The anthropology of money and finance : between ethnography and world history

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings and prospects, while referring back to the discipline‘s founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. From the 1980s the anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance especially have taken off. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and in attempts to reform it.http://www.annualreviews.org/hb201

Culture at the Country Level

Contains fulltext : 177082_a.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access)This chapter introduces and critically discusses the idea of measuring the culture of countries and cross-national differences therein. We start by elaborating the theoretical foundations for studying culture at the country level. We highlight the use of countries or nations as a unit of analysis and pay special attention to the way in which a group-level construct such as culture has implications at lower levels of analysis, affecting the values and beliefs of individuals. After briefly tracing the history of national culture studies, we then offer a short description of the current leading frameworks of national culture such as those by Hofstede, GLOBE, Inglehart, and Schwartz. Throughout the chapter, the emphasis is on debates concerning extant frameworks conceptualizing and quantifying cultural differences between countries in different dimensions, which feeds into open questions concerning culture at the country level. We end with some concluding remarks

Análisis del concepto de recursos naturales en dos estudios de caso en Argentina Analysis of the concept of renewable natural resources in two case studies in Argentina

El concepto de "recursos naturales", al igual que la misma idea de "naturaleza", presentan una dificultad para ser pensados en la investigación social, ya que su misma etimología nos hace suponer un carácter "esencial" o inmutable. Pero los "recursos naturales" no son dados de manera objetiva, sino que se relacionan con necesidades sociales específicas. De manera que tanto históricamente como en el presente estos han sido objeto de disputa entre actores en posiciones sociales desiguales y la propia noción de "recursos naturales" ha ido modificando su significado. En el presente trabajo nos proponemos desandar, a partir del análisis de dos casos etnográficos específicos, los conceptos de "recurso natural renovable" y "recurso natural no renovable". Como un modo de hacer visible aquello que se oculta cuando una categoría de la ciencia, en este caso, de la economía, forma parte del sentido común.<br>The concept of "natural resources", in the same way as the idea of "nature" is difficult to be thought in the social investigation, probably because its own etymology supposes some essential or unchangeable characteristic. But "natural resources" are not objectively defined, but they are related to specific social needs. So, historically and nowadays resources have been under dispute among social actors unequally positioned. In these arguments, the very notion of "natural resources" itself has been changing its meaning. In this paper "Natural Resources" and "Renewable and Non renewable" classification are reviewed through the analysis of two specific ethnographic cases in Argentina, as a way of making visible what is hidden when a scientific concept, in this case a concept from the economics, takes part in the common-sense