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- Convenors:
-
Chris Hann
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo)
Keir Martin (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E420
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Following Karl Polanyi, the balance between redistribution and markets (notably with reference to the fictive commodity labour and its mobility) is central to societal cohesion. Contributors will address multiple levels, from the household to the planet, in a variety of spatio-temporal frameworks.
Long Abstract:
Together with reciprocity, the concepts of redistribution and (market) exchange were put forward by Karl Polanyi as principles of economic behaviour or "forms of integration". They are the basic tools of his comparative economic anthropology. For Polanyi, when the market exchange form is dominant (i.e. when the "fictive commodities" of labour, land and money are subjected to price-forming markets), economy becomes "disembedded" from society. Societal "self-protection" then leads to reactionary forms of politics, including Fascism.
Revisiting Polanyi's key concepts can help anthropologists to analyze and critique multiple dimensions of "overheating" or global accelerated change (Eriksen). It is instructive to link contemporary analyses to a long-term historical dialectic between redistribution and the market (Hann). Alongside the expansion of markets, Eurasian states have consolidated their fiscal powers over millennia. More recently, while redistribution in the form of socialist central planning is generally considered a failure, "Keynesian" redistribution underpinned decades of stable and prosperous welfare states in Scandinavia and the rest of Western Europe. Can this form of integration be re-activated and massively extended in a post-neoliberal 21st century? Or are well-intended measures to extend transfer income to society's weaker members in practice easily subverted by the dominance of capitalist markets? The level of the nation-state is clearly insufficient: without substantial redistribution between regions on the planetary scale, recent crises of more or less (in)voluntary mobility will intensify. Participants at this Round Table will address these issues from a plurality of theoretical and political perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 August, 2018, -Tijo Salverda (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
Starting from how market actors involved in land investments respond to their countermovement, I discuss (1) that Polanyi is too pessimistic about the countermovement and (2) that his principles may not point us in the right direction when we want to overcome our current ('overheated') predicament.
Paper long abstract:
Starting from research on how market actors involved in large-scale land investments (in Africa) respond to their countermovement, I will discuss (1) that Polanyi is too pessimistic about the countermovement and (2) that his principles may not point us in the right direction when we want to overcome our current ('overheated') predicament.
Outcomes of Polanyian countermovements appear more varied and often less apocalyptic than he envisioned. The double movement is a perpetual reality of our (capitalist) world, with economies as temporary outcomes of never permanently settled, though at times dormant, power struggles over distribution. In many instances the outcomes are, like Polanyi observed, frightful, such as current examples of authoritarianism demonstrate. In other instances, however, countermovements help shaping more equitable outcomes, such as in the case of welfare states. It may never be perfect, it may never be enough, but it is always embedded.
Yet even then, it seems that three main tensions in an 'overheated' world - environmental change, inequality and population growth - cannot easily be captured by, or seriously countered with, Polanyi's dichotomous double movement. Perfect redistribution alone will never halt environmental degradation and population growth. Instead, and following Chiapello (2013), it may be better to explore how a stronger focus on environmental issues may unite different actors (and sides of Polanyi's double movement) in an effort to fundamentally challenge dominant economic thinking. Only without a perpetual need for capital accumulation, a more environmentally sustainable and equal world able to host an ever-growing population may be envisioned.
Rachel Smith (Aberdeen)
Paper short abstract:
I focus on the politics of redistribution and exchange in a rural Vanuatu community highly engaged in overseas labour programmes. Returned workers were withdrawing from communal and reciprocal work and redistributive demands, instead espousing market exchange, microfinance, and voluntary donations.
Paper long abstract:
In Bislama, the pidgin lingua franca of Vanuatu, to 'share out' (seraot) can mean either sharing and distributing material goods, or to divide the people, according to context. I will focus on the politics and economics of redistribution from the perspective of the 'domestic moral economy' of a Melanesian community in Epi, Vanuatu, undergoing a process of accelerated socioeconomic transformation due to a high level of engagement in New Zealand's and Australia's Pacific seasonal worker programmes. Islanders' access to overseas seasonal labour opportunities was conceived by policymakers and workers alike as an alternative to foreign aid, and one that allowed them to bypass political corruption. Overseas wages were seen as funding a kind of 'do it yourself' community development, where the small island state was seen as too weak and dependent to enact major redistributive projects. However, the flow of cash into the community was causing a crisis of redistribution on home soil. The fiction of labour-as-commodity - the 'time is money' logic- appeared to be upsetting the generalized and reciprocal exchange of labour, and community work and mutual aid were said to be in decline. Meanwhile, workers resisted demands for fixed sums intended to compensate for their absence from community and church projects, preferring to emphasize the benefits of the local circulation of money and microfinance, alongside an ethics of entirely voluntary donations. However, the community-centric nature of redistributive debates belies any depiction of this process as simply one of 'globalisation'.
Theodora Vetta (Universitat de Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
Starting from ethnographic material on taxation regimes in Greece, I will discuss austerity-led redistribution as a form of social disintegration.
Paper long abstract:
The recurrent bail-out agreements of the past decade, targeting both the "saving" of the Greek state and the recapitalization of the financial system, have produced a strong sense of debt socialization among an impoverishing majority. A labyrinth of austerity-inspired new fiscal measures (parallel to the collapse of health and social services), have consolidated a particular redistribution mechanism and have produced severe intra-class antagonistic behaviors and understandings, fostering wider processes of social disintegration.
Dimitris Dalakoglou (Vrije University Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Does crisis of capitalism help the '(re)embedding' of economy to society?
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based on the ongoing ethnographic project infra-demos that studies the capitalist crisis in Greece in reference to infrastructural gap and grassroots activities and on the previous project crisis-scapes (2012-2014) that studied crisis in reference to public urban spaces, will attempt to open the discussion about the crisis and its relationship with embedding of economic activities to society.