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Towards An Anthropology Of Wealth
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Book Synopsis Towards an Anthropology of Wealth by : Theodoros Rakopoulos
Download or read book Towards an Anthropology of Wealth written by Theodoros Rakopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aiming to redefine the concept of wealth, which has too often been reduced to merely ‘accumulated assets’, this book views wealth primarily as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. The authors therefore outline wealth as a triangular phenomenon between capital, the commons and power. Viewing wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, the book explores the processes wherein it is constantly being pulled at from forces that demand appropriation, be that finance, community or state. The chapters tackle perceptions (and practices) of wealth in the commons, in mythical narrative, immaterial substance, aristocratic orders, antimafia, money real and imagined, and conspiracy theory, with contributions from Melanesia, Italy, Greece, India and Mongolia. The comparative perspective lies at the heart of the book, bringing together instances of commonwealth and the commons, as well as hierarchical, relational and substantial understandings of wealth. As the first collection in recent decades to address the anthropology of wealth openly in a comparative perspective, this book will spark discussions of the concept in anthropology, not least at the back of a renewed debate over it due to Piketty’s legacy. This book was originally published as a special issue of History & Anthropology.
Book Synopsis An Anthropology of Money by : Tim Di Muzio
Download or read book An Anthropology of Money written by Tim Di Muzio and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthropology of Money: A Critical Introduction shows how our present monetary system was imposed by elites and how they benefit from it. The book poses the question: how, by looking at different forms of money, can we appreciate that they have different effects? The authors demonstrate how modern money requires perpetual growth, an increase in inequality, environmental devastation, increasing commoditization, and, consequently, the perpetual consumption of ever more stuff. These are not intrinsic features of money, but, rather, of debt-money. This text shows that, through studying money in other cultures, we can have money that better serves the broader goals of society.
Book Synopsis Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value by : D. Graeber
Download or read book Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value written by D. Graeber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-13 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.
Download or read book Anxious Wealth written by John Osburg and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ethnographic study of China’s new elites and their rarified world of debauchery and corruption: “A must have book for China studies” (Choice). This pioneering investigation reveals the private lives—and the nightlives—of the powerful entrepreneurs and managers redefining success and status in the Chinese city of Chengdu. For more than three years, anthropologist John Osburg accompanied wealthy Chinese businessmen as they courted clients, partners, and government officials. Now he invites readers along on his journey through the highly gendered world of luxury karaoke clubs, saunas, and massage parlors—places designed to cater to the desires of elite men. Within these spaces, a masculinization of business is taking place. Osburg details the complex code of behavior that governs businessmen as they go about banqueting, drinking, gambling, bribing, exchanging gifts, and obtaining sexual services. These intricate social networks play a key role in generating business, performing social status, and reconfiguring gender roles. Yet underneath the façade, many entrepreneurs feel trapped by their obligations and moral compromises in this evolving environment. Osburg examines their deep ambivalence about China’s future and their own complicity in the major issues of post-Mao Chinese society—corruption, inequality, materialism, and loss of trust.
Book Synopsis Big Capital in an Unequal World by : Rosita Armytage
Download or read book Big Capital in an Unequal World written by Rosita Armytage and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite. Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.
Download or read book How Forests Think written by Eduardo Kohn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-08-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be humanÑand thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of EcuadorÕs Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the worldÕs most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting directionÐone that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
Download or read book Savage Money written by C.A. Gregory and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.
Book Synopsis The World of Goods by : Mary Douglas
Download or read book The World of Goods written by Mary Douglas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-28 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is well-understood that the consumption of goods plays an important, symbolic role in the way human beings communicate, create identity, and establish relationships. What is less well-known is that the pattern of their flow shapes society in fundamental ways. In this book the renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood overturn arguments about consumption that rely on received economic and psychological explanations. They ask new questions about why people save, why they spend, what they buy, and why they sometimes-but not always-make fine distinctions about quality. Instead of regarding consumption as a private means of satisfying one’s preferences, they show how goods are a vital information system, used by human beings to fulfill their intentions towards one another. They also consider the implications of the social role of goods for a new vision for social policy, arguing that poverty is caused as much by the erosion of local communities and networks as it is by lack of possessions, and contrast small-scale with large-scale consumption in the household. A radical rethinking of consumerism, inequality and social capital, The World of Goods is a classic of economic anthropology whose insights remain compelling and urgent. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Richard Wilk. "Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking." – Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood
Book Synopsis Pursuits of Happiness by : Gordon Mathews
Download or read book Pursuits of Happiness written by Gordon Mathews and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being--defined as "the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society"--and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Gordon Mathews is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996) and Global Culture /Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), and co-written Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2007); he has co-edited Consuming Hong Kong (2001) and Japan's Changing Generations (2004). Carolina Izquierdo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has centered on health and well-being among the Matsigenka in the Peruvian Amazon, the Mapuche in Chile, and middle-class families in the United States.
