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Drawing on ethnographic observation conducted in a Montreal pawnshop, this paper explores the logics and perception of money and changing rhetoric of value deployed within pawn broking, an activity of value fixation. The complex experience and self-definition of their social role by pawnbrokers is explored. The history of pawn broking is briefly C'est bien de valeur, mais… Portrait d'un pawn shop montréalais [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, the scene of the contemporary debate on the value remains an updated or improved version, of the one we met in the late 19th century. At its one end, we always meet subjective theories of value, the most distant source of which is the neoclassical economic one, and, at its other end, we still find objective theories, which form the contemporary echo of theories of value/work. Our paper wants to overcome this old quarrel by showing how much a market value is a product of both social fabrication of subjectivities and objective process of production. Through this exercise, our goal is to build the outline of a new anti-capitalist theory of value, whereby we can base a critique of advanced capitalism in the light of the historical phenomenon of capitalist mass consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mechanisms of reproduction and transformation of the transnational parental links among Mexican migrants working temporarily in Quebec as seasonal agricultural workers. In particular, I will analyze the economic, social and cultural impact the regular remittances have on these families. These monetary transfer practices will be examined based on the hypothesis that they constitute a particular economic habitus (Bourdieu, 2000, 2008). The latter is to be observed in the more or less traumatic affinity (or distance) generated by the concrete historical practices of the migrant workers and by the cognitive and behavioural exigencies imposed by the seasonal agricultural work. Among these exigencies, we can mention the subjectivation related to the discipline of a wage-earning work fastened to a maximal productivity, the language ability, the forms of monetary calculation and the cultural norms of consumption and saving, as well as the learning of the moral models of monetary distribution within the family. The notion of economic habitus, allow us to better understand the dynamics of reciprocal translation between the quantitative dimension of money, as a homogeneous and impersonal means of exchange, and its qualitative dimension, as personalized monetary transfers, expressing parental relations and their emotional meaning. This arduous activity of exegesis turns out intense on the typical daily life of migrant workers, where one could observe the emergence of a particular "sens pratique" (Bourdieu, 1989). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]