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- Convenors:
-
Patrice Ladwig
(Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity )
Patrick McKearney (University of Cambridge)
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Rachel Smith (University of Aberdeen)
- Chair:
-
Laura Bear
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Morality
- Location:
- Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) SR1
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how and why people may turn to a language of morality to imagine ways the economy and their position in it seem fraught with ought. It examines comparatively how talk of ethics may relate to other registers for imagining norms at play in (dis)ordering people's economic lives.
Long Abstract:
As promises about what the economic future may herald seem for many to have unraveled over recent decades, people have sought imaginatively to fathom the economic situation they're in and what should be done. One striking empirical phenomenon (with intriguing historical parallels) has been the strongly moralising terms in which people have reckoned with such economic change, whether on global, national, or more personal economic scales. From greedy traders to careless regulators, feckless markets and reckless states, the value-laden language people have drawn on to articulate how economic life ought and ought not to be organised has often turned to "the moral" or "the ethical". Frequently, this has occurred in a complex relationship with other registers for imagining normativity, ranging from rational-technical efficiency, legal rights, and political justice, to the religious and the occult.
This panel seeks to explore how and why people may turn to a language of morality as they imagine ways the economy and their position in it seem fraught with ought. Are there particular historical or ethnographic contexts we can identify comparatively where a turn to ethics becomes more (or less) compelling for people seeking to reckon with socioeconomic change? What may be empirically at stake in such settings, when distinct vocabularies associated with morality or ethics become critical loci for imagining the conjunction and disjunction between technical, legal, political, and religious norms also at play in (dis)ordering people's economic lives?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This introduction gives two illustrations of moral language as a window to imaginaries about economic success, failure and inequality in two ethnographic contexts characterised by the rise of 'prosperity religions'.
Paper long abstract:
This introduction gives two illustrations of moral language as a window to imaginaries about economic success, failure and inequality in two ethnographic contexts characterised by the rising popularity of 'prosperity religions'. We start by considering moral language through Paul Ricoeur's (1970) characterisation of 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. Drawing on this theory, we suggest that documenting moral languages of economic imagination renders the hermeneutics of suspicion into an ethnographic object that anthropologist can decipher.
The first illustration comes from Ghana, where Charismatic Pentecostalism has transformed into a 'public culture' since the past 25 years of economic and political liberalisation. We zoom into a private media company where young professionals work under enthusiastic Charismatic Pentecostal managers who encourage employees to work hard. The young professionals, on their part, circulate gossip about the managers as witches who use Christian management ethos as a 'bluff' to cover their malevolent intentions, namely the objective of sucking life-force out of the employees. The language of gossip reveals the moral ambiguities generated by the combination of Christianity with management practice.
The second part explores the relationship between religious and economic language in Laos. It outlines how certain vocabularies used in Southeast Asian Buddhist ritual practices are employed for thinking and speaking about the economy. It also asks whether ritual as a mode of influencing economic success or failure can be understood as form of language that is 'good to think with' when making sense of the moral implications of capitalist transformations or behaviour.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the private rental market in Britain as characterized by increasingly acrimonious conflicts between an ethics of individual responsibilisation through property investment, and moralising calls for an end to 'parasitic' rent seeking and a universal 'right to a home'.
Paper long abstract:
With the decline of Western welfare states, investment is no longer a marginal game for the rich. As governments promote the virtues of the fully responsibilised subject, property investment has become both a middle-class status symbol, and for many, a necessity to secure income in old age. At the same time, lack of affordable housing especially in cities has led to ubiquitous 'housing crises', as increasing numbers of renters compete for a dwindling number of available homes. The resulting conflicts are commonly framed in strongly moralizing terms, as private landlords are portrayed as 'parasites', 'vampires', and 'greedy profiteers', whose self-interested rent-seeking is seen as a direct cause of widespread homelessness and hardship. At the same time, however, small-scale landlords are often only marginally more financially secure than their tenants, having sunk their modest savings into mortgaged property they stand to lose at the slightest of missteps. With the decline of the mediating role of the state, private renting is therefore increasingly characterized by two competing moral paradigms: an ethics of personal responsibility for one's financial future comes to clash with calls for a universal 'right to a home'. This paper explores the resulting conflicts in Britain, where an army of small-scale 'buy to let' landlords faces off against an even bigger army of renters. It forwards the argument that in the age of financialisation, moral imaginaries of productive vs. 'parasitic' capital, which have historically characterized anti-Semitic tropes, become individualised and diffused into everyday encounters, with serious consequences for social cohesion.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the moral language of laziness, hard work, autonomy and dependence of the long-term unemployed poor in South Africa. In linking jobs to fairness, hope and citizenship, my informants insist on a work-based moral economy of contemporary capitalism, despite its inaccessibility.
