Cover Image: Ceremony for the Goddess of the Southern Sea to ward off natural disasters. Java, Indonesia, 2005. Photo credit: Thomas Reuter.

Strict state policies and regulations restrict private‐sector growth in Cuba. And yet, many people (scholars and others) view Cuban entrepreneurialism as a celebrated feature of recent Cuban economic transformations. Entrepreneurship usually surges under more liberalized circumstances, where resources are more readily available or individual economic actors are given opportunities to use their flexibility

This article examines the circulation of gifts that binds dozens of indigenous Wayúu communities and Jemeiwaa Kai, a wind energy corporation that intends to build five wind farms in Colombia's coastal region of La Guajira. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork, I analyze how the intimate, reciprocal, and meaningful social exchanges that take place as part of the gift‐giving practices between Jemeiwaa Kai

Recent scholarship indicates that populist rhetoric can profoundly shape commonsense understandings of global energy crises. While scholars often depict rural, working‐class communities as objects of right‐wing disinformation, posttruths, and alternative facts, how rural communities interpret or experience populist narratives is far from adequately understood. This research examines the recent coal

This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. It depicts playful engagements with speculative forms of credit and debt on the part of everyday people facing mass unemployment. The article calls into question contemporary theories of debt that characterize it as inherently destructive or inherently productive. My main argument suggests that credit‐debt

This article posits that conventional human capital development theory as applied to economic development lacks a consideration of cultural context. In developing regions of the world, life decisions at the postsecondary educational level are often less driven by individual choices and “rational” cost–benefit analyses and more by the continuing importance of family, community, and place‐based values

With the recent proliferation of modes of payment, anthropology must increasingly pay closer attention to innovative designs and uses of money in Western societies. Money has started to be perceived as a consumable service with multiple providers from which to choose. In such an environment, the question of how people consume money—instead of how they consume with money—grows in importance. This article

Sex work provides a particularly good example to consider the relationships of money, authenticity, and intimacy. Many scholars who research intimacy point to the fact that seeing sex work as an exchange of money (or goods) for sex is a simplistic and reductive approach. Building on the existing research that complicates the idea of sex work as an emotionally detached sex‐for‐money transaction, this

In this article, I trace how payment and money transfer systems in Cuba have expanded from underground courier services to digital platforms such as Airbnb and Bitcoin wallets. I focus here on payments being halted and deferred because of U.S. embargo restrictions that prevent correspondent relationships with Cuban retail banks and constantly flag transactions initiated in Cuba. Cubans and visitors

The trade in cotton cloth and dammar in late nineteenth‐century Sulawesi passed through three distinct exchange spheres mediated by barter. The highland end users transformed European‐made cloth into a special‐purpose money like the classic case of brass rods among the Tiv. In contrast to Bohannon's treatment of the Tiv, I set the highlanders' use of cloth money in the same analytic frame as the money

Senegalese religious groups historically have relied on their own networks to manage external challenges, such as colonialism, drought, and economic difficulties. Present‐day religious networks often use small businesses to economically support themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research in central Senegal, this article argues that strong religious networks, and practicing Islamic teachings of social

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, thousands of workers across the world have revived bankrupt businesses without—and often against—the involvement of their previous owners. This kind of labor struggle is usually referred to as workers “recovering an enterprise.” Cases of recovery have been reported both in the United States and in European countries, from Spain and France to Greece and Italy

In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people remains unrecognized, undervalued, and exploited. Recently, the ongoing conflict between capitalist markets and human value came to the fore again during the coronavirus pandemic, when many health systems were unprepared. In the United States, business and government leaders feared that quarantines would

This article explores the production of wealth through distributive labor in Maine's secondhand economy. While reuse is often associated with economic disadvantage, our research complicates that perspective. The labor required to reclaim, repair, redistribute, and reuse secondhand goods provides much more than a means of living in places left behind by international capitalism, but the value generated

This article explores crucial decisions made by Sylvia, a Xhosa woman living in the townships of Cape Town, during a period of approximately thirty years. These decisions involved large sums of money and had important consequences for her own life, for those of her son and grandchild, and for the relationships she had with her first and second husbands and in‐laws. Sylvia's decisions continued to be

