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- Convenors:
-
Stephen Gudeman
(University of Minnesota Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- Theatre S1
- Sessions:
- Thursday 12 July, -, -, Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
Economy presents the greatest source of uncertainty and disquiet today. This panel focuses on how economic changes are reflected in ritual, and how ritual is reflected in economy. Are rituals a resurgence of making connections in light of markets, or are market economies becoming rituals?
Long Abstract:
Economy presents the greatest source of uncertainty and disquiet today. From low market economies, traditionally studied by anthropologists, to high market ones in which many of us live, economy is generating disquiet for its deleterious effects on the environment, generation of poverty, increasing disparities in income, control by capital interests, and profligate consumption. Growing numbers of people feel disenfranchised economically and politically by these developments. The effect is great because solutions are not clear to view, easy to bring about, or achievable in the short term.
Our panel focuses on these economic changes in light of their relation to ritual. How are economic changes reflected in ritual, and how is ritual reflected in economy? We wish to rethink economy in light of what ritual does. If ritual is one form of sociality in that it creates connections and pretends to cover gaps that are presented in a social order, then with economic change what is the place of ritual? Does a market economy draw on ritual in the process of accumulation and the promotion of consumption, as in advertising imagery and a rise in festive spending? Does a market economy tend to eliminate rituals in the process of efficiency-seeking? Conversely, are rituals a resurgence of making connections in light of the fractionating effects of markets? If rituals have to do with making sociality, is it possible that market economies themselves become rituals and create new uncertainty?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 12 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic field research on professional wedding planning and the wedding industry in Austria this presentation argues that the longing for security and control in and outside ritual is a driving force of “ritual business”.
Paper long abstract:
Euro-American style weddings and the US wedding industry are probably the most prominent examples of market economies drawing intensively on ritual in the promotion of consumption and festive spending (see e.g. Ingraham 1999, Otnes/Pleck 2003). A huge number of products and services have to be purchased in order to celebrate in the hegemonic way of the "white wedding", which is intensively promoted by media (Egström 2008). This festive spending differs strongly from the various forms of gift exchange often connected to weddings. Furthermore it is accompanied by the rise of new ritual specialists, conveying economy deeply into the planning and performance of ritual: wedding planners. Being fairly common in the US, they are progressively establishing their services in European countries and worldwide. Based on ethnographic field research on the wedding industry and professional wedding planning in Austria, this presentation will explore the interrelations of a market, which used to call itself "recession proof", uncertainty and the organisation and modification of wedding ritual. What is happening, if "the market", as professionals to be paid for, intervenes in ritual organisation, formerly being part of women's unpaid family work? Is efficiency-seeking of professionalism eliminating ritual characteristics of weddings? And which forms of social relations are created, fostered and performed? Is kinship (still) important and what role does friendship play? The "outsourcing" of wedding work is not only connected to a new ordering of social relations in ritual, as I will argue, but first and foremost a way of handling uncertainty in and outside ritual.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines extravagant inflation of wedding feasts and money gifts in mountainous communities of timber producers and traders in Transylvania. It discusses ideas of change, generosity, gain and reciprocity.
Paper long abstract:
This study is concerned with mountain rural communities in Transylvania, which experienced an unprecedented economic boom after the fall of socialism and inflated spectacularly their wedding feasts. The opulence of recent 'wedding businesses' of this Transylvanian area is quite singular, compared to other rural areas in Romania and Europe. The very high amount of money raised for the endowment of the young couple is also outstanding. This inflation occurs in contrast to the rather small and house-oriented wedding ritual of the period before the collapse of socialism.
Many instances of the wedding, especially the money-giving ceremony and the harsh haggling over gifts among parents and godparents comprise a kernel of potential destruction of social relationships, which can be smoothed out by ritualization, as it was described by other anthropologists for other social situations. However, it would be misleading to call the weddings a misrecognition or mystification, a bare exchange of cash veiled in the ideology of gift, sociality and generosity.