Paper long abstract:
Why do discourses of laziness and welfare dependence and the language of autonomy and hard work remain prevalent in countries like South Africa, which has some of the world's highest rates of unemployment and inequality? This paper explores this question through fieldwork with the long-term unemployed poor in inner-city Johannesburg. My informants use a specific moral language to link accessing cash via wage work with moral goods, including justice, fairness, hope, and agency, and money without labor or labor without money to moral bads such as laziness, lack of autonomy and even lack of national solidarity. These associations are prevalent despite a distinct lack of opportunities for formal wage labor, and despite a sense of injustice and discontent with current political and economic elites.
Such language illuminates an integrated collective of socially-held values around the ways that the economy should function, even if it no longer does so, and perhaps never did -- in other words, a cohesive moral economy. I argue that the moral language of my informants marks their resistance to relinquishing the work-based membership norms of market capitalism, despite the systemic impossibilities of actually meeting such norms in South Africa -- and indeed, in much of the rest of the world. This shared moral discourse around work and distribution illuminates the means though which deeply embedded norms of fairness, deservingness and aspiration underpin attitudes about redistribution, cash and labor, and thus influence both support and resistance to particular political agendas around redistribution or economic reform.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how and why language of 'moral hazard' is deployed in undergraduate economics education, to examine certain tensions this illuminates between ethical and other registers in the discipline.
Paper long abstract:
From Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920) to Graeber's Bullshit Jobs (2018), sociologists and anthropologists have long considered why people feel they ought to work. In particular, they have focused on the moral aspects of relationships between work and time, as well as the tensions that emerge through the interrelationship of ethical, technical and epistemological orders in timescapes of work (Bear 2016).
This paper explores this dilemma by considering how and why economists themselves turn to a language of 'moral hazard' in undergraduate economics courses. It highlights the specific contexts and sometimes contradictory ways in which this heuristic is deployed, in order to draw out some of the tensions in economics between a) ethical and technical norms, and b) ethical norms and ontological commitments. In particular, it discusses both the convergence and divergence between notions of 'utility' and 'morality' in economics. Morality in the utilitarian traditions of marginalist economics has often been reduced to 'utility', yet turns to 'moral hazard' highlight that the picture is more complex. Some of these complexities are evident in analyses of 'utility' itself, with the paradox of a discipline where it is commonly assumes that work holds 'disutility' also often assumes that people will choose to work more under circumstances which could facilitate them working less, such as increases in pay. This paper will unfold several aspects of this dynamic, as expressed through analyses of how people both can and should act in relation to work.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the moral language of doing business in the social welfare economy as experienced through my involvement with policies, practitioners and research within a European Commission funded project studying "successful social enterprises".
Paper long abstract:
Social enterprising combines the "best of both worlds": solidarity and freedom, safeness and innovation, cooperation and independence. In this paper I look at how such business ethics talk is a way to imagine the European economy as "social", as well as how this language is reassembled, translated and adapted by third sector practitioners and researchers to fit with our/their own moral evaluations of the social economy. My argument will build on three related (ethnographic) examples that aim to explore how the value-laden rhetoric of social enterprising is made to cohere with everyday practices of social service provision and making money.
First, by looking at the business of selling recycled bags in the city centre of Vienna, I will explore how entrepreneurial morality in work integration enterprises, such as creativity or innovativeness, becomes meaningful through locally constructed antagonism with corporate for and not-for profit competitors. Second, these liberal values stem from the (moralizing) demand for social entrepreneurs to do good by doing business. By imagining non-liberal principles as productive innovations to the liberal agenda, these discourses reconnect with classic debates in anthropology on the interested nature of solidarity, from Marcel Mauss to Mary Douglas. At the same time and thirdly, I will look at how academics like me, from across the social sciences, have studied businesses, social movements and the third sector in the past and are now trying to deal with the empirical, normative and imagined scenarios of "welfare hybridity".
Paper short abstract:
Indigenous worlds, Christendom, communism - all alternatives to the neoliberal present in the contemporary West seem to recede into the past. Imagined alternatives are a precious resource. This paper explores emergent imagined alternatives amongst economic activists in Vancouver, Canada.
Paper long abstract:
The apparent decline of indigenous worlds, Christendom and communism have left a number of people nonplussed as to alternatives to the neoliberal present in the contemporary West. The fall of the Berlin wall in particular, the many faults of the Soviet empire notwithstanding, brought with it an air of resignation amongst some economic activists. The faltering moral imagination involved in this post-Soviet gloom seems particularly well captured in one of my interlocutor's suggestions that we should move: "from each according to their means to each according to their...how does it go again?" What alternatives lurk on the horizon for those wishing to develop an alternative economic future?
