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- Convenors:
-
Yukun Zeng
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Yang Shen (Zhejiang University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
Beyond interests, intention, and ideology, this panel centers the weight of action—costs, labor, time, repetition, sacrifice, defense, struggle, and asks how commitments and stakes are formed, maintained, and valued, and with what social, political, and methodological consequences.
Long Abstract
This panel develops an anthropological approach to an often-obscured aspect of moral economy: commitment and stakein social action. Rather than asking only about value, interests, intentions, or ideology, we foreground the weight of action—its costs, labor, effort, time, repetition, sacrifice, defense, and struggle—and the socio-political situations that shape and are reshaped by these investments. We propose a comparative vocabulary for analyzing the formation, maintenance, contestation, intensification, and aftermath of commitment and stake across settings.
We invite papers that take up questions such as: How and why do people become committed? What do they put at stake, and who recognizes or refuses those stakes? How are people’s costs moralized in the process? Which devices (metrics, narratives, rites, contracts, audits) certify or discount commitment? How do temporalities (short surges vs. long horizons) and breakdowns (default, exit, crisis) reorder persons, relations, and futures? How do people conceptualize commitment and stake? And what commitment and stake stays unconceptualized yet operative in practice? By asking these questions, this panel advances classic debates in moral economy and economic anthropology, while building bridges to the anthropology of social movements, labor and work, religion, and health/medicine.
Recognizing the ethnographic difficulty of accounting for commitment and stake, we also invite methodological reflection: How can ethnography trace grit, effort, and endurance without reducing them to thin labels or romantic tropes? What genres and techniques best render the “imponderabilia” and thickness of commitment legible and at stake?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper proposes three methodological implications on attending to stakes : 1) attention to the politico-economic gravity of social meaningfulness; 2) a “post-gnostic” mode of inquiry, rather than diagnosis and prognosis; and 3) a radical commitment to engagement as a methodological imperative.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates the methodological implications of attending to stakes in social scientific inquiry. Stakes point to the weight behind social action: the concerns, costs, labor, effort, time, repetition, sacrifice, defense, and struggle. They foreground a dimension of moral economy that is often overlooked in social science yet remains deeply at stake in grassroots social worlds. How might social inquiry take stakes seriously? This paper proposes three methodological implications: first, attention to the density and gravity of social meaningfulness; second, a “post-gnostic” mode of questioning that departs from diagnostic and prognostic frameworks; and third, a radical commitment to engagement as a methodological imperative. The analysis draws on empirical cases from my fieldwork on grassroots Confucianism and self-taught examination in China, as well as on critical historical studies of Clifford Geertz and feminist economic anthropology.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Piedmont , the article explores the issues of commitment in the lens of genealogical commitment and shows how farmers navigate market and policy constraints through tactical resistance , preserving their "form of life" amidst ecological fragility.
Paper long abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in South-Eastern Piedmont (Italy), this paper ethnographically interrogates the “weight” of ecological transition and industrial standardization on family farms. While European policy narratives frame agriculture through the lens of technical efficiency and measurable sustainability , this study reveals the agricultural experience as a heavy accumulation of labor, bureaucratic sacrifice, and material struggle.
Moving beyond economic interest, the paper analyzes the farm not merely as a production unit, but as a site of “genealogical commitment”. Here, the stake is the maintenance of a "form of life" rooted in intergenerational memory and moral responsibility toward the land. However, this commitment is increasingly weighed down by the labor of compliance: the "second job" of navigating digital portals, certifying eco-schemes, and meeting industrial parameters that render the field legible to the State but alien to local knowledge.
The paper proposes the concept of "bounded peasant autonomy" to describe how farmers endure this weight. They do not act with full sovereignty, nor are they passive victims; rather, they engage in a constant, exhausting negotiation of constraints. The "cost" of staying involved in agriculture is paid through "everyday forms of resistance"—tactical adaptations of protocols, the intensification of family (often female) administrative labor, and the friction between maintaining yielding crops and adhering to environmental audits. By tracing these frictions, the paper illuminates the material and existential toll required to maintain the “stake” of rural continuity in an era of precarious ecological governance.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on fieldwork with autoworkers at Volkswagen Mexico, this paper focuses on efforts to create solidarity among unevenly located workforces. It traces an emerging moral economy that seeks to cut across union politics.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the labor involved in cultivating relationships of solidarity. Drawing on fieldwork along Volkswagen’s supply chain of car production in Mexico, it focuses on a group of autoworkers and their efforts to create solidarity among unevenly located workforces and among workers whose social relations are contentious and antagonistic.
