"Money is good, but a friend is better". Uncertainty, orientation to the future and "the economy"

Abstract

à paraître dans Current Anthropology,Based on a long-term ethnography in State-run settlement projects on former sugarcane plantations in Northeast Brazil, the paper questions the evidence of "the economy" as a privileged framework for understanding the life situation of the poor, structured by precariousness and uncertainty about the future. Exploring the polysemy of Portuguese esperar (to wait, to hope and to expect), it analyzes the plurality of orientations to the future among former sugarcane wage workers included as beneficiaries in land reform projects, and their strategies to mitigate uncertainty in various configurations. If radical uncertainty lies out of human hands, relative uncertainty may be acted upon by mobilizing people. While money is desirable, but has a transitory character, the value of friends lies in their potential to 'help', especially in case of a 'crisis'. Ethnography thus suggests to move beyond an 'economic anthropology' aiming to analyze "other economies", and set out to explore the fields of opportunities and frames of reference that structure life situations, and the local versions of oikonomia, in its original meaning of "government of the household"