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?

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