internet). The indigenous or local innovators are either responsible for the technology, as in the case of radio and cable television, or adapt to exploit it like early internet hackers, public access television producers, and phone phreaks. Examples include TVTV, a psychedelic television producer community who created an opening on cable television in the 1970s and Deep Dish TV, a progressive producer collective who exploited inexpensive satellite rents to distribute their anti-war message. They used their policy discourse and interventionary practices to exploit an opening in an otherwise closed system. These opening can provide the context for the democratization of (capital) production. These examples of media democratization are from the pre-digital phase, how does granularity impact media democracy as well as the financialization of media?

Mobile Media Financialization

Granularity impacts two forms of media financialization: personalization and fragmentation. The obsession the Google founders Page and Brin have with artificial intelligence is dutifully documented by Nick Carr in The Big Switch. They hope to know enough about each of us through recording our search records to be able to recommend consumer solutions to life. This they call personalization, the individualization of search. This ‘give-them-what-they-appear-to-like’ mentality includes searches we do on politics as Eli Pariser explains, keeping us in homogenous “filter bubbles.” Just yesterday it was reported that Google’s personalization ambition has been branded as “Search,  Plus Your World” to honor how they merge their search data with the person data we freely give them on their fledgling social network Google+. The point is that every granular piece of personal data has a price. It is on these grains of identity that Google and Facebook hang their future business plans.

Google is financializing another stream of granular data, the video clip. Beginning back in 2007, I began documenting the transformation of amateur to professional YouTubers. By the end of 2011, this transformation is now complete and YouTube is fully prepared for the convergence of broadband home entertainment by creating the Partner program, buying Next New Networks, and recently enshrining 100 top video producers. Many of the professionalized channels are vloggers whose work is not granular in the traditional sense of the term (micro-payments or lines of code) but it is granular in reference to the lengthy documentaries, over-cooked television talk shows, and studio call in shows of the past. They are short and often include ever more granular clips. Ray William Johnson, the most subscribed and viewed YouTube celebrity built his business around making fun of little clips. Kind of like America’s Funniest Home Videos for tweens. Taken as a whole, from the semi-famous vloggers making almost a million dollars a year from revenue sharing with Google to the one-hit wonder who uploads an addictively watchable cat video and who make a few thousand dollars for Google and herself, granularity is part of the financialization as well as democratization of visual media.

Possible Social Consequences

What are the possible global and local impacts of the theory that granularity is turning money and media into objects easily interchangeable, financialized, and democratized? In essence I am concerned with the manufacturing and exploitation of desire, the commercialization of bio-politics, and the death of democracy. I worry about the emergence of a corporation capable of exploiting the verisimilitude of money/media and developing financial/media instruments that can control and monetized the smallest units of both symbolic systems. I worry about the capacities of these money/media corporations to manufacture ubiquitous entertainment environments that can extract financial rewards based on phenomenologically inconsequential but altogether quantifiable granular units of sensual attention. I worry about the media, which includes journalism, being colonized by financial interests to such a degree that there is no media (and no journalism) without a financial product immediately inscribed in its metadata. That would negate any democratization granularity would produce.

And yet, I have faith in the rationalities and techniques of the indigenous innovators, phone phreakers, “guerrilla television” producers, and hacktivists to intervene in this worrisome future.

This post is largely inspired by Anke Schwittay’s excellent 2011 article, “The financial inclusion assemblages: Subjects, technics, rationalities” in Critique of Anthropology 31[4]:381-401.

]]> /2011/09/30/darwinian-tax-reform/ /2011/09/30/darwinian-tax-reform/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:27:58 +0000 /?p=6156 Continue reading Darwinian Tax Reform →]]> Prima facie the notion of applying ecological theory to challenge our understanding of the national economy sounds intensely intriguing. So it was with great expectations that I read economist Robert Frank’s recent NYT piece based on his new book, “The Darwin Economy.” He presents the same idea in precis, here. Unfortunately the results did not live up to the promise of such an innovative idea.

Frank’s stated ambition is to use Darwin to critique Adam Smith on the basis of their different understandings of competition. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), Smith argued that as an individual pursues his or her own self-interest the outcome, without the individual ever intending to do so, can be beneficial to all of society. For example, as merchants compete with each other in their efforts to win customers the result is technological innovation, a collective good.

