11Th Konitsa Summer School in Anthropology, Ethnography and Comparative Folklore of the Balkans

The Municipality of The University of Ioannina Border Crossings Network Konitsa

11th Konitsa Summer School in Anthropology, Ethnography and Comparative Folklore of the Balkans

Konitsa, Greece, 27/7 - 12/8/2015

New trends in economic anthropology: Labour, finance, and solidarity in a turbulent world

Dr. Aliki Angelidou, Panteion University, Athens Dr. Dimitra Kofti, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Dr. Theodoros Rakopoulos, University of Bergen Tyler Boersen, New School for Social Research, New York 2

COURSE SYLLABUS

Description:

During the last decades the world economy has taken new directions, shaped by the free flows of capital and information, financialization, the precarization and fragmentation ofemployment, growing inequalities and the development of multiple grassroots initiatives and struggles. As a result, anthropologists became more critically engaged in discussions concerning local performances of global processes of capitalism. This course aims to critically discuss ways in which anthropological understandings of economy have been informed through ethnographies on the neoliberal turn of the economy and the effects of the financial and the sovereign-debt crisis which occurred in the US and Europe since 2008. During the course, we will discuss the growing anthropological interest on notions such as ‘finance’, ‘labour’, and ‘solidarity’ that have given lately a new breath to economic anthropology. We will focus on case studies from our own fieldwork research in Southeast Europe, as well as from numerous ethnographies dealing with recent anthropological approaches to late capitalism and crisis.

Teaching methods: Lectures, ethnographic film screening and team-work exercise.

Lecturers: Aliki Angelidou ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, exploring socio-economic transformations in postsocialist rural Bulgaria. Additionally, she has collaborated with the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Institutions et des Organisations Sociales (LAIOS/CNRS), Paris, investigating the (re)definitions of the European identity after the enlargement of the European Union towards the East. She has also published on migrants’ mobility from East European countries to Greece and on the economic elites’ mobility in the Balkans. Currently, she carries out research on household economy and crisis in a Greek agrotown. She has been a research fellow at the University Kliment Ohridski (Sofia) and at the Center for Advanced Studies Sofia (CAS) and a visiting scholar at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. She is external partner of the Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative (IDEMEC/CNRS), Aix-en-Provence. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, anthropology of Eastern Europe and postsocialism, migration, borders and transnationalism, the comparative history of anthropology in Southeast Europe as well as applied anthropology.

Tyler Boersen ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York City, USA. He holds a master’s degree in anthropology from The New School and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan. His doctoral research based on long term fieldwork in Athens, Greece investigates ‘insolvency’ as a social, political, and economic concept. He has taught and published on the intersections of finance and work, most recently The New Insolvencies: From Detroit to Athens (August 2015, in Greek) in To Vima Magazino. 3 Dimitra Kofti ([email protected]) is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany), member of the research group on financialization. She has studied history and anthropology (BA University of Thessaly, Greece) and social anthropology (MA, PhD University College London, UK). She has worked on class and changing temporalities in the context of privatisation and flexibilisation of labour in Bulgaria and has formerly been a member of the ‘Industry and Inequality’ research group at the Max Planck Institute. She is currently completing her film on crisis and deindustrialization in Bulgaria. She has also worked and published on cross-border relations and economic transactions, with a particular focus on business mobility and on consumer tourism at the Greco-Bulgarian borders. She has been a research fellow at Central European University in Budapest and at the University Kliment Ohridski in Sofia. Her research interests include economic and political anthropology, historical anthropology, anthropology of space and film.

Theodoros Rakopoulos ([email protected]) currently works as Research Fellow at the Egalitarianism ERC programme, University of Bergen. He has a PhD from Goldsmiths and has previously worked as Research Fellow at the Human Economy Programme (University of Pretoria). He has conducted long-term fieldwork in rural Sicily and urban Greece in research supported by the Wenner- Gren Foundation. His previous and forthcoming publications include articles anthropological and regional journals (including Focaal, Social Analysis, Dialectical Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology and Social Anthropology, as well as the Journal of Modern Italian Studies and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies). His monograph titled Working on mafia land: work cooperatives and the Sicilian antimafia is due for publication by Berghahn.

