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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.