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- Convenors:
-
Stefan Leins
(University of Konstanz)
Chelsie Yount-André (University of Leiden)
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- Discussant:
-
Caitlin Zaloom
(New York University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 0G/024
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to reconsider the relationship between morality and economy in contemporary capitalism. Examining how crises transform economic moralities and their future-oriented narratives, we explore how these processes impact global inequalities.
Long Abstract:
If seminal works on "moral economy" defined the concept in opposition to the (a/immoral) market economy, more recent anthropological research has focused on the ways moral orders shape all forms of economic practice. Examinations of moral logics that underpin even the most neoliberal capitalist systems have revealed economic moralities to be multiple and contested, debated in unfolding interaction in businesses and families alike. Embedded in value-laden stories, discussions, pledges, and reports are claims about how resources "ought" to be used and distributed, and how they might circulate. Economic moralities move money. Their prescriptive terms make claims on future economic relations, shaping how social actors evaluate potential economic futures, whether in household planning, financial investments, or supply chain management.
For this panel, we invite papers that empirically deal with the economy/morality-nexus, asking how practices of speculation are carried out in moral-economic terms. We particularly look for contributions that focus on the ways that moments of crisis transform economic moralities and their future-oriented narratives, considering how these processes impact inequalities and the redistribution of wealth. Beyond that, we invite papers that address questions of how moral values are applied, ignored, negotiated, and transformed in economic settings more broadly. Our aim is to use these contributions to reconsider the relationship between morality and economy in the context of current financialized capitalism, to consider how social actors draw on moral values in efforts to shape economic futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Lauren Cubellis (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Clinicians caught at the intersection of a rationalised healthcare economy and a moral imperative to recondition psychiatric crisis care develop a daily practice in which the therapeutic rejection of short-term valuing opens novel possibilities for morally tenable care under neoliberal conditions.
Paper long abstract:
The difficulty of predicting psychiatric crisis, anticipating its duration, and planning for its recurrence has been a moral and economic challenge for clinicians, families, and insurance providers for decades. Many progressive interventions for psychiatric crisis recognise that these experiences are social, the temporality of their emergence unknowable, and the trajectory of their development uncertain. But while some clinicians advocate for creative means of working with these complex histories and elusive futures, health care economies are generally less flexible, revealing how ostensibly shared goals are derailed by divergent values in practice. Based on fieldwork with clinicians in Berlin, Germany, this paper explores how local economies of care splinter around temporal horizons tethered to long- and short-term valuation. While health insurers understand psychiatric crisis as an imminent risk to be managed, and, when it occurs, met quickly with discrete interventions based on cost-effective measures, this clinical team takes a longer view, in which crisis is understood to be part of a recovery process that is not always measurable, or predictable, in economic terms. Insurers and clinicians both want to see patients avoid long and costly hospital stays, but they assess the relative risk of crisis episodes, and what past crises mean for future possibilities, according to different speculative frames. Caught at the intersection of a rationalised healthcare economy and a moral imperative to recondition crisis care, these clinicians develop a daily practice in which the therapeutic rejection of short-term valuing opens novel possibilities for morally tenable care under neoliberal conditions.
Sarah-Jane Phelan (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
This paper centres on Huguette, a Burkinabè market trader, managing a gradual but dramatic shift in the edges of her moral and material world, reorienting herself and her resources through contested and emotionally-laden calculative practices that reflected and reshaped changing possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on twelves months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Burkina Faso market, this research interrogates the types of cognitive and emotional labour required to attune and respond to continually changing potentials emerging through a protracted macro-level crisis. This crisis entailed a gradual but dramatic degradation of security, compounding and compounded by an erosion of the economic rhythms that once animated this market, prompting traders to constantly “evaluate the possibility of continuities, transformations, or blockages” shaping what forms of moral and material worlds could be stewarded and (re)imagined, and how (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014).
This paper hones in on Huguette, a female trader managing a tea kiosk and caring for five children, actively reorienting herself and her resources to speculate and safeguard, pre-empting unaffordable losses and reimagine best possible futures, even in their newly compromised forms. The erosion of margins of accumulation for her business echoed degrading economic opportunities for her children as they emerged from school, while encroaching jihadist violence and the ripples of this in wider society narrowed margins for error. Huguette’s reconsideration of what she could afford to care about and what she could not afford to neglect illustrates how moral-economic contestations are problematised anew when previously affordable moral worlds are compromised or threatened (Zigon 2009). Moreover, this paper seeks to illustrate the intense cognitive work required to rearrange resources and imaginaries, and the emotional work of grieving complex and uncertain forms of loss in what one can imagine for oneself, one’s family and one’s compatriots.
