Paper short abstract:

This joint paper undertakes a critical examination of the chiasmic roles of economies on affect and of affect on economy in an effort to complicate current scholarly understandings of the intersections of “affect" and systems of difference.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, scholars have used the concept of affect to critique the long-held assumption in the social sciences that economic projects conflict with intimate, affective relationships in ways that render public and private or "inner" spheres opposite to one another. This joint paper proposes to examine an important connection not as well-made as it should be in current scholarship on affect: the chiasmic roles of economies on affect and of affect on economy. Drawing from key discussions during a yearlong experience as co-organizers of the New York-based working group "Economies of Affect", the paper asks: How can we find productive ways of understanding the complicating intersections of "affect" and systems of difference? Situating "affect" in the broader context of critical anthropological works on race, migration, and gender/queer theory, we are interested not only in complicating the long-held Western dichotomy between the "inner world" and material context, but to consider, specifically, what affect might contribute to our understanding of issues of inequality, subordination, and marginality in cases where personhood becomes uncertain, questionable, or under siege within unevenly distributed fields of power. While framed as a theoretical intervention and critique of recent scholarly renderings of affect as pre-social, our discussion also address the challenges behind empirical / ethnographic examinations of "affect" and consider methodologically productive ways to examine the intersection between what has traditionally been considered the world of "interiority" and larger political economies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the experiences of female sex workers in the Dublin sexual services market, during the Celtic Tiger as they sell a range of sexual and emotional services as part of their economic enterprises.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the experiences of female sex workers in the Dublin sexual services market, during the aegis of the Celtic Tiger when sex, like other consumables saw an insatiable increase in demand. Indeed, far from looking like an "exotic" enterprise, the sex industry, especially in the "Independent escort" sector of the market, resembles many other branches of the service industry in the formal economy, in dealing with the effects of globalization by finding new and innovate means of accessing potential markets, as part of their economic strategy. Sex workers learn to extract the highest possible price for their services, and develop skills to access their potential markets, selling a broad range of both sexual and emotional services.

Part of their economic strategy involves selling a range of emotional experiences to clients as part of their contractual agreement. These vary in emotional intensity and levels of intimacy, and are often referred to on escorts WebPages through terms such as GFE (Girl Friend Experience) or PSE (Porn Star Experience). PSE and GFE are explicitly advertised as a commodity that can be bought, and is sold as part of what (Sanders, 2005) terms a "manufactured identity." Many women refer to this aspect of their jobs as "acting" and describe how they adopt a range of strategies to maintain boundaries between their "working" and "private" lives, especially as these boundaries become blurred and their relationships with regular clients more intimate.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a case study in middle class Ghana, I will show how the notion of “transactional sex” in studies on Africa is prejudiced by a particular ideal of love, and prevents scholars to recognise the intimate connection between love and financial support.

Paper long abstract:

The idea that love transcends the financial union of a couple is a carefully kept ideal in the global West; "real love is blind". This fixation in western imagination becomes clear in studies dealing with love and sexuality in African societies, specifically in articulations concerning the notion of African "transactional sex". Transactional sex means a sexual interaction or relation that is based on the transaction of sex for material goods or money, excluding love and affection. In this paper I will show how the notion of transactional sex is prejudiced by the western ideal of love, which is related to a long tradition of stereotyping sexuality in Africa, and how it blinds scholars to recognise the intimate connection between love and financial support.

Based on research in the middle class in Ghana, I will show how love and money are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, a lover's or spouse's affection is understood through notions of "care" and "responsibility". "True" love is both emotional and material; a caring partner will notice the plight of the lover and will subsequently take responsibility and act upon it. Focussing on the dual definition of intimacy, i.e. as both a close relationship between people and as a sexual relationship, helps to uncover this mutually reinforcing dialectic. The pursuit of upward mobility is typically a project engendered by a couple, and is analogous with how love relations are construed in a rapidly globalizing world in Ghana where imaginations of intimacy have increasingly become mediated.

Paper short abstract:

Migrants from Kenya are re-configuring the ‘economy of affection’ they carry with them as they migrate to the United Kingdom. In particular, I consider how they re-define the relationship between economy and intimacy in their transnational Pentecostal wedding practices.

Paper long abstract:

Historically, intimacy and economy have been intertwined in the imaginings and lived experiences of Kenyans, with lineage being understood as a 'court of claims, rather than a family tree' (Lonsdale 1992). While this understanding follows them as they migrate to the United Kingdom, I would suggest that migration, and particularly the discourses of African Pentecostal Christianity, offers Kenyan migrants opportunities to reconfigure the relationship between intimacy and economy.

Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in London and Nairobi, I argue that the emergent moral discourse among Pentecostal migrants from Kenya living in London rests on a reconfigured link between economy and intimacy. I first describe briefly how Pentecostalism is helping migrants from Kenya to negotiate their relations, which, ultimately, may enable them to limit their obligations to non-migrant kin. I move on to discuss how economy emerges anew in their intimate lives, using the example of what many Kenyan migrants refer to as 'community weddings', i.e., large-scale, multi-stage events in which significant sums of money are raised. The pre-wedding activities (including the negotiation of bridewealth), which require bridal couples to manage risks and anxiety about (perceived) abuses, provide a basis for considering how migrants from Kenya gauge each other's motives and intentions. For instance, 'come-we-stay' (cohabiting) couples, who decide to marry, must demonstrate their sincerity to preempt accusations of 'marrying for money', i.e., using their weddings as sources of capital accumulation. The discussion addresses a dynamic 'economy of affection' among migrants from Kenya.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the discomforts of domestic service, asking how employers make sense of the occupation. Bringing the public into the private, domestic service forces employers to see how broader social inequalities are produced in the home, through everyday ‘intimate’ interactions and spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the discomforts and disturbances of domestic service. In particular, it focuses on employers—native-born, middle-class women in Los Angeles—and the ways they understand and seek to understand this occupation. Breaching the public/private divide, domestic service disrupts the perceived intimacy of the household and forces attention to seemingly seamless processes of social reproduction. If interactions within the household serve to reproduce broader social norms and practices, a relationship to the home is also crucial to attaining and maintaining middle-class status. A reflection of its owners, the home stands for the possibility as well was achievement of the American Dream; this dream posits a classless middle-class society and promises success for anyone willing to work hard. The physical presence, and labor of, immigrant women inside private homes confounds these expectations, bringing social and economic disparities into sharp relief. Moreover, placing the public in the private, domestic service dispels the belief that personal accomplishment and family relationships are separate and separable from broader processes of inequality. Domestic service thus transforms the middle-class home from symbol of inclusion to a space of exclusion. Indeed, many middle-class Angelenos only see their privilege when they hire someone to clean their homes or care for their children. Attempting to reconcile these contradictions, employers must (re)consider who they are and want to be, as well as, who they want their children to become. In so doing, they rethink notions of family, success, and 'Americanness' and rearticulate the boundaries of national belonging.

Paper short abstract:

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a luxury restaurant in the Czech Republic. It suggests that luxury hospitality is characterized by two opposite discourses - economic exchange and gift exchange.

Paper long abstract:

In his Laws, Plato criticizes innkeepers for corrupting the natural laws of hospitality taught by Heaven by not treating their guests as friends but rather as captives who have to pay for what should have been given to them for free.

Although in the present-day Czech Republic hardly anyone is shocked by the fact that hospitality constitutes a separate industry and is governed by the laws of economy, there are strong concerns over the morality of the relations between service workers and customers. Whereas during socialism, interactions among people within the public sphere were limited to the necessary minimum and deprived of expressions of affection (Holý 1996), today customers are encouraged to demand personalized, friendly service, and service workers are expected to offer it.

The proposed paper draws upon my ethnographic research among service workers and customers in a luxury restaurant in Prague, Czech Republic and focuses on the contradictory nature of hospitality as business. I challenge the view that economic exchange and gift exchange represent two independent spheres and I show that with its attention to individuality, voluntariness and personalization, luxury service is characterized by symbolical gift exchange and denial of the economic, resulting in what I call the discrete economy.

In the paper, I pay particular attention to various meanings that workers in the restaurant apply to money, especially tips, and how by doing that, they cope with the inequalities that exist between them and their guests.

Paper short abstract:

Going to the marketplace to sell apples is perceived today as a factor that influences both family relations and the production process of the households in the Voinesti village. The article analyzes how the apple producers combine their business with the need to obey the community rules.

Paper long abstract:

Apple producers from Voinesti village have a long history of producing and selling apples in the marketplace since the communist period until today. Voinesti apples are a very well known food category in the Romanian market and they are similar with "terroir" products. In the communist period the market orientation of the households in Voinesti was different from today and the family relations have changed in the last years. Why are there households that choose to sell apples from the yard even though the profit is half, comparing to the profit in the marketplace? How important are family relations to the apple producers in Voinesti and how these relations affect their business?

The market is not the only choice for apple producers in Voinesti since the household economy is an alternative to the market economy. Diversification strategies result in many options, and the market is only one of them; the barter and the labor exchange are examples of the household's alternatives. Values as profit, development, economic success are sometimes as good as values such as prestige, family, sharing. The article will show that apple producers' economic strategies are neither irrational nor immoral in their orientation towards the market or family. The line between the economic interest and the personal feelings is very fragile in a traditional environment of apple production. The morality of the market is still a debate in the Romanian post-communist society but the household economy has also been questioned in the last years.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the frictions and moral dilemmas that members of Danish housing cooperatives experience and try to manage when cultivating a "right balance" between their sense of community, collective finances and members' individual economic interests which, if pursued too openly or tactlessly, are thought to destroy the moral community.

Paper long abstract:

In the Danish housing cooperatives in this study, interest and affect intersect at least at two levels: At the level of individual members against the collective and at the level of the cooperatives' collective economies. The moral communities of the housing cooperatives fundamentally rest on collective ownership of the cooperatives' property, the members' homes, and on taking care of this collective property together, but the hard-core economic facts are traditionally kept out of everyday interaction between the members. Rather, 'the economy,' both the members' and the cooperatives' collective finances, is confined to special settings and ritualized events such as meetings and general assemblies where affect is controlled by bureaucratic procedures such as agendas and polling rules, while the moral community is celebrated during seasonal events such as Christmas and Shrovetide and work parties where the economic aspects are downplayed.

The last decade's commercialization of cooperative property, its integration into the private housing market and its increasing complexity caused by the introduction of new financial products have challenged the already shaky balance between 'business' and 'community,' played out in different ways at several levels in local communities, with occasional moral outbreaks. This paper explores the cultural assumptions and silent predicaments about collective property, common goods and social values that surface in the moral discussions about commercialization.