Course outline:

Monday 25th July

The crisis of the capital and the coming back of Economic Anthropology (Developed by Dr. A. Angelidou)

This lecture is an introduction to anthropological readings on economic anthropology and a critical overview of the ambivalent relationship between social anthropology and economics. Following a historical approach we will focus on the main conceptual frames, methodologies and thinkers. Starting from the establishment of political economy in late 18th century we will follow the theoretical shift to economics in late 19th century. We will examine the works of Boas, Μalinowski and Mauss in the interwar period, regarding systems of exchange in non capitalist societies (potlatch, Kula, gift) that have shaped the field of 'primitive economics'. We will explore the 'golden age' of economic anthropology (1950-1970), when the debates between 'formalists' and 'substantivists' and the Marxist debates on production in pre-capitalist social formations dominated the main discussions. We will discuss the turn to consumption, commoditization and the 'cultural life of things' in the 1980s-1990s and the decline of economic anthropology. We will finally examine critical approaches to the ‘economy of market’ and 'neoliberalism' that came back again at the front stage after the end of the Cold War and mostly since the recent economic crisis. Our aim is to show how economic anthropology allows the shift from an ideological, and to a great extent abstract debate on the economy, to the study of concrete economic practices which are viewed as ‘cultural’ and ‘social’ rather than ‘natural’ events.

Key texts: 4  Hann C. and Hart K., 2006, ‘A short history of economic anthropology’, http://thememorybank.co.uk/2007/11/09/a-short-history-of-economic-anthropology/.  Hart K., Laville J.-L. & Cattani A. D., 2010, 'Introduction', in Hart K., Laville J.-L. & Cattani A. D. (eds.), The Human Economy. A Citizen’s Guide, Cambridge, Malden MA, Polity Press, 1-17.  Milonakis D. & Fine B., 2009, From Political Economy to Economics. Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory, London & New York, Routledge.

Readings:  Carrier J. (ed.), 2005, A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA, USA.  Godelier M., 1972 [1966], Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, London, New Left Books.  Godelier M., 1986, The Mental and the Material: Thoughts, Economy and Society, London, Verso.  Graeber D., 2001, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, New York, Palgrave.  Graeber D., 2011, Dept: The First 5,000 Years. New York, Melville House.  Gudeman S., 2008, Economy’s Tension: The Dialectics of Community and Market, New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books.  Gudeman S., 2010, ‘Creative Destruction: Efficiency, Equity or Collapse?’, Anthropology Today, 26(1), 3-7.  Hann C., 2014, "Varieties of Capitalism and Varieties of Economic Anthropology", in Nitsiakos & als (eds.), Balkan Border Crossings. Third Annual of the Konitsa Summer School, Munster, LIT Verlag, 9-30.  Hann C. and Hart K., 2009, Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.  Hann C. and Hart K., 2011, Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique, Cambridge, Polity.  Hart K. & Ortiz H., 2008, "Anthropology in the financial crisis", Anthropology Today 24(6), 1-3.  Hart K. & Sharp J. (eds.), 2014, People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis. Perspectives from the Global South, Oxford and New York, Berghahn Books.  Harvey D., 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Harvey D., 2010, The Enigma of the Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London, Profile Books.  Mauss M., 1990 [1925], The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London, Routledge.  Narotzky S., 1997, New Directions in Economic Anthropology, London, Pluto Press.  Polanyi K., 1944, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Times, Boston: Beacon Press.  Visser O. and Kalb D., 2010, “Financial Capitalism Soviet Style. Varieties of State Capture and Crisis“, Archives of European Sociology, L(2), 171-194.  Smart A. & Smart J. (eds.), 2005, Petty Capitalists and Globalization, Flexibility, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, New York, State University of New York Press  Zelizer Viviana, 2011, Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press. 5 Tuesday 28th July Flexible production, precarious labour and new inequalities at the global production line (Developed by Dr. D. Kofti)

