Human Economy

The micro-politics of interactions between the third sector, public institutions and private firms are still under-researched. This is of relevance both where the third sector is established, and in areas, such as the former Soviet Union, where it is being promoted, alongside a market economy, as an essential plank in building democratic societies. Frequently, generic ideal models of both the third sector and a free market have been exported, irrespective of local conditions and histories, often with poor or disastrous results. The third sector does, however, play a notable role in assisting and advising migrants across the former Soviet space. Attention to the past thus needs to be complemented by awareness of current transformations to the roles and functions of states and markets. As these change, often becoming more closely linked in the provision of public services, so too the third sector changes its forms and operations.

The third sector therefore acts as an umbrella term for a range of enterprises that differ according to local contexts and histories. It draws on ideas of social capital and community action emphasising the common good. It is commonly confused with the voluntary or community sector, social economy and social enterprise. Nevertheless, the term has real force in that government and supra-state institutions, such as the European Union, promote, fund and engage with the idea of the third sector, thereby endowing it with considerable instrumental potency

This thesis examines Papua New Guinean attitudes to money and modernity through an exploration of contemporary “fast money schemes” (Ponzi scams). The largest of these, U-Vistract Financial Systems, collected millions of Kina from 100,000s of “investors” on the promise of monthly returns on deposits of 100%. The scheme was declared bankrupt in 2000 but its founders escaped imprisonment, fleeing first to Solomon Islands and then to the “no go” zone of Bougainville, where the scheme re-established itself as the Royal Kingdom of Papala.

U-Vistract claimed to be a Christian reform of global finance systems that would deliver abundant prosperity to Papua New Guineans. U-Vistract cultivated a moral vision of its middle-class investors as compassionate Christian patrons whose coming wealth would deliver “development” to a nation disillusioned with social inequality and the postcolonial state.   

U-Vistract investors emerge from this study as morally engaged members of a transnational Christian civil society. This is a surprising conclusion to draw from studying fraud but it is all the more surprising in Papua New Guinea where anthropological interest has historically constructed the “village” as the central place where social meanings are generated. Here, urban Melanesians demonstrate moral and relational sensibilities that combine global aspirations for prosperity with Papua New Guinean disillusionment with the nation. In doing so, perhaps a more individualistic rendering of Melanesia emerges but these are individuals who are also more cosmopolitan in sentiment.

This is my PhD thesis on the symbiotic food system that feeds the majority of residents of the fast growing city of Dar es Salaam. It is based on years of actor orientated ethnographic research that involved following the food from the urban eaters to the primary producers through the networks of traders, transporters and processors.

Global food supply is dominated by transnational corporations, which have great power and are widely critiqued for the negative environmental and social impacts of their operations. Many argue that this industrial food system is unsustainable, yet its expansion seems inevitable and alternatives are seen as incapable of feeding the world's growing and increasingly urban population. Since much of the world's future population growth is going to happen in the cities of the developing world, they have become the frontline for the expansion of the industrial food system, raising the serious challenge of ensuring food security for residents. This paper, based on a qualitative study of patterns of egg provisioning in Dar es Salaam, explores whether existing patterns of food supply in this rapidly growing city, of over four million people, provide workable alternatives. Eggs are an important source of nutrition and patterns of egg supply offer a lens through which to explore the sustainability of different modes of provisioning. A range of non-corporate provisioning patterns, based on small-scale enterprises, are found to have social, economic and environmental advantages, challenging assumptions that corporate food chains are necessary, or desirable, to feed cities sustainably.

The article explores unconscious motivations of human behavior in the financial market. Author introduces the following new notions: 1) “financial magnetism”, i.e. the motivation which is responsible for attracting investor to the market, and enables the investor’s “internal compass” to indicate the way through the market uncertainty; 2) “propensity to presence”, i.e. the motivation to wait, to be calm, not to panic in the very volatile market conditions, to have internal felling of the right moment to act; 3) “automotive volition”, i.e. the motivation, even the inner-directed force to get the goals, find the solutions, make decisions, and do best in the situations when no enough time to think and make the right choice is available.

As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase ‘two sides of the coin’, money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of ‘governance’, with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as ‘economics’, a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U-Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi-magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver ‘development’. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U-Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short-comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam.

This course explores the historical formation of capitalism as a phenomenon in the world and as a theory of society. We will pay critical attention to the concepts used to theorize capitalism (especially credit, debt, capital, commodity, labor, land, property). We will further interrogate the notion of “pre-capitalist” and “non-capitalist” societies and social spaces as we pay special attention to debates concerning the nature of “capitalism” and “slavery.”