Chelsie Yount-André (University of Leiden)
Paper short abstract:
Analyzing the effects of a Covid bond on families in Senegal, I show how calls for urgency in the face of "crisis" are bound up with economic moralities that obfuscate the ways “responsible” and “sustainable” investments can exacerbate inequalities, jeopardizing families’ ability cope with crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Two weeks after the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, the African Development Bank issued a Covid-themed social bond to help African nations manage the crisis. By June, representatives at the West African Central Bank declared the region to have entered a phase of economic recovery, thanks to the quick response by organizations like the AfDB. In Senegalese families, however, the economic effects of the pandemic drag on. After two years, household revenues have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, meanwhile expenses have increased, due to the rising cost of necessities and the strain of providing for relatives who slipped into poverty.
This paper analyzes the effects of this Covid bond on families in Dakar, considering the consequences of the financialization of crisis relief on bonds’ purported beneficiaries. I analyze the economic moralities that motivated the issuance of Covid bonds and justified their inclusion in portfolios of “responsible” or “sustainable” assets, comparing these ethical discourses to moral narratives in Senegalese households that critiqued the insufficiency and corruption they saw as surrounding relief efforts. Through Covid bonds, financial professionals’ efforts to predict and manage crisis became entangled with families’ struggles to do the same. Families and financiers grapple with the crisis on divergent time scales, each underpinned by its own moral-economic presuppositions regarding how resources ought to be redistributed. I argue that calls for urgency in the face of crisis are bound up with economic moralities that obfuscate how “responsible” investments can reinforce inequalities and jeopardize families’ ability cope with crisis.
Kevin Yildirim (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Amid an ongoing "migrant crisis" in Istanbul, many shopkeepers feel obligated to help migrant waste pickers by giving them recyclable materials for free. For both parties, this transaction generates new moral perspectives on generosity, social otherness, and the limits of hospitality.
Paper long abstract:
Amid ongoing migrant and economic "crises" in Istanbul, migrant labourers in the informal recycling sector are often subjected to accusations of immorality. From local scrap metal dealers to the Istanbul Governor, those who leverage this accusation claim that the informal recycling sector, which employs many foreign migrants, generates "unjust profits." However, my research shows that many Istanbul residents regard encounters with migrant waste pickers as opportunities for realising moral commitments. For example, many local shopkeepers consider it a moral obligation to help waste pickers by giving them recyclable waste for free, knowing that this generosity facilitates their work. By transferring waste to them, shopkeepers enact a variety of moral and political convictions that respond to the presence of poor, hardworking non-citizens in their neighbourhood. Here, moral economic thought is a product of transactions between two parties who see the other as both a partner in exchange and an idealised other — citizen host and foreign guest. Waste transfers are not only a form of hospitality that occurs outside of formal institutions but also a relation that prompts participants to reconsider the morality of work, migration, and citizenship. The moral economic thought that emerges from waste transfers is thus widely diverse, suggesting a need to study morality in the economy as a dynamic and varied product of social interaction. In Istanbul, such an approach reveals the limits of migrant hospitality, as the moral judgments of those with political power triumph over popular understandings of who should profit from the city's waste.
Nikki Mulder (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I examine the intersection of financial and moral values in the context of commercial care for the dead. I explore how African American funeral directors in New Orleans balance financial foresight and a concern for the wellbeing of others in facilitating mortuary rites of passage.
Paper long abstract:
In response to increased competition within the funeral industry and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, black-owned funeral homes in New Orleans have tried to counter their economic precarity by changing their payment terms. Most have stopped arranging funerals on credit. They also re-financialize the life insurance policies of the deceased through factor companies, which builds up cash flow but also makes funerals more expensive. These financial changes are meant to secure financially stable futures for family-owned businesses. Yet they also create insurmountable economic thresholds for some grieving families and recalibrate moral-economic notions of solidarity and care that have long informed the relationships between black-owned funeral homes and the communities they serve. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018), I explore in this paper how African American funeral directors try to become financially stable while still taking proper care of the dead and the bereaved. By focusing on the ways that funeral directors facilitate mortuary rites of passage, I move away from the dominant scholarly discourse that understands the role of money in American death care in terms of ‘consumer choice’ and marketization. I suggest instead that the moral-economic practice of funeral directing is characterized by prudence, or the skill of deliberating well the things to be done in light of one’s own future concerns, while not losing sight of the well-being of others in the here and now. This paper thus speaks to the entanglement and transformation of financial and moral values in the context of commercial care for the dead.