Rather, this study argues that self-interest and genuine sociality and generosity coexist and are intermingled in practices and events. Money rising is as much part constituted as a ritual as the ritual is a form of raising money.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the meaning of wine, when it is used by village households to pay day laborers. Payments in wine can further exploitation or establish relations of mutual respect, depending on how employer and worker interpret wine’s connections to hospitality and self-sufficiency.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the meaning of wine, when it is used by village households to pay day laborers. In the past, there were several forms of labor exchange and mutual help which villagers relied on instead of hiring workers for cash. These forms of exchange are now in decline, with most villagers preferring to pay hired workers for cash or with wine. Paying workers in wine, however, causes and reveals social tensions about what the payment means. Is a worker paid in wine an alcoholic being exploited by his employers? Or, has the payment drawn worker and employer into a closer relationship of mutual respect? The answer hinges on how wine's connections to hospitality and self-sufficiency are interpreted by employer and worker, revealing many layers of ritualized behavior in local economic practices.
Paper short abstract:
Kyrgyz village life involves many rituals. Feasts associated with life-cycle events depend upon animals for hospitality and for gift transactions. Other ritual feasts are central to religious, neighbourhood, and economic groups. Production and consumption of animals link economic and ritual life.
Paper long abstract:
Post-Soviet Kyrgyz village economies have undergone radical changes, first with a return to subsistence agriculture, and then with new modes of market participation. The pastoral economy has devolved from collectivized production to more exclusively household-based production, but raising animals remains central to Kyrgyz village economics. Animals are important for subsistence, loans, savings, gifts, hospitality, and are central to transactions in the ritual economy. Most families hold animals in reserve for gifts and to slaughter and consume when they host ritual feasts. Families also loan animals when associates need them for rituals.
Despite the importance of crops for subsistence and income, animals symbolize wealth and the ability to participate in community events. Successful feasts for religious, life cycle and community rituals depend upon having access to the necessary animals: social ties are drawn upon to get the animals, and hospitality in the events themselves strengthens social ties for exchanges in the future.
The market economy is based on immediate equivalent return, while the ritual economy depends upon trust and long-term ties that are reproduced across many exchanges, but may involve considerable delay and not be equivalent. However, ritual relationships are valued because they are durable and flexible, and contribute to one's status in the community. Animals and rituals hence provide economic stability that is not found in markets in Kyrgyzstan.
Paper short abstract:
House-based pig-raising declined in Hungary with the disappearance of secure markets after socialism. Pig-sticking is also on the wane. In my fieldsite, the community reenacts pig-sticking in a festival. Festivalization transforms the event from an economic one to a ritual and political one.
Paper long abstract:
The paper examines transformations that have taken place in the economic practice of pig-sticking in an Eastern Hungarian village over the last three decades. Currently, the practice is waning: due to the decreased demand and lack of secure marketing opportunities, people do not raise pigs as they used to under socialism, when it was one of their main sources of income. Traditionally, pork products produced by the household during the winter season were also a mainstay of the diet. Nowadays, even when people do carry out a pig-sticking they often take shortcuts, such as buying the pig just before pig-sticking, hiring a butcher or only buying a few kilograms of meat to do a "limited" pig-sticking. At the same, however, another process is taking place. The village has created a pig-sticking festival for the community as a whole that "reenacts" the pig-stickings of yore, albeit on a much larger scale and with different goals and outcomes. The traditional pig-sticking was primarily a house-based economic event provisioning households, and creating cohesion and solidarity between individual households that participated in labor exchange or through the sharing of some of the products of pig-sticking. The festival turns the economic event into a village ritual that is as important for the reinforcing local hierarchies and for the creation of local community as for creating links with the world beyond the village.
Paper short abstract:
The paper amplifies the model ‘economy’s tension’. It explores human propensity for mutuality as instantiated in economy and ritual. Can ‘mutuality’s tension’ be a model in which economy and ritual meet?
Paper long abstract:
The idea of 'mutuality' has gained a wide range of meanings spanning from cooperation or competition to sociality and intersubjectivity. This paper explores 'mutuality', understood in the minimal sense as 'mutual awareness', as instantiated in economy and ritual. It amplifies Gudeman's model 'the tension of economy' understood as a contradictory dialectics between calculative competition and mutuality. What if competition, that necessarily requires recognition of the other, is viewed as a radical (or negative) form of mutuality? Such a phenomenological twist reanimates the 'economy's tension' model into an alternative one: mutuality's tension. The tension of mutuality could be understood then as a contradictory dialectics between modes of mutuality.
