This article serves to introduce the Special Issue of Economic Anthropology dedicated to “Convenience as a Driver, Mediator, and Moderator of Social Economies.” The twelve articles in this issue are based on papers presented at the fortieth annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame from April 30 to May 1, 2020. In this introductory article, I briefly introduce

This article gathers together stories from wild foods pickers in West Virginia's North Central Highlands who work along the side of the road. Building from anthropological scholarship in roads, roadsides, and edgework, I argue that amid neoliberal privatization, the side of the road is a convenient place to gather wild foods. Because the property along the side of the road is often confused, ignored

Facing enduring labor shortages, West Africans have long adopted labor-saving technologies. Using data from a study of 108 households in 2016–18 in Manantali, Mali, this article looks at the availability, adoption, uses, and outcomes of common labor-saving technologies in agriculture, domestic provision, transport, and telecommunications. People were attracted by technologies that they deemed useful

Advocates of philanthropy often frame its worth through efficacy. Critical voices counter such narratives by exposing the social construction of these ideas by hegemonic forces. But they do not interrogate concepts of efficacy through close attention to the process of doing philanthropy. To address this gap, this article engages with philanthropy through the anthropology of techniques. Based on three

Few figures are more at odds with convenience than the informal land broker. Lambasted for corruption, opacity, and inefficiency, at best such brokers are portrayed as necessary bridges between different embedded markets, at worst as crooks profiting from their monopolizing of relationships and information. Yet, little attention is given to how brokers can affect the formation of markets and the meaning

Based on life history interviews with successfully retired drug dealers, this article examines opportunities and challenges in the suburban underground economy. “Friendship” is key. Suburban drug dealing occurs exclusively through networks of friends, kin, and the acquaintances thereof. Friends are functionally necessary for the suburban illegal drug business but also economically inconvenient in that

This article uses the concept of convenience as an analytical prompt to investigate how ideas about work organize a cash-based social assistance program financed through foreign aid. Productive Social Safety Nets (PSSN) is a nationwide program providing small regular payments to very poor households in Tanzania. Cash transfers as components of social assistance not predicated on working confront assumptions

Rural transformation in Nepal is characterized by accelerating out-migration, along with shifting aspirations for becoming “developed” or “modern,” which are associated with urban and foreign infrastructure and consumption. In this context, I examine how convenience practices and technologies interact with the social processes of migration and how they together impact people's life choices and produce

The World Bank notes that officially recorded remittances reached $689 billion in 2018, including $529 billion to low- and middle-income countries. While these figures are mind-boggling and potentially render the act of migration as a clear decision, they do not communicate the social challenges that result for movers and nonmovers around migration and remitting. Our article is organized to better

Convenience technologies have the ability to change the way people do reproductive labor, or labor associated with caregiving and domestic roles, in their households. Reproductive labor is disproportionately performed by women across the globe and underpins capitalism by creating cheap labor. This article investigates how convenience technology challenges and reinforces gender roles and socioeconomic

Based on twelve months of fieldwork into Uber's conflict in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this article examines convenience's role in the emergence of what I call cynical economies: a method and logic of production expressly organized on the awareness of a distance the very rhetoric of convenience exacerbates. For the city's middle class, convenience defined a democratizing, empowering arena of private

How does convenience operate not just as a highly coveted consumer good that stands to mitigate the demands of life in a fast-paced society but also as an ideology that is integral to new forms of capital accumulation, domination, and extraction? Taking Shoshana Zuboff's work on surveillance capitalism as a departure point, in this article I explore this question by focusing on one of Amazon's newest

In this article, I argue that the economization of social differences in the workplace is a political practice. I examine how, after the dismantling of corporate bureaucracies and affirmative action policies, diversity professionals create economic justifications for practices they regard as creating racial equity. Insofar as they do this to conveniently create markets for their expertise, diversity

This article analyzes national monuments, museums, and Cultural Heritage Sites in Zimbabwe for their symbolic and economic value as politicized and contested landscapes. It argues that museums and national legacy sites are developed as public places that camouflage but also reveal social memory in the process of state identity formation. Developments at cultural and heritage sites include a dual mandate

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