Volkswagen’s autoworkers are directly employed by the car company. In the current labor regime, they benefit from traces of the social contract among union, state, and companies that characterized Fordism. Logistics workers, by contrast, are a younger generation of workers and are among the most precarious workforces employed in Mexico’s export economy. They are situated in a flexible labor regime. Contentious and antagonistic relationships between workers take different forms: from autoworkers blaming logistics workers for delays in production to autoworkers accusing each other and their union of colluding with Volkswagen to increase the speed of the line.
This paper centers on a group of autoworkers who meet outside the workplace, often during their day-off, and their conversations and heated discussions, to explore the forms of labor and time that go into collective efforts require to create solidarities. It examines how their commitment towards overcoming antagonistic relationships is cultivated and maintained in each encounter and put into practice on the assembly lines in the day-to-day of car production. By paying attention to how solidarities are crafted, this paper traces an emerging moral economy that seeks to cut across union politics, while still instilling labor politics.
Paper short abstract
In Transcarpathian villages, smuggling is described as “helping each other get by”. Local moral rules guide trust, fairness, and community autonomy, revealing how residents navigate uncertainty, sustain livelihoods, and negotiate everyday life beyond the reach of the state.
Paper long abstract
In villages along the Ukrainian–Slovak border, residents often describe smuggling not primarily as profit-making, but as “helping each other get by”. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Transcarpathian Ukraine, this paper examines how cross-border smuggling is embedded in a rural moral world shaped by mutual commitment, shared hardship, and a persistent sense of local autonomy from the state.
For many residents, everyday economic life unfolds amid uncertainty, shifting regulations, and limited trust in formal institutions. In this context, smuggling serves as a practice through which households maintain local autonomy and neighbors enact obligations toward one another. Decisions about trust, which goods to move, and how profits should be shared are guided by locally recognized ideas of fairness, moderation, and responsibility, reflecting an ethical sensibility within the community’s informal rules. People speak of “doing it the right way” — a phrase that signals moral restraint and attention to community consequences rather than legality.
These distinctions matter. Certain practices are condemned as greedy, dangerous, or socially disruptive, while others are tolerated or respected. Through these everyday judgments, borderlanders define the limits of acceptable economic action and assert collective stakes in how life should be organized. By tracing these moral evaluations, the paper shows how economic practices become a key arena where commitment to community, local autonomy, and negotiations with state authority are lived and contested. It offers ethnographically grounded insight into how moral economies are constituted through shared stakes, obligations, and situated forms of commitment.
Paper short abstract
I provide an outline of a theory of commitment as the dedication of action toward the realization of something in the world, over time, despite difficulty and struggle. Commitment is central to world-making; contextual and practical as well as a powerfully communicative of meaning.
Paper long abstract
In this presentation I provide an outline of a theory of commitment, understood as the conscious direction of action toward the realization of something in the world, over time, despite difficulty and struggle. Commitment in this sense constitutes a fundamental aspect of human action that deserves to be thought and studied in its own right. Drawing mainly on research on collective action, I provide some ideas about how to do so. I propose that commitment is central to world-making and involves the exercise of subjective capacities for recognition, evaluation, and realization of potentiality. Neither an individual psychological state nor a specific social or cultural form, commitment is contextual and practical as well as powerfully communicative, both as narrative and as example. Because a focus on commitment underlines how and why people struggle to make worlds meaningful, it renders visible forms of desire, care, and being that exceed those involved in conventional concepts of interested action. In doing so, it clarifies a perennial contradiction of capitalist modernity, which valorizes goal-directed, self-responsible activity, while bending its ends towards profit and “creative destruction.”
Paper long abstract
In 1966, Clifford Geertz, in a footnote, flagged the “underdevelopment” and even “non-existence” of an anthropology of religious commitment/non-commitment (1966:43). Rather than asking what such an anthropology might have looked like, we read Geertz’s comment as signaling an epistemic condition: at that moment, commitment was not an anthropologically thinkable object (Trouillot 2012). We ask how so.
Inspried by the 'affirmative geneology' method propsoed by Hans Joas (2013), we situate Geertz's observation within the intellectual realignments of American philosophy and social science in the 1950s~60s. Then eminent analytic philosophy decoupled commitment from a Western religious register, largely by separating fact from value and relocating the phenomenon of commitment into a domain of propositional knowledge, whose empirical manifestation is linguistic rather than embodied. This reconceptualization severed commitment’s link to contingent experience and situated action. By doing so, analytic philosophy rendered commitments intelligible as semantically recognized entities. Yet this same paradigm shift made the practical act of (non-)commitment effectively unthinkable for ethnographic inquiries.