In the last three decades, employment has become more precarious and fragmented across the world; from factory production lines to IT service companies and universities, there is a shift towards the prevalence of financial markets over employment and production politics and a general trend towards the casualization of labour, which sharpens the division between a shrinking permanent and an increasing temporary personnel. This lecture will focus on current discussions in the anthropology of work and precarity. Through ethnographies and historical accounts of small-scale family production and large-scale factory production, it will discuss gender, kinship and ethnic relations at work, union representation and interconnections between households and work spaces. We will further discuss the changing role of technology and skill, bodily experiences of work, as well as changing rhythms and temporalities at the flexible production lines.

Key texts:  Harriss, O., 2007, ‘What makes people work’, in Astuti, Parry and Stafford (eds.) Questions of Anthropology, Oxford, Berg (pp. 137-166)  Narotzky, S., and Smith, G., 2006, Immediate struggles. People, Power and Place in Rural Spain, Los Angeles, University of California Press (Chapters 6 and 7)  Parry, J., 2013, Company and contract labour in a central Indian steel plant, Economy and Society 42 (3): 348-374.

Readings:  Blum, J., 2000, 'Degradation without deskilling: Twenty-five years in the San Francisco shipyards', in M. Burawoy et al., Global ethhnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world, Los Angeles, University of California Press.  Burawoy, M., 1985, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism, London, New York, Verso.  Cross, J., 2011. ‘Technological Intimacy: Re-engaging with gender and technology in the global factory’, Ethnography 13 (2) pp. 119-143.  Dunn, E., 2004, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor, New York, Cornell University Press.  Goddard, V., and Narotzky, S., (eds.) 2015, Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism. Global Models, Local Lives?, New York: Routledge.  Graeber, D., 2007, ‘Turning modes of production inside out. Or, why capitalism is a transformation of slavery’, in Graeber, D., Possibilities, UK: AK Press, 85-112.  Haraszti, M., 1978, A Worker in a Worker’s State: Piece-rates in Hungary, New York: Universe books.  Hart, K. 1973. ‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies (1), pp. 61-89.  Harvey, D., 1989. The conditions of postmodernity. An inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, New York, Blackwell. 6  Kalb, D., 1997, Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950, Durham, Duke University Press.  Kasmir, S. and Carbonella, A. (eds.), 2014, Blood and fire. Towards a Global anthropology of Labor, New York and London, Berghahn.  Kofti, D., 2016 (forthcoming), ‘Communists’ on the shop floor: anti-communism, transformation of power and crisis in a Bulgarian privatised factory, Focaal, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.  Mollona, M., De Neve, G., and Parry, J., 2009, Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological Reader, Oxford-New York, Berg Publishers.  Pun Ngai, 2005, Made in China: Women factory workers in a global workplace, Durham, Duke University Press.  Rothstein, F., 2005, ‘Flexibility for Whom?: Small-Scale Garment Manufacturing in Rural Mexico.’ in Smart, A. and Smart, J. (eds.) Petty Capitalists and Globalization, Flexibility, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, New York, State University of New York Press.  Sahlins, M., 1972, ‘The Original Affluent Society’, in Sahlins, M., Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine, 1-39.  Spittler, G., 2009. Contesting The Great Transformation: Work in comparative perspective, in Hann, Chris and Hart, Keith (eds.) Market and Society, The Great Transformation Today, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.  Spyridakis, M., 2013, The liminal worker. An ethnography of work, precariousness and unemployment in contemporary Greece, London: Ashgate.  Thompson E.P., 1967, Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past and Present 38 (1): 56- 97.  Turner, C., 1995, Japanese workers in protest: An ethnography of consciousness and experience, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Wednesday 29ht July What does financialization demand of us? Ethnograpies of Finance, Debt and History (Developed by T. Boersen)