During the Early Classic period in the Maya lowlands (AD 250–600), black serving vessels were placed as offerings in the highest‐status elite burials. Complicated forms and sophisticated decorative conventions transformed these simple ceramic containers into precious social valuables that were deposited with only the most privileged individuals. This article presents new data, analyses, and interpretations

In recent years, a new class of entrepreneurs and investors has emerged in India. In this article, based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with start‐ups in Delhi, I examine how entrepreneurs are valued by investors and the sociocultural implications of this process. I make two arguments. First, the criteria used to judge creditworthiness, including personal networks, technological capability

The Attala County Self‐Help Cooperative, based in Mississippi, United States, formed with the intention of helping rural African American farmers utilize their land resources and enhance their farm productivity. Productivity is central to the activities of the cooperative. Yet, its members emphasize other forms of wealth that farming sustains, including self‐reliance, the maintenance of a Black agrarian

Sustainable development initiatives that seek to ameliorate global crises require new forms of organization and ways of working for participants. Using an alternative food system initiative in Chiapas, Mexico as an ethnographic case study, this article identifies three forms of labor—physical, organizational, and emotional—that emerge within such projects and explores how these labor forms interact

Research on wealth‐in‐people has proven useful for studying relationships between employers and employees in capitalist systems, but scholars have largely ignored an idea introduced alongside the concept of wealth‐in‐people in Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers's foundational 1977 study. Namely, these authors describe a continuum of ways in which people who are “wealth” to others become either included

In its origins as a concept, wealth in people depended on the circulation and accumulation of rights and obligations among and over the living. But if a person is a source of wealth, what happens when the person dies? Would the person be excised from the relationships upon which wealth in people depends, or might his or her wealth remain accessible to the living? To address this question, we present

This article explores the relationship between the value of money and the value of human life as it plays out in the financing of funeral ceremonies. It examines how these values are articulated through life insurance policies concerning violent deaths of working‐class black Americans in New Orleans. The article draws on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2017–18) in New Orleans, which included

Twenty‐five years after democratic transition, the political liberation of Black South Africans has yet to translate into socioeconomic transformation. As protesters highlight the nation's failed economic transformation, a group of residents in Khayelitsha—Cape Town's largest township—are attempting to bring about economic transformation by becoming entrepreneurs. While informal entrepreneurship has

Among some policymakers and elites, it is common sense that human behavior is rational and guided by material self‐interest. In turn, this view underpins the idea that cash transfers and social services, if made too generous, risk distorting economic incentives, diminishing the “work ethic” and fostering a “culture of dependency.” The Nordic countries, however, pose a significant empirical challenge

Despite substantial investments in the diversification and development of their economies, Oman and other Arab Gulf states have yet to experience structural changes that meaningfully reduce their dependence on oil. Pointing out that the “problem” of oil dependence has never existed independent of a development apparatus attempting to solve it, this article explores how developmental discourses and

In this article, I present a political‐ecological history of the Mikea Forest of southwestern Madagascar, and of the Mikea people, anchored in four water‐themed moments: 1966, with the publication of one of the first ethnographic descriptions of Mikea, Où vivre sans boire, “where they live without drinking”; 1998, when Mikea combined foraging with swidden maize agriculture and traveled long distances

A hallmark of many Global South city streets is ambulant vendors' daily trade in prepared and fresh foods. Yet governments often restrict such informal and sometimes illegal enterprises, privileging instead privatized and sanitized streetscapes—policies that disrupt urbanites' livelihoods and their consumption options. Engaging these issues, this article analyzes how street food vendors in Baguio,

After the U.S. foreclosure crisis of 2008, residential real estate investment became a dubious financial strategy. But in the real estate investment seminars I attended in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs in 2014 and 2015, the housing market's recent collapse was being repackaged into a space for ordinary people to seize financial freedom and find opportunity in the wake of crisis. This article

Organic regulation makes products legible to consumers around the world, adding value to commodities and seeking to counter socioecological injustice through neoliberal logics of consumer choice and market diversification. Despite the regulatory and consumer need for universal signification, organic agriculture varies considerably between regional contexts and even within the same country. Within India

This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the “responsible” category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption

Centuries ago in western Micronesia, Yapese islanders sailed to the Palauan archipelago 250 miles away to carve their famous stone money disks (rai) from limestone and then transported them back for use as exchange valuables in various social transactions. While rai were not strictly currency, their value is similar to other traditional and modern objects where worth is arbitrarily based on both real

Anthropological research on water and economy has a long and rich history, especially among archaeologists and political economy scholars. In this review article, we discuss contemporary anthropological scholarship on water and economy to identify still‐active areas of long‐standing theoretical interest as well as novel theoretical approaches. We present five important threads of scholarship on the

Since the 1990s, access to water has profoundly changed in rural Namibia. The institutional transformation was informed by the then dominant discourse in the global policy debate on water, most importantly the idea of community‐based management (CBM). While the supporters of the development regime promised that it would bring sustainability, economic development, and water for all, ethnographic research

The enclave state of Lesotho served as a labor reserve for South Africa's mining industries for more than a century before the the migrant labor economy declined dramatically in the 1990s. The Lesotho government has since hung its hopes on becoming another kind of reserve for South Africa: a water reservoir. A treaty between the two countries initiated the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, a multibillion‐dollar

The construction of Kariba Dam in 1958 ignited a legacy of livelihood insecurity and chronic liminality that reverberated through subsequent generations. A community under one chief was split into two marginal resettlement sites more than 200 km apart. Sixty years after the dam’s construction, and following a series of cyclical shifts between access to and alienation from international development

Water has multiple values across and within cultures—transforming it from basic substance to a vehicle of cultural identity. Water scarcity can be imposed by hydrological or by social exclusion; each reinforces the other. Yet, even under scarcity, hierarchies are not immutable. People use myriad tools to increase their share of water, including, at times, the expenditure of more water. In water‐scarce

Access to water underpins a range of smallholder livelihood strategies. Consequently, it is the intersections of water and land use and access that structure rural livelihoods. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in the town of Sussundenga in central Mozambique, this article examines how residents differentiated by class and gender negotiate access to water under a fragmented water

Kerkenes is the largest pre‐Hellenistic city in Turkey. It covers 2.5 square kilometers and is enclosed by a 7‐km‐long stone wall. This Iron Age, Phrygian city was well planned, only inhabited for forty to sixty years, and then purposefully destroyed and abandoned. Not only were the city wall and architecture planned but interconnected water management features for the city were also part of how the

Water sharing between households could crucially mitigate short‐term household water shortages, yet it is a vastly understudied phenomenon. Here we use comparative survey data from eight sites in seven sub‐Saharan African countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda) to answer three questions: With whom do households share water? What is expected

After a massive hurricane devastated Belize's south coast in 2001, “sustainable tourism” was the national government's answer to spurring economic redevelopment. Since then, the communities of the Placencia Peninsula, in particular, have engaged in rapid tourism development as an economic strategy for securing local livelihoods, culminating in the arrival of mass cruise tourism in 2016. In a region

Across the world, desalinization, wastewater recycling, and rainwater collection are just a few of the new technological and social processes transforming human–water relations in urban areas. Although rainwater collection is an ancient technology, I argue that its formalization as a water conservation technology in American cities brings into being novel resources and subjectivities. By analyzing

Despite the abundance of water in the Amazon rainforest, people living in Awajún communities in northern Peru express concern over their water security. In this article, I employ a critical biocultural approach to examine how shifts from subsistence to market‐based livelihoods have created threats to water security that can “get under the skin” to influence the mental health of Awajún community members

The quest for gender economic equality is becoming a component of corporate and transnational institutional antipoverty initiatives in the Global South. Framed as “smart economics,” this approach explicitly ties women's empowerment to economic growth. On one hand, this framework employs a discursive construction that depicts women as attentive, family‐oriented entrepreneurs and caregivers who are more

This article seeks to add to our understanding of the public versus private behavioral dichotomy in Northern Ireland by examining the underlying system of moralities. I argue that two sets of values, a “public” and a “private” one, exist within the Northern Ireland farming community. According to public values, it is more important to be a “good person” (honest, caring, hardworking) than a Protestant