Has Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) exhausted all its possibilities as a transforming theory
of the role of companies in the social construction of the XXI Century? Will we be able to achieve
the goals set out in the Global Compact and the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (SDG)
with the current CSR framework and regulations? These and other questions are asked by MEPs
(Members of European Parliament) and many thinkers, professionals and entrepreneurs in the
world, within the framework of the ideological debate on the economic system, after the long
and deep economic and financial crisis that we are living years ago and the growing social
crisis and environmental issues. In this scenario of doubts and within the framework of the
renewed CSR strategy of the European Union, the European Economic and Social Committee
(EESC) considered in its opinion of 9/17/15 that the model of “Economy for the Common Good
“(ECG) is conceived to be included both in the European legal framework as in the National
ones. The EBG is a proposal for a new economic, social and political model based on essential
values such as solidarity, human dignity, social justice, ecological sustainability and democracy
and transparency. In this article, we will approach the proposal that the Economy for the Common
Good presents as an evolution of the traditional CSR; It is an holistic model based on those
values that transform our current economy and business management, into a more human,
social and conscious one, that is, a model that drives us to manage our organizations taking
into account more parameters than usual: Economic, Social and Environmental sustainability
that encompasses them, in a balanced way.
Key Words: #Corporate Social Responsibility, #Economy for the Common Good, #Sustainable Development Goals, #Global Compact.

This book chapter offers an ethnography of a wildcat strike in a company town in Swaziland, framed within the rise of spontaneous labour unrest in southern Africa. I bring together insights from Gramsci, Polanyi and Hardt & Negri to explore the political economy of the alliance between the traditional monarchy and big capital, and the possibilities for democratic change in Swaziland. I suggest that customary ideologies can play a key role in mobilising workers, and are not necessarily aligned with royal hegemony. So far, however, Swazi trade unions and pro-democracy movements have pursued a stance generally hostile to the integration of custom in their discourse and practice, which greatly limits their popular support base.

Global fi nance was previously obscure, beyond the well-documented roles of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Several recent fi nancial crises, however, have now turned the eyes of academics, activists and ci tizens all over the world to how it shapes national currency fl uctuations, the dynamics of national economies especially in the Global South, the prices of oil and other global commodities, and surging infl ation. Anthropologists too have turned their attention to the social organization and culture of the trading pits and o ces of stock and commodities exchanges in New York, Chicago and London, where currencies and fi nancial products are traded and global fi nance is enacted (Zaloom 2006; Ho 2009). The emerging body of literature on fi nancialization points to the phenomenal growth of fi nance-related trade, credit rating agencies, o shore tax havens, speculation in fi nancial markets and the infl uence of banks on policy making and discourse (Martin 2002; Epstein 2005). This literature resembles, in some ways, earlier debates about the impact of globalization, focusing as it does on this dimension of the fi nancial system. Few accounts trace the emergence of new social groups, practices, institutions and subjectivities at the local level that are encouraged, discouraged and produced by the unfolding processes of financialization. The impact of 'high fi nance' on 'everyday life' is assumed to exist rather than be examined empirically. How, for example, do the consumers of fi nance contest, negotiate, domesticate and resist top-down fi nancialization in their everyday lives? We seem to agree that fi nanceas opposed to money or trade -has taken on greater importance in our lives across world society, but this does not mean that fewer spaces for practicing solidarity, self-organization and the reproduction of human life are available.

This series is more an agenda-setting enterprise than a mere book series. It promises to be the most important scholarly initiative to come from the global south in a very long time; one that is sure to change how we think about the world at large, about economy and humanity. JOHN COMAROFF, Harvard University

Rakopoulos whisks from the mists of sinister secrecy a detailed and riveting portrait of the pas de deux of social complicity and ethical engagement that has enabled this new confi guration to emerge within the ethos of modern capitalism.
MICHAEL HERZFELD, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University

This theoretically-sophisticated ethnography will not only change popular images of Sicily, it will also provide hope for those struggling to find new ways of organizing life in today's troubled world. CHRIS GREGORY, ANU College of Arts and Social Science

Based on sensitive fi eldwork and thorough ethnographic research, this is a marvelous account of the anti-mafi a coop project in Sicily which aims to transform landholdings previously owned by mafia families into functioning cooperatives. PETER SCHNEIDER, Fordham University

From Clans to Coops explores the social, political and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confi scated from mafi osi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafi a in Italian history. Rakopoulos's ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labour, ideologies of community and food and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people's lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labour might be salvaged from market fundamentalism and to emergent discourses about the 'human' economy.

The article contains an analysis of economic initiatives of the U.S. president D. Trump in 2017 in the context of his relationship with the American electorate. The author notes the acting president’s desire to strengthen his positions among certain groups of the voting public, encouraging economic optimism of the nation. However, the upcoming events and economic trends the year of 2018 are to test how successful are Trump’s economic initiatives and his MAGA policy.