The term ‘financialization’ encompasses a wide range of recent concerns with the transformative power of finance as an industry, idea, and force to be reckoned with. For the last two decades, social researchers have investigated the role of finance in transforming relations of family, state, markets, legal rights, property, gender, race, labor, and the increasingly precarious capacity to establish and keep a home and habitat. Recent research concerned with ‘financialization’ has demonstrated the necessity for tacking back and forth among these varying scales and sites, moving from the abstraction of markets for derivatives to the people who buy and sell them on trading floors; from the construction of subprime mortgage markets to the phone calls seeking to collect from debtors. Yet too much of this literature takes for granted the contexts of Anglo-American financial markets as a global paradigm without investigating the cultural histories and legal frameworks that shape the expansion of credit markets and their unwinding in insolvency proceedings. Moving with and against that literature, this lecture will investigate the ‘financialization’ of Greece and the widely circulating moral narrative about ‘sovereign debt crises’ in which Greece is a major figure. We will consider finance from different angles - from 7 global processes to local practices of choice and exclusion; from debt to credit scores and blood. We will pay close attention to the construction of home and the ways in which recent products and processes for consumer financing interact upon a local topography but neither came from out of the blue nor fabricated local relations from scratch. Our aim will be to focus on ‘financialization’ as a historical claim – as the marker of something which is in-progress – and even to take seriously (as the devil’s advocate?) the idea that finance is the cutting edge of modern progress. In particular, we will attempt to grasp what is new about ‘financialization’ by looking at ethnographic texts examining financial practices and financial subjectivities, tracking new forms of inequality, desire, violence, profit, as well as passion and ambivalence.

Key Texts: Aalbers, Manuel 2008 "The Financialization of Home and the Mortgage Market Crisis." Competition & Change 12(2): 148-166. Deville, Joe 2014 “Consumer Credit Default and Collections: The Shifting Ontologies of Market Attachment,” Consumption Markets & Culture 17(5): pp. 468–490. Joseph, Miranda 2014 “Accounting for Debt (Chapter 1),” in Debt to Society. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Riles, Annelise 2011 “Too Big to Fail,” in Edwards and Petrovic-Steger (eds.) Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Readings: Ashton, Philip & Brett Christophers 2015 “On arbitration, arbitrage and arbitrariness in financial markets and their governance: unpacking LIBOR and the LIBOR scandal” Economy and Society 44(2): 188-217. Caliskan, Koray and Michel Callon 2009 “Economization, part 1.” Economy and Society 38(3): 369-398. 2010 “Economization, part 2.” Economy and Society 39(1): 1-32. Carruthers, Bruce and Arthur Stinchcombe 1999 “The Social Structure of Liquidity: Flexibility, Markets, and States.” Theory and Society 28(3): 353-382 Guyer, Jane 2009 “The Craving for Intelligibility: Speech and Silence on the Economy under Structural Adjustment and Military Rule in Nigeria.” In Steven Gudeman (ed.) Economic Persuasions. Oxford: Berghan Books, 97-117. With LaRay Denzer. Halawa, Mateusz 2015 "In New Warsaw." Cultural Studies 29(5-6): 707-732. Han, Clara 2004. “The Work of Indebtedness: The Traumatic Present of Late Capitalist Chile.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 28(2):169–87 Langley, Paul 2008 “Sub-prime Mortgage Lending: A Cultural Economy,” Economy and Society 37(4): 469-494 Marron, Donncha 2012 “Producing Over-Indebtedness,” Journal of Cultural Economy 5(4): 407-421. Maurer, Bill 2012 “The Disunity of Finance: Alternative Practices To Western Finance.” Knorr Cetina, Karin and Alex Preda (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8

Musaraj, Smoki 2011 "Tales from Albarado: The Materiality of Pyramid Schemes in Postsocialist Albania." Cultural Anthropology 26(1): 81-110. Ortiz, Horacio 2013 “Financial Value: Economic, Moral, Political, Global.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (1): pp. 64–79. Roitman, Janet 2003 “Unsanctioned Wealth; or, The Productivity of Debt in Northern Cameroon” Public Culture 15: 211-237. Weston, Kath 2013 “Lifeblood, Liquidity, and Cash Transfusions: Beyond Metaphor in the Cultural Study of Finance.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Suppl): S24-S41. Zaloom, Caitlin 2009 “How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction.” Public Culture 21(2): 245-268.