In arguing so, the paper sheds light on changes in economy and ritual in post-socialist, post-war Muslim Bosnia. The modes of mutuality between persons implicated in everyday economic conduct have traditionally been shaped in rural Bosnia by two processes, ritual and exchange, and have been encompassed in the rhetoric of generalised reciprocity. Socialist modernisation of the countryside and the violent breakup of Yugoslavia considerably disintegrated these processes, and multiplied and monetised earlier forms of exchange. I have argued elsewhere that what underlies everyday forms of exchange for Bosnian Muslims today is a 'halal exchange' that differs from mere calculative reasoning. In this paper I illustrate the ways 'halal exchange' is particularly elaborated in the ritual of sacrifice (kurban bajram), and emanates into the spheres of everyday economic conduct, and thereby moulds and directs the modes of mutuality between 'trading' persons.
Paper short abstract:
In the post-socialist and post-industrial city of Prilep in Macedonia people devote important part of the household budget to ritual celebrations. In a context were economy is based almost exclusively on social relationships people draw on the house and kinship metaphors to constitute sense of market relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Since the break up of Yugoslavia and the dismantlement of its markets, livelihoods in the town of Prilep have noticeably deteriorated. The mainstream complaint among locals is about gradual impoverishment and deprivation, due to a chronic cash shortage. The situation however conceals a paradox. A household budget survey ranks ritual celebrations and house-based feasts on the top of the list of unavoidable expenditures. Despite diminishing feast budgets and the constraint to reduce the number of guests, informants state that throughout the socialist period till now the number of celebrations that a family should hold in a year has multiplied. Celebrations such as the Patron saint of the house (Slava) and the 8 of March are generally qualified as a "duty" that "one cannot omit". Unanimously their cost is evaluated as "too high" and the detail on purchases deemed to be necessary for, are listed out together with the amounts of electricity, water and taxes bills.
I argue that people devote so much material resources and time to ritual because their economy is based on social relationships. In a city with almost 40% of unemployment most households combine casual jobs with house-based tobacco growing. In this setting we observe how ritual events that sustain kinship and friendship relationships are given priority over community based rituals. Caught up by the ritual, individuals draw on the house and kinship metaphors that they project outside to constitute sense of market relationships. Underneath, there is an idea that ritual life creates material wealth.
Paper short abstract:
Numerous connections between ritual and economy will be highlighted through the case study of transformation of rituals connected with (manual) agricultural work. It is argued that survival of such rituals depends mainly on their potential for sustainable development and identity politics.
Paper long abstract:
After the Second World War, political, ideological, economic, social and cultural changes influenced economic and social restructuring, different employment challenges and nature of work, but also rituals connected with working itself. Presumably most visible changes occurred in the primary sector, where inhabitants started to abandon agriculture to work in the industry and other non-agrarian businesses. Most rituals connected with agricultural (manual) work died out along with the economic and social base of such activities, but some of them modified and survived until present, either in families or local community. Nowadays, farmers are facing new challenges in selling produce and products; selling at public events has become ritualized and therefore gained different development potentials. In connection with the notion of rural idyll and heritage tourism, ritualization of everyday activities (e.g. selling) has been used as a strategy for improvement of living: increasing family income, achieving recognition of the farm, setting local area and community on a tourist map etc. Traditional and new agricultural rituals became a means for sustainable development and identity politics; they add to regeneration, strengthening or development of local economy as well as they affect sense of belonging and integration of local population. Through the case study in the rural surroundings of Slovene's capital, the paper will try to show how economic changes are reflected in ritual and how ritual is reflected in economy; and in addition it aims to shed light on numerous connections between ritual and economy.
Paper short abstract:
I explore the ritual aspect taken by changes in economic regimes and their underpinning cultural values. I focus on the interactions between clients in default and credit collection departments of banks and conceptualize the periodic financial crises as ritualized contexts facilitating the renewal of capitalism and its regimes of accumulation.
Paper long abstract:
My paper focuses on the re-scheduling of credit contracts and the negotiation of loan repayment by Romanian bank clients facing default. Precipitated by the increasing interest rates during the financial crisis of the last years, the portfolio of default loans of foreign-owned banks in Romania has reached alarming levels as over 1 million bank customers among the 4.3 million employees in Romania are unable to repay their loans. Pressed by the banks to continue the repayment of loans and threatened with property repossession, many such people adopt a variety of tactics ranging from deferred payments and delayed reimbursement of principal, to strategic default, asset alienation and even dramatic attempts at suicide.