As a counterpoint Frank offers an example from the animal kingdom that he argues illustrates how Darwin’s theory better explains market behavior. Bull elk have enormous antlers that they use to compete with other males for access to mates. As the bull with the largest rack of antlers typically wins, competition has encouraged an “arms race” resulting in ever larger racks of antlers. Truthfully, the antlers are much bigger than they need to be. Consequently when bull elk flee from predators such as wolves they often get their racks tangled in trees, slowing them down and making them susceptible to predation. Thus, Frank concludes with Darwin contra Smith, in a competition things that are beneficial to the individual can result in an outcome that is detrimental to the group.

I’ll pause here for you to snort derisively.

Frank continues, if the elk could “vote” they might decide to start growing their antlers to only half their size. They could continue to compete among themselves, in fact the scale of the individual competition would remain exactly the same if everyone’s antlers were 50% smaller. At the same time such a deal would expedite their retreat into the forest when pursued by wolves, an increase in the public good. Simply put, the elk’s antlers are bigger than they need to be so cutting down on excess antler growth would eliminate the waste generated by the arms race of competition.

In turning his attention to the American economy, Frank observes a similar pattern of arms race-like competition in the quest to obtain social status through luxury purchases. As the wealthiest acquire status symbols so too do the middle and lower classes race to keep up by spending money in a never ending competition for prestige. The result is a society living beyond its means. Whereas elk “voting” to change their antler size is a fantasy, we can use policy to alter wasteful spending patterns and increase savings by replacing our progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax. This is not to be confused with a valued added tax, national sales tax or flat tax endorsed by some libertarians, which he recognizes is rightly decried as regressive. Frank’s formula goes like this:

 Taxes Paid = (Adjusted Gross Income – Annual Savings) * (Progressive Rate Structure)

The result of implanting this tax structure, Frank writes, would be that the wealthiest would reign in excessive spending on status goods to avoid the consumption tax. This would relax the pressure to “keep up with the Jones,” prompting the middle and lower classes to follow suit. Of course, there would still be competition for prestige expressed in consumer goods, cars, and real estate, but everything would be scaled back. The progressive consumption tax would generate an economic surplus at the household level. It is the tax structure Charles Darwin would have endorsed and Adam Smith never would have thought of.

Something’s wrong here and it begins with Frank’s misreading of Darwin. The example of elk’s antlers is, properly speaking, one of sexual selection. In “On the Origin of the Species” (1859) Darwin presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, which wonderfully explained why all polar bears have thick coats and all giraffes have long necks. Over time any trait beneficial to the individual will spread through the population if it helps them adapt to selective pressures in their environment. But Darwin struggled to explain things like the ornate patterns of butterfly wings, which don’t seem to have anything to do with the environmental pressures, or the peacock’s tail which, frankly, seems to be detrimental to the individual’s survival.

It wasn’t until “The Descent of Man” (1871) that Darwin hit upon the theory of sexual selection. These things are not to enhance the survival of the individual or help them adapt to the environment but to advertize their fitness as a mate. Frank’s elk example fails because he only considers the male’s point view. Males compete, but females choose. It is female choice that has led to spread of large antlers through the elk population not male competition.

Males and females have different reproductive strategies stemming from the fact that they invest different amounts of energy into the reproductive process. Females have a limited number of eggs, when they are pregnant they cannot take another mate, and after giving birth spend time and energy caring for the young. In terms of reproductive success, females do best when they are choosy and pick a male endowed with the best genes. Males can produce sperm by the millions and after taking one mate can increase their fitness by quickly taking another. Males improve their reproductive success by competing with other males in an effort to increase the quantity of females they mate with.

If you can take that and apply it to economics, great. But that’s not what Frank does. To him Darwin’s theory is just a handy metaphor.

Nowhere does Darwin say that competition among individuals does not always produce results beneficial to the group. That is a conclusion Frank comes to because he’s reading through this lens that forwards agenda for new tax policy. Natural selection doesn’t care about groups, it only ever acts on individuals. It doesn’t really care about survival either, rather “winning” at natural selection means reproductive success. Evolution is the aggregate result of natural selection shaping the frequency of variations within a population. Therefore, no bull elk would have a huge and unwieldy rack of antlers if the benefits of having them did not outweigh the costs.

This is to say nothing of Frank’s weird ideas about social prestige. Maybe this is explained better in the book length work? I’d be interested to see if he sees himself as engaging with Thurston Veblen, another economist who had a misguided understanding of evolution.

