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Paper short abstract:

My paper argues that dominant versions of the market have set off the realm of the economic as a sphere of purely human action. By contrast, I highlight the importance of supplementing anthropocentric exchange theories with an attention to more-than- and other-than- human concerns.

Paper long abstract:

The market as commonly understood works to restrict scholarly understandings of lively exchanges between human and other-than-human entities. Market-centric approaches to exchange have built up the economic as a sphere of purely human action and have resulted in the exclusion of non-human agents (with the limited exception of incorporated collectivities), from mainstream exchange theory. By contrast I argue for the necessity of bringing more-than-human and/or other-than-human “moral persons” into our analyses of economic behaviour both beyond and within market worlds.

Conflating the composite “moral persons” of classical models of gift exchange (which incorporated both human and non-human components) and conceptions of transactors as identical with what Debbora Bataglia has called “the skin-bound individual” has inhibited scholars’ ability to see concepts of exchange as a purely human terrain as ideological rather than as natural and normal. As a result, economic relationships have tended to be analysed in a reductive and anthropocentric manner. Exchanges with animals (Nadasdy), gods and spirits (Chakrabarty), and other non-human agencies are by definition excluded from economic analysis.

By contrast I advocate a non-anthropocentric attention to the constitution of moral persons as parties to significant exchanges (at various places on the gift/market spectrum). I briefly discuss contending understandings of a signal and now quasi-mythologized transaction, the “purchase” of Manhattan Island for a trifling sum of beads from local First Nations peoples by 17th century Dutch colonialists in order to highlight the importance of supplementing anthropocentric exchange theory with an attention to more-than- and other-than- human concerns.

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Paper short abstract:

Online and mobile trading apps bring global financial markets into people’s personal devices. App users learn to read and imagine the world through the portfolios they carry in their pockets. Working with users in Singapore, I consider how this arrangement modifies what money does.

Paper long abstract:

With the rise and popularization of online and mobile stock trading applications, global financial markets are now carried around in people’s laptops, handbags and pockets. How do these new configurations of distant and proximate wealth, electronic and physical assets, and macro- and microeconomic concerns change the way that people imagine and interact with their worlds?

This paper draws on ongoing fieldwork with stock trading app users in Singapore, to explore how these technologies are remaking people’s conceptions of value, personhood and obligation. Specifically, I ask how the mediating role of money is being modified. If money is classically theorized as the great agent of abstraction that renders qualitatively incommensurable goods commensurable and brings everything and everyone into “the market,” how does the emergent practice of on-the-go retail investing compel us to rethink the way that money connects, commodifies and alienates? What novel notions and forms of relatedness, fairness and responsibility does money in this instance engender and enforce?

Preliminary findings suggest that stock trading app users in Singapore regularly enact the idea that the significance of events in the world “out there” is their impact on the the stocks in their pocket. Trading apps provide the framework through which users read the news and envision the lives of others. Money in this framework becomes something that objectifies other people, while intensifying one’s relationship to oneself. I expand on this finding and explore its implications for the question of how new market technologies are changing what money does.

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Paper short abstract:

As China closes wet markets and promotes supermarkets in response to emerging viruses, this paper examines the "qualification devices" used by consumers to evaluate the safety of live or pre-slaughtered poultry in situations of uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Infectious disease scientists describe China's so-called "wet markets," where live poultry and other animals are sold, as potential sources of zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19 or pandemic influenza. In line with this assessment, China's own nonggaichao policy calls for the closure of wet markets and their replacement with supermarkets. However, many Chinese consumers purchase food at wet markets, including live animals, because they believe these markets provide healthier, fresher, and safer food. Meanwhile, consumers express concerns about the quality and safety of food sold in supermarkets, particularly in the aftermath of food fraud scandals such as melamine milk powder.

Rather than dismissing consumer perceptions of food safety as misinformed, this paper examines how vendors and consumers evaluate food safety and quality. How do food evaluations differ when applied to live animals versus slaughtered meats? Drawing on the concept of "qualification devices" proposed by STS scholar Michel Callon, the paper compares the techniques used by vendors and consumers to evaluate the qualities of food at a) wet markets and b) supermarkets. Live animal wet markets not only pose distinct risks from slaughtered meats (based in interspecies contact, not food ingestion), but also make available different testing devices for consumers to qualify food safety and quality (based in the intimate use of senses, rather than impersonal trust in official standards or brands). By observing how qualitiative signs are interpreted as indicators of safe or unsafe food, the paper shows how risk and uncertainty are lived in everyday practice.

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Paper short abstract:

Honey and almaciga are targeted via market-based interventions to provide sustainable livelihoods. Yet the materiality of honey and almaciga give rise to vastly different political ecologies perpetuated through the broader patron-client relations and governance of the forest product trade.

Paper long abstract:

Honey and almaciga resin are substances targeted in market-based interventions to provide sustainable livelihoods for indigenous people on Palawan Island. Yet these promotions of potentiality rarely acknowledge the multitude of material disparities between these sticky, flowing, fragrant substances. Focusing on the material qualities honey is valued for, this paper examines how value is created through selling and not selling honey, both of which are partial in making a living. Making a living in this context does not refer to a singular, comprehensive livelihood, rather the use of terms such as livelihood (in English) and kabuhayan or hanapbuhay (in Tagalog) refer to a shifting range of activities and opportunities that are seen to be possible, desirable, permitted, banned, challenging, unappealing, difficult or unattainable by different Tagbanua at different times. Honey flows are seasonal and ebb and flow over multi-year cycles, and these dynamics contribute to the frequent absence of honey from Tagbanua homes and livelihoods. Yet honey has a kind of ongoing presence established through its discussion in terms of sustaining provision. These descriptions provide a stark comparison to livelihood activities more regularly conducted but also considered much less desirable such as almaciga harvesting. While the latter is often used to obtain household necessities, the materiality of honey and resin give rise to vastly different political ecologies perpetuated through the broader patron-client relations and governance of the forest product trade. Something is sustained through almaciga harvesting, but almaciga does not provide Tagbanua with the sustenance that honey can, partially, provide.