By reconstructing these conditions of 'unthinkability', we argue that the absence of an anthropology of (non-)commitment was not a disciplinary accident but a consequence of a broader reconfiguration of the conceptual terrain shared by philosophy, religious studies, and social science. The paper does not offer an anthropological theory of commitment; it demonstrates why such a theory has been historically foreclosed. In doing so, it opens conceptual space for future theoretical and ethnographic work on the practical, relational, and processual forms of (non-)commitment in current social life.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines migrant women’s pursuit of paid work in Germany as a gendered moral economy of commitment and stake. Based on two years of ethnography in Halle (Saale), it analyzes these efforts as prolonged moral projects marked by unequal costs, uncertainty, and layered temporalities.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines migrant women’s pursuit of paid work and vocational trajectories in Germany as a gendered moral economy of commitment and stake. Drawing on two years of ethnographic engagement with migrant women participating in projects for labour market transition in Halle (Saale), the paper analyzes these pursuits not as linear pathways but as prolonged moral projects marked by unequal costs, uncertain outcomes, and layered temporalities.
Seeking paid work for migrant women is oriented towards securing material stability and individual autonomy, pursued alongside other moral projects that weigh on household obligations and transnational gendered expectations. Migrant women’s commitment for finding employment is a sustained emotional, material, and logistical labour carried out over time. These are repeatedly interrupted and recalibrated by care responsibilities, household coordination, and the management of family life, producing distinctly gendered temporalities of waiting, acceleration, and suspension. Their trajectories often unfold as marathons marked by delay, repetition, and endurance.
Everyday practices—attending language courses and Sprachcafes, volunteering, gathering certificates, deciphering correspondence, and navigating training and job-search infrastructures—constitute forms of labour that are rarely recognized as such, yet are essential to moving forward. Documents and credentials function as devices that translate dispersed effort into legible proof, while simultaneously disciplining women’s time and conduct. As emotional, temporal, and material investments accumulate, women’s stakes intensify, rendering withdrawal increasingly costly even as promised forms of independence remain deferred. By tracing commitment as lived and gendered labor, the paper contributes to moral economy debates by foregrounding endurance as a central analytic object.
Paper short abstract
Based on fieldwork about the repurposing of defunct church buildings in Montreal (Canada), I show how clergy collaborate with residents to form collectively governed spaces, reshaping commitment to public good through property ownership strategies that claim both secular and sacred sources of value.
Paper long abstract
Since the mid-twentieth century, church attendance across the global North has plummeted, forcing Christian institutions to divest from expensive historic buildings. In Quebec, austerity-driven cuts to heritage conservation have accelerated the commercial redevelopment of churches into luxury condos, gyms, and nightclubs. Although secular reforms in the 1960s dismantled the Catholic Church’s role as an institutional guarantor of public good, sales to private developers spur public outcry over the loss of a collective inheritance built through generations of tithing and volunteerism. In response, residents are experimenting with social enterprise models that repurpose defunct churches into collectively governed public assets (immobilier collectif).
Drawing from fieldwork (2023–2024) at a repurposed church in Montreal, this paper examines the political stakes of converting religious property wealth into civic value in Quebec’s secularized social economy. Thinking with—and critically beyond—“moral economy” (Fassin 2009; Palomera and Vetta 2016), I show that while church repurposing initiatives challenge commercialization and private ownership regimes, they also hinge on infrapolitical strategies for working virtuously within capitalist infrastructure to promote social—and sacred—values like reciprocity and redistribution: clergy leverage tax exemptions to offer subsidized rent to nonprofits who also co-manage the site, while monetizing the sanctuary through worship and corporate event rentals that fund building operations. I join calls for an anthropology of capitalism beyond denunciatory critique (Millar 2024), tracing how religious actors reshape their commitment to public good through property ownership strategies that claim alternative sources of value (Rudnyckyj and Osella 2017; Simoni 2016).
Paper short abstract
In the aftermath of great events, sometimes it is impossible to continue a previous life. For some, these events introduce an existential disturbance that leads to profound new commitments, or the abandonment of old ones. I examine this relation through two stories of refugee reception in Berlin.
Paper long abstract
In the aftermath of a great event, sometimes it becomes impossible to continue a previous life. Those that live through such transformative events might find themselves disturbed or fractured by them. The interruption of the everyday that such events introduce can also become the beginning of a new self, one that finds its existential anchor in a mode of commitment, a sense of purpose that feels urgent and necessary. Then again not all who live through such times are equally captured by them, and not all those who are, commit in the same way, or to the same things. How do we understand the relative success and failure of events to produce enduring commitments? In this paper I examine this question through two such events of refugee arrivals - the Oranienplatz refugee movement of 2012, and the Long Summer of Migration of 2015/16 - as they played out in the lives of interlocutors of mine. In doing so, I borrow and build on the work of philosophers like Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek. For Badiou, the event is the central piece of a puzzle for both persons and societies: how do new things/beings come into existence? The event, evidence of a “newness in being”, demands, Badiou contends, fidelity (commitment) to its truth. For Zizek, the “event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes”. As excessive effect, the event becomes one way of thinking about commitment’s allegiance to a certain disturbance. What can anthropology add to this conversation?