The prospect of applying ecological theory to contemporary economic policy is stimulating. That kernel of Frank’s argument is brilliant. Economics, of course, gave rise to modern ecology. After all Darwin had his “Eureka!” moment when he finally got around to reading Thomas Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798). Malthus, an economist, argued that as the human population continues to grow so too will the pool of available laborers, the multitude of unemployed will depress wages resulting in widespread poverty. Existence is a struggle because resources will always be limited and individuals must compete to access them. When populations exceed their available resources the result is famine, disease, and war.

Ecology grew directly out of economics, epitomized in this historic moment when Darwin incorporates Malthus. My wife, a fisheries ecologist, teaches an evolution class for biology majors using a textbook titled, “The Economy of Nature.” At a very fundamental level ecology and economics are about understanding similar things. What if you could take the insights of ecology and formulate them into a critique of economy? I would be excited to see the results! Too bad Frank failed to follow through.

Frank’s usage of Darwin does not go beyond analogy. Essentially it amounts to little more than a rhetorical move whereby the economist seeks to borrow Darwin’s authority to sell his idea of a progressive consumption tax. Incidentally, I had never heard of such a thing before and maybe it’s a worthwhile policy to consider. But it has nothing to do with Darwin or natural selection.

There are a couple of issues dominating the discussion. The first is whether the protesters who supported Hazare are dupes of right-wing parties — a claim which echoes similar debates about the Tea Party Movement in the US? The second is whether the bill being proposed by Hazare will make India more democratic by cutting down on corruption, or less democratic by creating a government body with too much power over elected representatives of the people? And the third issue is whether or not ridding the nation of corruption will make for a more just society, or whether corruption offers the disenfranchised important wiggle-room in dealing with state power, wiggle-room usually preserved for the elite?

I don’t have much insight into the first two questions, although I’ll admit that my sympathies usually lie with writers like Arundhati Roy who has been very critical of Hazare and his supporters. I do, however, have some small insight into the issue of corruption in India, having recently completed a documentary film in which corruption was one of the central themes. My wife, Shashwati Talukdar, and I have spent the past five years making frequent trips to an urban ghetto in Ahmedabad, in Western India, where we filmed a troupe of young actors who use street theater to protest against police brutality and corruption. I have also published two academic articles about the history and ethnography of the community.

The Chhara are one of 198 communities throughout India, an estimated 60 million people in India today, who were labeled “born criminals” by the British under the “Criminal Tribes Act,” first passed in 1871. Even though the act was abolished, the stigma of criminality still remains, and it is difficult for the Chhara to find legitimate work. As a result, many turn to brewing liquor, which is illegal in the dry state of Gujarat. It is this home-brewed liquor that is the focus of much of the day-to-day corruption which pervades the community. The police turn a blind eye to the strong-smelling alcohol stills bubbling away in nearly two thirds of the homes, while simultaneously taking a cut of the profits in the form of bribes. Costumers come to Chharanagar from all over the city to get a drink.

While this seems like a win-win situation, one which might support the claim by some of the Kafila bloggers that corruption is empowering for the poor, the truth is both darker and more complicated. In fact, both the police and the Chhara are trapped in a vicious circle with no way of getting out. The police refused to be interviewed for the film, so we didn’t get tell their story as fully as we would have liked, but we’ve been able to piece together bits and pieces over the years.

In short, applicants to the police force have to pay bribes to get into the police academy, but they can’t afford the bribes, so they have to borrow the money at exorbitant rates from money-lenders. To pay off the interest on the loans they then need to collect bribes, and because the Chhara community generates a fair amount of illegal revenue, they all wish to be assigned to the local police station which oversees the Chhara community, but getting assigned there requires another hefty bribe… Because the Police depend on the illegal activities of the Chhara for their livelihood they will even resort to force to keep Chhara from “going straight.” They also administer beatings and torture to ensure that the bribes are paid in a regular and timely manner.

Nor did bribery seem to significantly protect the Chhara from arbitrary detention and torture. Instead, what worked for the community was the ability to organize around street theater. While problems persist, the existence of Budhan Theatre (the name of the street theater movement) has helped temper the worst excesses of police violence. On the other hand, in Bhavnagar, a coastal town with a Chhara community that also brews liquor, the situation was much worse. We also saw significant class differences in both communities. It is often the most vulnerable (i.e. poor widows) who were subject to the worst violence.