The looming alteration in climate has spurred a veritable industry over the past two decades of overly simplistic scenario modeling and theoretical predictions of future changes brought about by global warming, some based on research on human responses to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature in the past. Scholars who stress the complexity of climate and social processes have critiqued such crude

Anthropologists have long considered how people create and perceive the value of goods and services. While valuation of nature as a commodity is one means of conservation, locally resonant values of nature may not follow market logic. We apply the ecosystem services valuation (ESV) framework to four major urban river ecosystems (Australia, New Zealand, United States, and United Kingdom) to compare

Residents of many African cities face economic uncertainty due to high rates of under‐ and unemployment and lack of government support. In response, many urban Africans have fortified their links to rural areas as a strategy to weather uncertainty and reduce vulnerability. Scholars have documented high rates of ownership of rural resources (e.g., land, housing, and livestock) by people living in cities

In Brazil’s post-neoliberal government of upward mobility and public policies, infrastructures are the symbiosis of experimental forms of government, political action, and practices of consumption. This article draws from a four-year-long multiscalar ethnography of Minha Casa Minha Vida, the country’s largest public housing program. It uncovers the temporalities of infrastructural hope unleashed as

This article examines the labor power of digital miners. Though an obscure and still incipient facet of the digital economy, crypto‐mining powers and secures transactions across blockchains, or public distributed digital ledgers. Drawing from interviews with cryptocurrency enthusiasts, blockchain advocates, and developers; participation in online and offline discussions; and a survey with small‐scale

This article explores how and when student debt is represented as a problem for young people as well as the ways in which the consequences of this indebtedness are handled. This is done through a comparative reflection about the experience of indebtedness felt by several young adults who have university student loan debt in Santiago, Chile, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The primary results confirm

This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by†product of

This article contributes to critical social scientific understanding of the significance of state power to the furtherance of the financialization of socioeconomic life. Drawing on the poststructural theories of power of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the concepts of “diagram†and “dispositif†are developed to foreground how changes in modalities and relations of power are manifest in shifting

The aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 witnessed a significant transformation of the financial systems of the Southeast Asia region. It saw the ascendance of capital markets in financial systems that had traditionally relied on bank loans and other sorts of so†called relationship finance. This emergence of capital markets was by design rather than the spontaneous and natural result

Why did random walk models and market efficiency become central to financial economics, when other approaches did not? Attention to the terms of the debate that surrounded efficiency at a formative stage for the discipline reveals an emerging consensus about best practices in assembling data, framed in a mode of argumentation that emphasizes “reasonableness†over other standards. Changes in the

The material nature of money has always been at the core of debates about its early development and its role in socioeconomic relationships. Archaeology can contribute to these debates through its attention to the material world, its long†term perspective, and its examination of diverse contexts in which money has been used. In this article, I examine the early monetization of cacao beans and cotton

The popularity of gold in India and Vietnam is attributed to either cultural values or an undeveloped financial sector. Yet gold also serves as an important reserve asset for central banks, more so than ever following the 2008 financial crisis. By way of exploring this juxtaposition, I turn to recent campaigns in each country to promote a national gold form, the SJC bar in Vietnam and the Indian Gold

Through an ethnographic study of commercial microlending in urban India, this article examines how “everyday†financialization reinscribes class and gender hierarchies in working†class communities at global finance's outer edges. Relatively privileged women deploy their knowledge of their communities to organize women, sometimes coercively, into precise formations that meet the exacting requirements

This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the well†known case of mobile money but also the emerging use of smartphone apps, payment tills, digital credit services, and digital fund†raising computer programs. Development professionals have explicitly feminist goals in bringing digital finance to women in the Global South. In several recent reports

Latin American conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are usually regarded as policies of social protection that question the neoliberal agenda. This article suggests instead that the Brazilian CCT Bolsa FamA­lia (Family Grant) is ambiguous in the sense that it was consolidated in association with policies of expansion of financial markets in the country under the rubric of social rights and female

This article describes the financialization of work, value, and social organization in a transnational community of soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. This community originally migrated from the US Midwest to the Brazilian Cerrado in search of large tracts of cheap and productive land. While these farmers migrated to Brazil in pursuit of the reproduction of farming livelihoods and values, they adopted