This article is an introduction to the concept of a human finance, which explores internal mechanisms and impulses for development of financial market, financial relations and institutes. The author analyzes main principles, categories and sources of such concept. The key fundamental difference between a traditional financial theory and the concept of human finance is identification of role and place of a human being in such relations. The fist one sees a human being just as a nominal unit of economic relations, where all activities of such units are determined by rational choice. That is one of the key reasons in the author’s opinion that traditional finance theory could neither explain nor envisage is the latest financial crisis. It is not surprising that with such approach financial world shows up as environment, which is full of randomness. In author’s opinion irrational behavior and acts of persons explain a concealed determination of events and processes in the financial market. In the article author highlights five principles which could become a basis of human finance as an inde- pendent theory: proportionality of people’s mutual obligations and responsibilities, personification of financial relations, driving role of experiments and search of new ideas, determination of events, and restorability of human arrangements, cooperation and trust.

The idea that anyone, with the right critical knowledge and a certain amount of spare time and resources, could become a globally responsible citizen has been skeptically questioned at least since the time of Rousseau. But, during the last two decades, the specific concern that has troubled critical qualitative researchers has been the possible complicity of the active citizen with a neoliberal regime of governmentality, a regime that often uses the injunction to volunteer as a political tactic of responsibilization. The article seeks to address this latent concern through the study of a particularly marketized act of global citizenship: the immersive experience of volunteer travel. Through an innovative Foucauldian analysis and original qualitative method, designed to excavate deeply seated skeptical insights among returned volunteers in Australia, this study elucidates, first, how a personal sense of complicity actually surfaces within the market-mediated volunteer experience, and, second, how the ensuing predicament can be tackled, both from the perspective of the critical academic and of the citizen on the ground.

This article develops a diagnostic lens to make sense of the still baffling development of a 'humanitarian marketplace'. Ambivalently hybrid initiatives such as volunteer tourism, corporate social responsibility or even fair trade do not strictly obey a distributive logic of market exchange, social reciprocity or philanthropic giving. They engender a type of 'economy' that must be apprehended in its own terms. The article argues that the large-scale collaborative effects of such a dispersed market can be theorized without resorting to the classical biopolitical move of simplified agency/holistic reification. The argument proceeds counterintuitively, by appropriating the notion of symbiosis as redefined by contemporary biology, contending through historical contextualization and conceptual work that nature itself offers the best example to grasp spontaneous collaboration among unrelated human beings as a non-automatically balanced and intrinsically political affair that calls for critical management through an ex post facto interventionist policy of selective cultivation.

The concept of Human finance requires determining the principal agent of the financial interrelations. In this article author introduces a new term “Financial human”. This term is an analogue to the term “Economic human” (Homo economicus) which is much better known and widely used in economic literature. The key categories, which turn human being into the financial human being, are consumption, exchange, saving, welfare and intermediation. These categories from the very beginning of human economic activities motivate people to develop financial relations, to create financial assets and institutions, as well as financial mode of human thinking. In the author’s opinion they can’t be unattached from human nature. Author analyses them in a broader sense not just as rationally determined acts, but he sees them rooted in animal spirits. On this ground author concludes that financial human is a key agent of all existed interrelations, obligations and interdependences that determine development pathways of the modern financial system.

South Africa was once notorious for an extreme system of racial inequality known as apartheid. It is still a world leader in economic inequality, but the racial situation is confused. In the meantime something like apartheid has become universal. The Southern African regional economy has some features that point to a more humane alternative to unequal society, to a “human economy”. The world needs a new free trade movement that would begin to dismantle the institutions of national privilege and insist on movement as a human right.

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In becoming a witch, that woman kills one of her relatives, whose flesh is consumed by the cowitch. The cowitch, in turn, becomes indebted to her and must provide more human flesh. This cycle of death may be broken when a healer offers a gift of sacrificial blood to the accused witch in exchange for the victim’s life. Drawing on David Graeber’s concept of human economies as well as Peter Geschiere’s treatment of intimacy and trust in witchcraft discourse, this chapter shows that requests and gifts may constitute leaps of faith that are dangerous but also necessary to undertake.

The diverse research activities carried out in the Human Economy Project focus on the economic practices that people on the ground perform in their everyday life, and the interactions between these actions and larger-scale political and economic structures and institutions. This article provides some partial reflections on what we mean by ‘human economy’. It will discuss some aspects of this approach that have influenced project members, including an ethnographic orientation, historical analysis and comparison across cases. Human economy research often cuts across geographic and theoretical scales. Many project members aim to move beyond the analytical distinction between local and global, and towards a conceptualisation of the economy as a Maussian ‘total social fact’. Finally, the knowledge produced within the project has the potential to help individuals and social groups in building a better world for all who live in it.