Having said all that, if corruption were magically eliminated, I’m not sure it would be a good thing for the Chhara – at least not in the short term. While there are new opportunities emerging for the more educated sections of the community, a significant number of Chhara still depend on illegal activities for their income.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta argues that corruption offers wiggle-room to those who fail to easily fit within the four corners of the law:

For the vast majorities who face the glare of documents, the demand for transparency, the imperative to come clean and be visible – corruption offers an occasional patch of friendly shade. Corruption, at least as a certain looseness with the law and with the regulatory power of the legal apparatus, is what keeps this society humane at its deeper, darker recesses.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Certainly corruption helps the less fortunate Chhara make ends meet when they can’t find more legitimate employment; but the corruption we observed in Chharangar cannot be described as “humane” by any stretch of the imagination. Corruption keeps the Chhara (as well as the police) trapped in a cycle of violence, and the only way out has been the grassroots political organizing of Budhan Theatre. Gramsci said that “between coercion and consent lies corruption and fraud” which I think aptly describes the situation in Chharangar, where “common sense” is very much determined by the logic of corruption which pervades daily life. I worry about those who would romanticize petty corruption as liberating, even as I acknowledge that the absence of corruption may very well be worse…

About a year ago, I gave my old friend Keith Hart a draft of my new book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and asked him what he thought of it. “It’s quite remarkable,” he ultimately replied. “I don’t think anyone has written a book like this in a hundred years.”

The reason I’m not embarrassed to recount the incident is because I’m still not sure it was meant as a compliment. If you think of most books of the sort people used to write a hundred years ago but no longer do—Frazer’s Golden Bough, Spengler’s Decline of the West, let alone, say, Gobineau’s Inequality of the Human Races—there’s usually an excellent reason why they don’t.

But in a way, Keith had it exactly right. The aim of the book was, indeed, to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor. History will judge whether it’s still possible to pull this sort of thing off (let alone whether I’m the person who will be able to do it.) But it struck me that if there was ever a time, the credit crisis —and near collapse of the global economy in 2008—afforded the perfect opportunity. In the wake of the disaster, it was as if suddenly, everyone wanted to start asking big questions again. Even The Economist, that bastion of neoliberal orthodoxy, was running cover headlines like “Capitalism: Was It A Good Idea?” It seemed like it would suddenly be possible to have a real conversation, to start asking not just “what on earth is a credit default swap?” but “What is money, anyway? Debt? Society? The market? Are debts different from other sorts of promises? Why do we treat them as if they were? Are existing economic arrangements really, as we’ve been told for so long, the only possible ones?”

That lasted about three weeks and then governments put a 13-trillion dollar band-aid over the problem and started the usual chant of “move along, move along, there’s nothing to see here.”

Still, it strikes me this is likely to be only a temporary hiatus. Just as the true crisis shows every sign of having been merely postponed, so has the conversation been put on hold. Someone has got to try to start it up again, and who better than anthropologists—those scholars whose appointed role, at least in the past, has been to remind everyone that social possibilities are far more rich and wide-ranging than we normally imagine—to try to kick it off?

Given Savage Minds’ dedication to “increasing the public face of anthropology” I thought this might be an interesting place to discuss the issue—and the editors agreed. They suggested, however, that rather than writing one long screed, I write a series of shorter posts, which are easier to digest and tend to spark more focused discussion.

So I will start by talking about some of the issues I grappled with when trying to put together the debt book, hopefully, to compare notes with others out there who have doing, or thinking about doing, something along the same lines.

In the past, I have mainly written either for academic audiences, political/activist audiences, or occasionally both. This one was to be different. I was writing for a commercial press (Melville House) with a much larger, popular audience, in mind—potentially, given the subject-matter, one including popular economics buffs (a sizeable population in the US) and followers of current political affairs.

So: what was to be the model for a big questions sort of book, and how to write a book that would still be scholarly, but not academic?

This is what I came up with:

Of all the models I considered, the most amenable turned out to be the approach adopted by Marcel Mauss. This might seem odd. especially because Mauss never actually wrote a book; he’s mainly famous for a series of essays. Yet many of these essays—not just the Gift, but his essay on the person, techniques of the body (where he coins the term “habitus”), sacrifice and magic—really have had a profound effect both on all subsequent scholarship, and, to differing degrees, political and social debates ever since. Mauss had an uncanny ability to ask the right questions—often, questions he was the first to pose, and which have become mainstays of theoretical debate ever since. His was also an appealing model because Mauss was both a serious, committed activist (he was especially active in the French cooperative movement), and a scholar of remarkable erudition. His problem—and this, I suspect, is why he never did write a proper book, despite numerous attempts—was that he was also almost unimaginably disorganized, and therefore, terrible at exposition. I suspect if alive today he would have been quickly diagnosed with severe ADD.