Tuesday 30th July Solidarity, labour, futures (Developed by Dr. T. Rakopoulos)

Solidarity, a pillar of the modern political imagination takes many forms in local configurations and unfolds in the critical junctions of crises. This class will explore the claims and practices over building a ‘solidarity economy’ in contemporary Greece, examining the case of the anti-middleman movement of food distribution. This way, it aims to shed light on anthropological conceptualisations of solidarity and activism. It would specifically elucidate the grounded social activities of certain urban groups, committed to building a social economy of distributing food without intermediaries. In the light of new ethnographic data from grassroots responses to the crisis, we shall discuss an expansion of reciprocity's conceptual boundaries, to include solidarity as a local concept rampant in crisis-ridden sites. Activities branded as 'social economy' should be approached through the prism of labour, especially in the light of a cooperativist prospect under way. This future-oriented idea is radically opposed to a 'no future' perspective or a past-focused conceptualisation, that aim to isolate the crisis' origins.

Key texts:  Stedman Jones, Susan. 2001, Durkheim Reconsidered. Polity Press.  Gregory, Chris. 2014 .Unequal Egalitarianism: Reflections on Forge's Paradox, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 15:3, 197-217.  Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. How anthropologists think: configurations of the exotic Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 813-836.

Readings:  Burawoy, Michael. 2013. Ethnographic fallacies: reflections on labour studies in the era of market fundamentalism. Work, Employment and Society, 27(3): 526-536.  Gill, Tom. 2001. Men of Uncertainty: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.  Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn: Melvin House. 9  Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, New York: Palgrave.  Hann, Chris and Hart, Keith. 2009. Introduction: Learning from Polanyi. In: Hann, C. and Hart, K. (eds), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-16.  Hart, Keith. 2007b. Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of the Whole: a Review Essay. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 49(2):1–13.  James, Deborah. 2011 The Return of the Broker: Consensus, Hierarchy, and Choice in South African Land Reform. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(2): 318–338.  Kalb, Don. 2012. Thinking about Neoliberalism as if the Crisis was Actually Happening, Social Anthropology 20(3): 318–330.  Kasmir, S. 1996. The Myth of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-class Life in a Basque Town. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.  Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.  Long, Nicholas J. and Moore, Henrietta L. (Edited by). 2014. Sociality: New directions. London and New York: Berghahn.  Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2014a. The crisis seen from below, within, and against: from solidarity economy to food distribution cooperatives in Greece. Dialectical Anthropology, 38:189–207.  Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2014b. Resonance of Solidarity: Anti-Middleman Food Distribution in Austerity Greece. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32, no 2: 95-119.  Polanyi, K. 1957. The Economy as Instituted Process, in K. Polanyi, C. M. Arensberg and H. W. Pearson (eds), Trade and market in the early empires: Economies in history and theory. New York: The Free Press, pp. 243-270.  Vargas-Cetina, Gabriela. 2005. From the Community Paradigm to the Ephemeral Association in Chiapas, Mexico, Critique of Anthropology, 25(3), pp. 229–51.

Team-work exercise: Early 21st century capitalism reconfigurations: The end of socialism, neoliberal crisis and what comes next? Students will be organized in small groups and will conduct a team-work exercise: Each team will choose, through internet research, a common or similar current socio-economic issue that appears in the media of their respective countries of origin, or research or residence. The outcome of the exercise will be a discussion on how this topic could be approached through economic anthropology, based on the anthropological concepts discussed during the course and on set literature which will be distributed during the first session of the course.