Если посмотреть на самые заметные "случайности" недавней истории — финансовый кризис 2007-2008 годов, банкротство банка Lehman Brothers, на пресловутый Brexit, на избрание Дональда Трампа президентом США, придется поверить Нассиму Талебу, автору книги о "черных лебедях", что случайность правит миром. Но хочется с этим поспорить.

People's economic activities in southern and central Africa have undergone major transformations in the last three decades, influenced by significant structural changes in the configurations of big capital and state-capital relations. The focus of this edited collection is on people's economic responses to restructuring in the three mining centres of South Africa, the Zambian Copperbelt and Haut-Katanga, DRC. There is a growing interest in comparing the central African Copperbelt, but, to our knowledge, there has not been any systematic comparison of these three interconnected mining systems. 1 By 'mining system' we mean a specific historical configuration that developed from the interactions, negotiations and conflicts between mining capital, colonial powers, colonised polities, migrant and local labour, and local communities. While capital was internationalised from early on, the forms of state-capital relations that emerged in the three locales shaped them into separate, albeit interconnected and open-ended, systems. Mining companies competed over labour, with African migrants and their families often moving across these areas, but also capital and international markets. Dynamics of competition and cooperation also occurred between the different colonial states. While these systems developed their own specificities, the original goal of conquest for extraction of raw materials destined to the metropolitan markets was common to all three configurations. These processes produced massive displacements and large-scale disruptions of existing economic activities (including mining), international trade, and migration routes. As a heuristic device, we selected articles that study people's economic activities in various geographic areas directly linked to the three mining systems. We included urban mining centres as well as rural labour-sending areas from within and outside the mining countries' national borders. In sectoral terms, we kept the focus as broad as possible, trying to provide some analysis of: how large-scale mining and its institutions have changed over time (Stewart and Nite, Macmillan, and Uzar, in this issue); how people residing in urban mining centres and formerly employed in large-scale mining moved to other economic activities (Rubbers, in this issue); how artisanal mining developed alongside the decline of largescale mining (Cuvelier, in this issue); and how rural sending areas fared with the drastic reduction of mining employment (Johnson, and van der Waal, in this issue). Most of the articles in this special issue are contemporary ethnographic case studies, rooted in an awareness of the political economy of the region and engaging to varying extents with the history of the three mining systems. Different scales are at work herefor example, while one article engages with the changes in the configurations of big capital and state-capital relations in South Africa (Macmillan, in this issue), another is a national case study of mining trade unions in times of privatisation in Zambia (Uzar, in this issue). The next three sections will provide a synthetic comparative historical overview of the main trends in the complex interactions between race, class and capital in the three mining systems, from the inception of large-scale capitalist mining to the present day. The purpose is to bring together already available knowledge into a comparative framework, to provide key context to

The city region foodscape is a relational space of spatially proximate as well as more distant relations. The current understanding of city region foodscapes will be enhanced by more analyses of what is happening in the African and Asian cities where rapid population growth and urbanization, with all its challenges and opportunities, is predominantly taking place. This paper explores the city foodscape of one such city, the rapidly growing Dar es Salaam with over 4.5 million inhabitants. By following some important foods for eaters in the city, this paper draws a picture of the changing shape and nature of Dar es Salaam's foodscape and draws out lessons for debates on city region food systems and urban food planning. It is found that key staple foods are coming from the rural hinterland through a food system that is not part of or modeled on the globally dominant corporate food system and as such represents a working alternative. This food system neither fits within administrative boundaries nor relies primarily on local production. We argue that more academic and policy attention needs to be given to understanding and reinforcing such middle-ground, neither local nor global, food systems that are delivering at city feeding scale.

Malgré une grande similarité au niveau des objectifs proclamés (opposition à la mondialisation néolibérale, développement d'alternatives), les acteurs du commerce équitable et ceux de l'altermondialisme ont constamment maintenu certaines distances entre eux. Cet article propose dans un premier temps une analyse de l'implication des acteurs du commerce équitable dans les forums altermondialistes avant d'exposer les principaux éléments qui distinguent ces deux acteurs.

The aim of this chapter is to examine tentatively the difference between two kinds of moral frameworks based on the concepts of the good and that of interest. I shall start with some introductory remarks on language taken as an explanatory framework rooted in Gadamer and a hermeneutical reading of MacIntyre. In parts two and three, I use this hermeneutical background to analyse the difference between the concept of the good as seen within the classical tradition and that of interest as it came up with the turn of modernity. I also deal with some consequences of this distinction for ethics. Finally, in part four I discuss the possibilities of using the Aristotelian idea of the ethical in a contemporary social and philosophical context. I argue for the necessity of including some references to developed economics by pointing out those aspects of Martha Nussbaum’s and Amartya Sen’s projects, which promote a conception of the good within liberal economics.