Still, this basic organizational structure struck me as still viable. Basically, what Mauss would do would be to first frame his question—“what is it that makes the market seem so morally hollow?” or “how did we end up coming to attach such significance to the individual?”—and then both bring a wide range of ethnographic examples to bear, but also, to frame his question in the grandest possible scale of world history. Obviously, nowadays, one would not frame one’s history in quite the same way. There was always a certain evolutionist strain in Mauss’ writing. But if you read his arguments carefully, evolutionist assumptions are always in tension with an equally powerful insistence that almost all social possibilities—democracy and monarchy, individualism and communism, gifts and money—are simultaneously present in any social context, and always have been, and that all that really varies from age to age is how they come together, and which tend to be seized on and promoted over the others as the truly defining features of society or human nature. It struck me that if one develops this strain, and makes it explicit, the larger structure still works: and this is precisely how I organized the debt book. First I set out the principles that one can assume will always be at play. Examples of these are: the three moral logics that can be appealed to in economic transactions—which I labeled as “communism” (after Mauss), “exchange,” and “hierarchy”—or the dual nature of money (after Keith Hart), as simultaneously commodity and social relation (or more specifically, virtual credit system.) Then I moved from ethnographic comparison to constructing a grand historical narrative, though in my case, demonstrating more that history seems to follow a pattern of alternating cycles dominated by virtual credit money, and bullion money, than that it’s going in any particular overall direction.

But what about the style? How to write the sort of book one wishes Mauss would have written, rather than the sort of difficult, convoluted, frequently disorganized essays he actually did?

At least in the English-speaking world, there have been two dominant approaches taken by scholars trying to reach a broader audience. One might be deemed the Pop Mode, familiar from people who most anthropologists dislike, like say Jared Diamond, or Evolutionary Psychologists, or in the area of money, perhaps Jack Weatherford. In Pop Mode, one affects an accessible and breezy style, much easier to understand than ordinary academic prose, but, rather than seriously challenging one’s audiences’ assumptions, essentially provides them with reasons they never would have thought of to continue to believe what they already assume to be true. (By the way, I didn’t make up this definition of pop scholarship, but now I can’t remember where I got it from.) The alternative is the exact opposite. I’ll dub it the Delphic or Oracular mode (this term I am making up on the spot, but I think it kind of works.) This is the approach of, say, Deleuze or  Baudrillard, or actually, almost any of the trendy French, German, or Italian theorists who gain followers outside of academia, usually in bohemia or among those working in the culture industry. Here the aim is usually to challenge as many common-sense assumptions as possible, but also, to do it in a style even more obscure than ordinary academic writing—so obscure, in fact, that its very obscurity generates a kind of charismatic authority, as devotees spend untold hours of their lives arguing with one another about what their favorite Great Thinker might have actually been on about.

Neither seemed particularly appealing, and anyway, the second isn’t really an option for an Anglophone scholar—we are generally only allowed to be secondary interpreters, or at best, perhaps, like Michael Hardt, Batman-and-Robin-style faithful sidekick, to some Continental oracle. What then the alternative?

Well, the book is my answer. An accessible work, written in plain English, that actually does try to systematically challenge common sense assumptions. The problem is that merely trying to write accessibly isn’t enough. I had to confront any number of other issues both about style and content, and some of the results are worth contemplating – or at least passing on. Here are three things I think I learned:

• jokes and little stories, often off-set like quotes, are helpful. Zizek pioneered this but I think it works out (though some of his own are getting a bit repetitive at this point). Mainstream editors don’t seem to like Bourdieu-style alternating between different fonts or styles of print, but if they can be prevailed upon, readers actually seem to like it.
• Mainstream audiences don’t care what other scholar is wrong. This cannot be emphasized enough. The difference between an academic work and a scholarly-but-not-academic work mainly comes down to this. Nobody wants to hear why your approach to the Oedipus myth is better than Levi-Strauss, let alone, what flawed assumptions caused Levi-Strauss to get it so terribly wrong, and how Rene Girard does rather better but is still not as right as me because he overlooked… whatever. No. Resist! Just tell them something interesting and new about Oedipus and why this take might actually be true. Obviously, if you are critiquing things that actually are common wisdom (Adam Smith’s theory of the origin of money, in my case…) that’s different. But if it’s an in-house quarrel, keep it for in-house publications. Or the footnotes.
• About those footnotes: back up your statements with extensive, detailed references that actually do say what you think they say. Good scholarship is more appreciated by popular audiences than academic ones. This is a bit scandalous but I have found it to be true. I have about 100 pages of notes and bibliography in the book and non-academics commenting on the book rarely fail to note, approvingly, that I don’t ask anyone to take my word for what I say, but back up all my claims with numerous references. Some show signs of actually having checked a few to make sure I was on the level. It’s an interesting comment on academia that we almost never do this. To the contrary: I’ve noticed whole small academic literatures based on footnotes in Mauss where clearly no one ever bothered to look up the cited sources (since they don’t say anything like he claims they did.) I’ve seen two reviews of my own work, published in very prestigious academic journals, where veritably no statement made about the contents of the book was accurate—I mean, with statements that were just over-the-top false, or obviously dishonest, like taking quotes from the book and removing the word “not” from them—and apparently, despite the fact that they were also hatchet jobs, the editor just waved them ahead unchecked. Ironically, no such a review could ever have been published in a magazine like Harpers or The Nation, where there are battalions of fact-checkers who literally test every statement a writer submits for factual accuracy.

So that’s a start: be an even more conscientious scholar, don’t waste time arguing with other academics unless there’s a reason to, and entertaining digressions are okay, especially, if clearly marked as such. Let me leave with that and come back and throw out something about the actual content next week.

In a recent essay called “Anthropologists and the Economists Without History,” Jason Antrosio wrote:

Many anthropologists receive a caricature of economics. This caricature has been promoted by neo-classical economists, who sought dominance and the erasure of heterogeneous approaches. Restoring a fuller history can help to promote a rapprochement between anthropology and economics.

I agree that anthropologists often have a limited picture of what economics is all about, and that we sometimes lump any and all economists in with the neo-classical folks.  I, for one, am guilty of that, and I realize that I need to put some time in to learning more about what economists actually do if I want to move beyond arguments and understandings that are based upon mere caricatures.   Not all economists think alike–and that’s a pretty important point to keep in mind.

Jason also argues that a renewed focus on the history of economic thought might be a good way to bridge anthropology and economics.  Interestingly, Loomnie recently posted something about a project that Bruce Caldwell–from Duke University–is heading, which focuses on putting discussions about methodology and the history of economic thought back into graduate training.  Caldwell states that an emphasis on the history of economic thought has been absent from many economics graduate programs around the country for some time.  Duke, apparently, is one place where this kind of training has survived.  Check out the video and Caldwell’s explanation of his Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke.  Interesting, no?

I would really like to see how this history of economic thought is taught, and what (if any) overlap there is with anthropology (and economic anthropology more specifically).  What kinds of readings are on the table, and does this open up a space for talking about human behavior and economics that moves beyond the standard neo-classical framework?  Some day, actually, would like to spend some time learning how economics grad courses are taught–I really have no idea what they do, how they set up seminars, and why anthropology and economics ends up in such different places when it comes to ideas about human motivations, etc.  I think it would be pretty fascinating, for instance, to sit in on some graduate seminars in economics–but that’s just me.  Dialog–or even debates–require some sort of mutual understanding to actually be interesting (and effective).

When was the last time that anthropologists and economists had a sustained conversation about their overlapping interests in human behavior? Was it waaaaaaay back in 1941 when Knight and Herskovitz had their little fireside chat?  Was it during the infamous debate between the formalists and the substantivists?  What would a renewed conversation–or even debate–between anthropologists and economists look like?  Do we need some kind of collaboration or dialog between anthropologists and economists? What would we all hope to achieve with this? Is there room for dialog, or are the disciplines so theoretically, methodologically, and politically different that there is no possibility for productive engagement?

In their recent book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write about one of their main goals:  “We hope to persuade economists with real world concerns to take an interest in what anthropologists have discovered about the human economy, and in the kinds of theories we have advanced to understand it” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  However, they also make this point quite clear: “There is not much hope for dialogue with those who define economics exclusively as the application of an individualistic logic of utility maximization to all domains of social life” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  Ultimately, they say, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists” (Hann and Hart 2011:162).

