Moral economy: Rethinking a radical concept

This article argues that the original thrust of the moral economy concept has been understated and attempts to cast it in a new light by bringing class and capital back into the equation. First, it reviews the seminal works of Thompson and Scott, tracing the origins of the term. It deals with the common conflation of moral economy with Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness, differentiating the two concepts and scrutinizing the ways in which these perspectives have been criticized. Second, it dispels dichotomist conceptions separating economic practice from morality, or embedded configurations from disembedded ones. Against binary views of the market as a boundless realm penetrating previously untainted moral spheres, it posits that social reproduction is characterized by an entanglement of values, which can only be fully grasped by delineating the contours and characteristics of capital accumulation. Third, it contends that moral economy is a dynamic concept because it accounts for class-informed frameworks involving traditions, valuations and expectations. Finally, it argues that moral economy can enrich the concept of hegemony because it pays attention to the often-contradictory values that guide and sustain livelihood practices, through which cultural domination is reproduced or altered

Handshake Nostalgics and Starter-uppers: Restructuring Governance and Citizenship in Southern Europe

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is a general process of readjustment of socio-political relations, power geometries and hierarchies within fundamental segments of society. This article tackles precisely such transformations by analyzing emerging practices, legitimacies and struggles around citizenship in south European periphery. Ideologies, representations and deriving practices around models of financial support are deeply engrained within particular production structures, embedded themselves within particular historical social relations, moralities and claims. By looking at two very differently -almost opposed- produced regions, the Industrial District of SMEs in Veneto, and the large electricity production site of Kozani, we ethnographically explore the dialectics between the political meanings attached to 'private' and 'public', while inhabiting with our analysis the mutually constitutive relationships between the economic and the political

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not

ONG, classe sociale et culture en Serbie (une anthropologie de l'aide à la démocratie)

Cette thèse analyse la "révolution associative" en Serbie, le boom des ong locales depuis la dissolution de la yougoslavie. Loin des vues normatives qui célèbrent les ONG comme incarnations démocratiques, il faut expliquer ce phénomène à travers ses liens dialectiques avec l'industrie de l'aide, l'économie politique mondiale et les projets néolibéraux de restructuration étatique. J'analyse tout d'abord ce que la démocratisation fait en pratique, les épistémologies du changement social qu'elle produit, la manière dont elle essentialise l'Histoire et suggère des techniques de soi comme forme d'intervention sociale. J'examine ensuite les politiques culturelles autour du cadre dominant "démocrates contre nationalistes" à travers le prisme analytique de classe: en exposant le cosmopolitisme pratique que les ONG de salon déploient comme stratégie de légitimation pour se consolider, et en analysant les "nationalstes" à travers des expériences de dépossessions symboliques et matérielles, je montre aussi que faire des "projets" déradicalise la production du savoir et l'action politique, en même temps qu'il produit un nouveau précariat. Enfin, je discute le conflit assumé entre ONG et état via la réforme de l'état providence. Je soutiens que les hiérarchies de pouvoir se situent plutôt entre une élite technocratique d'experts, circulant entre ONG-donateurs-état et les ONG et institutions publiques qui fournissent des services, stigmatisées à cause de leur "résistance" aux réformes. L'aide, je conclus, crée non seulement les conditions de sa propre reproduction institutioneele, mais surtout, contribue à la reproduction sociale de systèmes mondiaux inégalement structurés.This thesis sets out to unpack the associational revolution in Serbia, the boom of local NGOs since the violent Yugoslav dissolution. Far from normative views, celebrating NGOs as democratic incarnations, we have to explain this phenomenon within its dialectical constitution with global systems of political economy, aid, and current neoliberal state restructuring. First, I analyze what democratization actually does, what kind of epistemologies of change it produces, how it collides to local political constellations, how it pathologizes history and suggests technologies of the self as a form of social intervention. Second, I examine the politics of culture behind the dominant framework Democrats vs. Nationalists through the analytical prism of class: by depicting the practical cosmopolitanism that the salon NGOs deploy as a legitimizing strategy for consolidating power; and by analyzing the nationalists through class-based experiences of material and symbolic dispossessions. Third, I look at the art of NGOing; how project-making deradicalizes knowledge and political action; what labor patterns it produces through the formation of a local precariat. Finally, I discuss the overstated NGO-State clash through the welfare reform (outsourcing policy/provision). I argue that power hierarchies are instead to be drawn between a technocratic élite of experts, circulating among NGOs-donors-state, and nonprofit and public institutions in service provision, stigmatized for their resistance . Aid, I conclude, not only creates the conditions for its own institutional reproduction, but critically partakes to the social reproduction of unequally structured global systems.PARIS-Médiathèque MQB (751132304) / SudocSudocFranceF

Moral economy: Rethinking a radical concept

This article argues that the original thrust of the moral economy concept has been understated and attempts to cast it in a new light by bringing class and capital back into the equation. First, it reviews the seminal works of Thompson and Scott, tracing the origins of the term. It deals with the common conflation of moral economy with Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness, differentiating the two concepts and scrutinizing the ways in which these perspectives have been criticized. Second, it dispels dichotomist conceptions separating economic practice from morality, or embedded configurations from disembedded ones. Against binary views of the market as a boundless realm penetrating previously untainted moral spheres, it posits that social reproduction is characterized by an entanglement of values, which can only be fully grasped by delineating the contours and characteristics of capital accumulation. Third, it contends that moral economy is a dynamic concept because it accounts for class-informed frameworks involving traditions, valuations and expectations. Finally, it argues that moral economy can enrich the concept of hegemony because it pays attention to the often-contradictory values that guide and sustain livelihood practices, through which cultural domination is reproduced or altered