Far from being 'fraught with ought' this paper highlights how the people I have spent time with are struggling to conjure the kinds of imaginaries from which a moral discourse can be developed. Drawing on ethnographic research amongst economic activists in Vancouver, Canada, this paper highlights how people draw lamentingly on past alternatives that no longer seem viable: of a pristine landscape prior to resource extraction; of a collectivist economics prior to agriculture; of a communist utopia that seemed possible prior to the fall of the Berlin wall. These "past perfect" attitudes seem to leave people always fighting against a neoliberal tide, or else relinquishing altogether, rather than developing new visions. I close by highlighting inklings of an alternative amongst a minority of my interlocutors.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how migration and pursuing a dignified life are experienced and valuated, and what the anxieties and blame games they give rise to might reveal about people's understandings of their economic and moral lives.
Paper long abstract:
The Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis sprawls on a strip of sand dotted with olive trees and elaborate villas, largely funded by men working in France. Zarzis was also one of the main points of undocumented departure for Lampedusa in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. The town has since reverted to being strongly implicated in the production and policing of the EU's border. Yet this has not prevented new generations of men from seeking to do the harga - the burning of the frontier. When explaining their motivations for being willing to risk it across the Mediterranean, young men point to the lack of jobs and perspectives in Zarzis. "Ya harga ya sharga": either we make it or we drown, but we might as well try, since we are already dead here. The persistence of the harga gives rise to myriad anxieties and moral accusations among the inhabitants of Zarzis. Older generations of men, who had migrated to France legally under more lenient mobility regimes, believe younger emigrates' immoral displays of European wealth to be at the core of the harga problem. Those aspiring to leave are accused of chasing after the easy money and sinful temptations of the West. Men of all ages agree on one thing: the harga is the women's fault. This paper will explore how migration and pursuing a dignified life are experienced and valuated, and what the blame games they give rise to might reveal about people's understandings of their economic and moral lives.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation discusses South African musicians' prevalent suspicion that they have been taken advantage of by the music industry insiders. It provides an example of baffling moral reflection and studies the kind of moral language and understanding concerning exploitation that ensues from it.
Paper long abstract:
In the South African music industry, musicians' feelings of having been taken advantage of by the industry insiders are prevalent. Musicians' meager proceeds create or enhance their suspicion of the music producers cheating them a good part of their rightful returns. This is a phenomenon not unique to the South African music industry, although the historical legacies of racial inequality and the entangling of diverse modes of organizing and rewarding creative work bring some special features to it. Because it is often difficult to verify whether appropriation has taken place, musicians typically remain perplexed about the trustworthiness of their industry partners and whether they should continue working with them. Therefore, this presentation will focus on issues of suspicion, ambivalence and uncertainty that complicate musicians' feeling of "moral feelings" and hence, their making of economic and moral claims. Much of the recent anthropology of morality has highlighted reflection as an important part of ethical lives and moral systems (e.g., Laidlaw 2014; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2008). This presentation will contribute to the anthropology of morality (and economy) a view of baffling moral reflection, where the assessment of the validity of an experienced moral affect or emotion remains indeterminate. It will also discuss the kind of understanding and language concerning exploitation that ensues from this reflection.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks into the moral assumptions underlying the terminological choices surrounding timebanking in Helsinki, Finland. In particular, I focus on the idea of "exchanging" time and the way it conflicts with the tax authority's idea of time credits as "work performances".
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on the moral viewpoints of two conflicting interpretations of timebanking - an "alternative" trading and exchange system - in Helsinki, Finland. The argument revolves around the Finnish state tax authority's 2013 decision to make time credits taxable income. By doing so, the tax office undermined the principles upheld by the Helsinki Timebank - crucially, "that everyone's time, work and needs are of equal worth".
The tax office has employed a taxation system based on fixed work identities, and applied this onto a trading network which, in turn, conceptualises its activity in terms of exchanges in the medium of time. The tax office's motivation is to make the timebank's time credits (called tovis, i.e. "whiles") convertible into the state's official currency of taxation, the euro. The timebank insists that monetary valuation of time credits undermines the values of communality and mutual aid: after all one does not "buy" things in the timebank, one "exchanges" them. Thus the two conflicting views over the worth of the "while" do not highlight just a discrepancy between the two ways of understanding time banking, but also wider moral ideas that accompany "exchange" in contrast to "trading", "transferring" or buying and selling.