David Graeber, in his seminal book Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, argues: “In fact, the effort to reconcile the two disciplines is in many ways inherently contradictory. This is because economics and anthropology were created with almost entirely opposite purposes in mind” (Graeber 2001:7).**  Anthropologists and economists do approach the study of human behavior and society in some radically different ways.  However, it’s pretty safe to say that not all economists think alike–and the same can of course be said of anthropologists.  So maybe, indeed, there is room for some sort of productive engagement.

One thing that does seem pretty clear to me is that anthropologists talk about economists much more than the reverse.  When was the last time you saw an economist refer to an anthropologist in any way?  Anthropologists, especially those with an economic bent, talk about economists and their BIG IDEAS all the time.  The only problem?  I am not sure there’s really anyone on the other end of the metaphorical phone, if you know what I mean (they aren’t necessarily all that concerned with the BIG IDEAS from anthropology).  I could be wrong, but for the most part I do not think that economists spend much time, if any, reading about what anthropologists have to say about economic issues.

What does this mean?  Well, considering the spate of economic “events” that have taken place since 2008, I think it’s probably high time for anthropologists–who have more than their fair share of experience studying human behavior–to get themselves back into larger debates and discussions about economics.  It’s definitely time for some rethinking about the relationships between individuals, the market, and society, that’s for sure.  And if people aren’t listening, we’ll have to find ways to make our thoughts on these economic matters known.  Sitting around waiting for the Adam Smith’s invisible hand to get this engagement started isn’t doing us any good.  Where should this all start?  Well, as Jason Antrosio argues, a revamped exploration of history would probably be a good place place to begin.

*Here are a few of my favorite posts from Maxine Udall:

Economics: Art or Science?

Amartya Sen: The Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith

Faith-Based Economics

The (Crippled) Invisible Hand

**Graeber’s book, which I just reread this summer, is a fantastic read.  Highly recommended.  Now I just need to get my hands his new book on debt, which also sounds really good.

Karl Polanyi, in a much lauded book that is getting its fair share of attention in these days of economic malaise, argued that the economy should, ideally, serve the interests of society.  Proponents of the self-regulating market basically argued the reverse: that society should in effect be structured according to the supposedly rational logic of the market.  These same sentiments continue to be promulgated by economists, politicians, and pundits today–these are the proponents of the “free market” who seek to fix the economy by cutting it free from the mores of government, rules, and regulations.  Such an arrangement, for Polanyi, was particularly troubling: “Ultimately, that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of a society as an adjunct to the market.  Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in economic systems” (2001:60).

Tourism development is a particularly relevant case in which specific places are made to serve the demands and needs of wider economic markets.  Since my research is in Mexico, I tend to focus on places like Cancun, Acapulco, Chichen Itza, and Los Cabos–but this argument applies elsewhere as well.  Tourism markets go through trends and fads, just like any other market.  One of the most prominent trends in Mexican tourism development these days focuses on luxury and exclusivity (see Berger and Wood 2010).  Los Cabos, which is exemplified by the coastal tourism city of Cabo San Lucas,  may well be one of the new models of tourism, with its focus on high end hotels, marinas, restaurants, and golf courses.

The place where Los Cabos sits today was once little more than a relatively small fishing community on the southern tip of  the Baja California peninsula.  This was in the 1970s and early 1980s.  Today, it has been reshaped–geographically, economically, and architecturally–to attract tourists from around the world (although most come from the United States).  While Los Cabos may indeed bring a certain amount of jobs for Mexican workers (many of them migrate to tourism zones in search of work), make no mistake: it is a place that has been designed to cash in on market trends.  Tourism zones cater to tourists, and they tend to benefit the politicians, investors, and developers who own the land, businesses, hotels, marinas, and golf courses where those tourists spend their money.

These places may be known internally as idyllic, beautiful, and desirable destinations, but they are also notorious for their high socio-economic inequality, if not outright social segregation (see Lopez et al 2006; Clancy 2001; Castellanos 2010; Hiernaux 1999; Wilson 2008).  Places like Cancun and Los Cabos are literally ringed with colonias–urban or semi-urban neighborhoods, settlements, etc–where the standards of living are far below that of the tourism zone itself.  This arrangement is by no means accidental, since these communities service the tourism sector through low wage jobs (see Castellanos 2010 for some specific insight into this relationship).  These are the kinds of images and realities, of course, that you aren’t going to find in airline magazines.  But they are just as much a part of “the tourism experience” as the sandy beaches and comfortable hotels, even if the vast majority of tourists have no idea.  It’s all part of the structure, so to speak.