Download or read book Financialization written by Chris Hann and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.
Book Synopsis Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality by : Daniel Scott Souleles
Download or read book Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality written by Daniel Scott Souleles and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1980s, private equity investors have heralded and shepherded massive changes in American capitalism. From outsourcing to excessive debt taking, private equity investment helped normalize once-taboo business strategies while growing into an over $3 trillion industry in control of thousands of companies and millions of workers. Daniel Scott Souleles opens a window into the rarefied world of private equity investing through ethnographic fieldwork on private equity financiers. Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss documents how and why investors buy, manage, and sell the companies that they do; presents the ins and outs of private equity deals, management, and valuation; and explains the historical context that gave rise to private equity and other forms of investor-led capitalism. In addition to providing invaluable ethnographic insight, Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss is also an anthropological study of inequality as Souleles connects the core components of financial capitalism to economic disparities. Souleles uses local ideas of “value” and “time” to frame the ways private equity investors comprehend their work and to show how they justify the prosperity and poverty they create. Throughout, Souleles argues that understanding private equity investors as contrasted with others in society writ large is essential to fully understanding private equity within the larger context of capitalism in the United States.
Book Synopsis Cognitive Foundations of Natural History by : Scott Atran
Download or read book Cognitive Foundations of Natural History written by Scott Atran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-29 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, this work traces the development of natural history from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from the common conceptions of folkbiology.
Download or read book Anthro-Vision written by Gillian Tett and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges. Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists learn to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision. Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. “Fascinating and surprising” (Fareed Zararia, CNN), Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world.
Book Synopsis The Wealth Hoarders by : Chuck Collins
Download or read book The Wealth Hoarders written by Chuck Collins and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defence Industry. These ‘agents of inequality’ are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01%. In this book, inequality expert Chuck Collins, who himself inherited a fortune, interviews the leading players and gives a unique insider account of how this industry is doing everything it can to create and entrench hereditary dynasties of wealth and power. He exposes the inner workings of these “agents of inequality”, showing how they deploy anonymous shell companies, family offices, offshore accounts, opaque trusts, and sham transactions to ensure the world’s richest pay next to no tax. He ends by outlining a robust set of policies that democratic nations can implement to shut down the Wealth Defence Industry for good. This shocking exposé of the insidious machinery of inequality is essential reading for anyone wanting the inside story of our age of plutocratic plunder and stashed cash.
Book Synopsis Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies by : Benjamin Lee
Download or read book Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies written by Benjamin Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-02 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume draw upon their deep backgrounds in finance, the social sciences, arts, and the humanities to create a new way of understanding derivative capitalism that does justice to its technical, social, and cultural dimensions. The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated both that derivatives are capable of producing great wealth and that their deregulation and privatization cannot control the risks that they produce. A popular reaction is to focus on the regulation or abolition of derivative finance. These authors take a different tack and instead raise the question: if we should want access to the wealth that derivatives are capable of producing, what kind of social institutions and policies would be needed to make such wealth production work for the benefit of all of us? Since this question goes to the very heart of what kind of society is most desirable, the volume argues that we need both a social understanding of the derivative and a derivative understanding of the social. The derivative reading of the social employs a small set of financial concepts to understand certain defining dimensions of contemporary reality. The central concept is that of volatility and its relations to risk, uncertainty, hedging, optionality, and arbitrage. The social reading of the derivative involves anthropological discussions of the gift, ritual, play, and performativity and provides us with frames of embodiment for analyzing, through action and event, the ways derivatives do their work.
Download or read book Liquidated written by Karen Ho and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-13 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
Book Synopsis Anthropology and Economy by : Stephen Gudeman
Download or read book Anthropology and Economy written by Stephen Gudeman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a uniquely cross-cultural perspective, renowned economic anthropologist Stephen Gudeman presents a theory of economic crisis and lessons for its mitigation, in light of the recent global financial crash. This compelling book is richly illustrated with examples from 'strange' small-scale economies as well as developed market economies.