Focusing on the interactions between clients in default and credit collection departments of banks, I treat such encounters as ritual performances where previous life choices are questioned, the basic values permeating economic practices are reevaluated, and future possibilities emerge out of liminal experiences. Such ritual interactions - happening, to a certain extent, under all economic circumstances, multiply spectacularly during episodes of economic crisis.
Periodic crises have been considered inherent to modern economies illustrating the limits of capitalist accumulation by both leftist thinkers and international financial economists. Acknowledging these literatures, I go beyond the structural aspects of the crisis and consider it as a ritualized context and rhetoric device through which capitalism renews itself. New regimes of accumulation premised on changing cultural configuration and new forms of personhood emerge from ritual crises with the simultaneous demise of those preceding them.
Paper short abstract:
The island of Bali is facing massive international tourism, and copes well with the challenges it raises. The local Hindu religion is widely present. Through its costly and beautiful rituals, it creates a parallel economy, redistributing money and preserving strong social and economic bonds.
Paper long abstract:
Hindu Balinese culture produces a profusion of eye-catching colourful offerings and religious ceremonies. Yet tourism has been flooding the island for decades. Tourism can bring wealth and technology. But it can also erode social bonds, create economic, thus social discrepancies, and degrade local religion. Why does it look like these negative effects are rather weak in Bali?
Choosing to address the economic side of the question, research shows an interesting entangling of economics and religion. Balinese Hindu religion is not only a way of seeing the world, of perceiving divinity. It includes a long list of rituals that have to be performed, and cost a lot.
Balinese live in two parallel economic worlds. One is the touristic and non-religious work world, where they work, earn the money, and count it. The other world is the family, the local community, with costly rituals, where the more you have earned, the more you spend, being grateful to the ancestors and divinities. Thus a parallel economy is created that strongly lowers the disruptive impact of tourism. It redistributes wealth, as those who don't work can do offerings and earn some money. It maintains strong social bonds, as many ceremonies are addressed to community deities (village divinity, common ancestor), and many other ceremonies (weddings, funerals) are just too expensive for a family to pay alone: these ceremonies have to be shared.
My research explores these two economic worlds, how they meet, how their boundaries are ritually delimited, and how they sometimes contradict.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will reflect to the imbrications between economy and ritual through the analysis of two Slow Food movement's events. These are about food, selling, politics but they are also ways of changing society and imagining news ways to make economy
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the imbrications between economy and ritual through the analysis of two apparently unrelated social gatherings of the Slow Food movement: the "Salone del Gusto", an international exhibition fair of high quality food products, and the concomitant "Terra Madre", a meeting of small producers invited from all around the world to discuss food politics and the future of local economies. These two events, which take place in Turin every two years, may be read also as rituals in which food become a connection, a way of communication producing different forms of sociality and linking producers and consumers (Salone del Gusto) as well as producers between them (Terra Madre). New forms of economy emerge out of ritual and from ritual gatherings. From this perspective, "Salone del Gusto" and "Terra Madre" need to be analyzed together as complementary spaces of production of new ways of doing economy and imagining a new economic order. Economy here must be considered also as a ritual which talks to people of an ideal food, of an ideal world and of new ways of producing and consuming. As ritual, economy presents an ideal and moral order. And what is performed here is a "moral economy" of food conceived partly as an alternative to neoliberalism and partly as a reform of it.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the ritualistic use by South Western Malagasy fishing populations of NGO-introduced scientific fisheries models to increase catches, determine "good" fishing grounds and manage risk.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores the ritualistic use of scientific models by South Western Malagasy fishing populations to increase fisheries and income generated as a result of the integration to collector networks and world markets. Following the observation of the 'miraculous' success of an octopus reserve implemented initially as a demonstration by an international NGO, many villagers of the coastal area of South Western Madagascar started similar temporary conservation enterprises, in the hope that these would provide similar results. The paper explores the ritualised governance of sea resources (via the ownership of spirits inhabiting fishing grounds) and the transposition of the model underlying this governance in the new context marked by marine conservation programmes and efforts to generate alternative livelihoods through different forms of fishing and the integration to international markets for dry fish, shark fin, sea cucumber and octopus.