At this point you may be thinking: Ok, I know where you’re going with this.  You might think that I am just another “critical anthropologist” making the argument that tourism development is “problematic,” and that we need to rethink it, and so on.  Maybe we can move past that at some point.  I am not against tourism development per se, and I am certainly not going to claim that all tourism development is somehow exploitative, negative, and unwanted, or that local people are always passive victims of the grist mill that is economic development.  In fact, many people that I have talked to in various parts of Mexico have some pretty optimistic or hopeful ideas about the potential of tourism development.

Yes, tourism is full of complications and problems, but for many people it translates to opportunities, money, and jobs.  The problems arise when communities or places are completely restructured or transformed according to external ideals, desires, and expectations.  So, in a sense, it often comes down to politics and power: the ability (legally, socially, economically) to fully participate (or not) in the development process itself.  This is based upon what I have seen (and read) so far–and these are exactly the kinds of issues that I will be exploring in my upcoming fieldwork.

All of this comes back to the issue Polanyi brought up way back in 1944: should the economy serve society, or should we allow society to be restructured in such a way that it serves the needs and whims of the economy (i.e. the market)?  In the case of many tourism developments in Mexico, what happens to places like Cancun and Los Cabos when market trends shift?  What happens when places become passé, when they not are no longer the hot destinations?  What then of all the hotels, marinas, and other structures that were specifically designed to appeal to one moment in time?  What happens to all of the people who migrate across the country to find work in or around the tourism industry when the flow of moneyed travelers dries up?  In essence, these tourist spaces are examples of ordering society according to the logic of the market, rather than the long term interests or needs of society (communities who bear the brunt of tourism, etc) on the whole.

I don’t really have any firm conclusions at this point, since many of the issues and questions that I am dealing with here need more empirical and ethnographic investigation.  But I find this idea of making places according to market trends–rather than the needs of community and society–to be particular interesting and useful.  Landscapes and communities throughout Mexico–and beyond–are in the midst of dramatic transformations that seek to remake places to draw in tourists.  These tourists are in reality an abstract mass of traveling consumers whose tastes are both fickle and constantly in flux.  One day a place can be a tourist “hot spot,” and the next it can be almost completely forgotten (reminiscent of the plot in Alex Garland’s novel “The Beach“).  Polanyi–and the contemporary economic anthropologists who are following in his tracks–are definitely on to something here: the ways in which we think about and enact society in relation to the market isn’t just some abstract, theoretical issue.

So who is served by tourism development in Mexico?  Well, let me put it this way: If tourism development is only geared toward satisfying the exogenous desires of tourists (i.e. market demand), with little concern for the interests of communities themselves, it seems that society will indeed be served–as curious, quaint, nostalgic tidbits to be consumed like a daily special and then unceremoniously cast aside when the next best thing arrives on the map.  As Polanyi argues: a society subordinated to the unfettered whims of the market, rather than the reverse, is nothing more than a recipe for conflict, inequality, and, ultimately, disaster.  In the global shell game that is international tourism development, the interests and long-term welfare of society should be a primary concern–rather than the market–since the much idealized “free hand” of Adam Smith sure isn’t going to provide any jobs when formerly desirable places like Cancun (and, someday, Los Cabos)  are no longer gracing the headlines of the latest trend-setting travel magazines, TV shows, and web sites.

*Why yes, this is indeed a not so subtle reference to a famous short story and an episode of the Twilight Zone, all at once.

References

Berger, Dina, and Andrew Grant Wood.  2010.  Holiday in Mexico.  Durham: Duke University Press.

Castellanos, M. Bianet.  2010.  A Return to Servitude.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clancy, Michael.  2001.  Exporting Paradise.  New York: Pergamon.

Hiernaux, Daniel Nicholas.  1999.  Cancun Bliss.  In The Tourist City.  Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds.  Pp. 124-142.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

López-López, Álvaro, Judith Cukier, and Álvaro Sánchez Crispín. 2006. Segregation of Tourist Space in Los Cabos, Mexico. Tourism Geographies Vol. 8(4): 359-379.

Polanyi, Karl.  2001[1944].  The Great Transformation.  Boston: Beacon Press.

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