Search

What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies become both intelligible, possessing representational unity or naturalized authority, and compelling—the stuff of fantasy and desire, power and subjugation. Taking a series of national economic conferences in Equatorial Guinea as a point of departure, the article argues for the centrality of the state and questions of geopolitical scale in any approach to the national economy form. Juxtaposing the literature on economic performativity with Equatoguinean political history and the power of U.S. oil companies in the global South highlights the open-endedness of what Michel Callon has called economics “in the wild” and the as-if qualities generated at the crossroads of economic theory and postcolonial inequality. This article thus aims to open up ethnographic possibilities in the face of national economies far beyond Equatorial Guinea’s borders.

This article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate Occupy sites—the Alternative Banking working group of Occupy Wall Street, the daily life of lists in Liberty Square, née Zuccotti Park, and the work of Strike Debt. In particular, I focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. Where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism’s otherwises for inspiration and potential, the expansion of the economic imagination I trace here suggests that the centers constitute zones of possibility as well. I aim to show not only the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of imaginative work in the dense and seemingly definitive spaces of financial expertise but also a remarkable, and largely unrecognized, contemporary conversation around the future of banking, foreclosures, and democratized finance.

Recent transformations in the political economy of housing—particularly the corporatisation, concentration, and financialisation of landlording—paradoxically intensify both the atomisation of the tenant experience and the potential for organised tenants to exercise structural power. This potential collective power, however, is not self‐actualising. Building on two years of participatory action research and one year of operational data from the California‐based Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT), we attempt to address this conjunctural possibility. We conceptualise tenants as debtors and identify new solidarities emerging from a pandemic era landscape which has left many tenants, particularly Black tenants, deeply indebted to national corporate landlords. We discuss the TPT as a piece of legal mutual aid which both responds to the immediate imperatives of combatting eviction within the existing landscape, and we argue, helps provide the basis for advancing the work of tenant organising across scales and geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies become both intelligible, possessing representational unity or naturalized authority, and compelling—the stuff of fantasy and desire, power and subjugation. Taking a series of national economic conferences in Equatorial Guinea as a point of departure, the article argues for the centrality of the state and questions of geopolitical scale in any approach to the national economy form. Juxtaposing the literature on economic performativity with Equatoguinean political history and the power of U.S. oil companies in the global South highlights the open-endedness of what Michel Callon has called economics “in the wild” and the as-if qualities generated at the crossroads of economic theory and postcolonial inequality. This article thus aims to open up ethnographic possibilities in the face of national economies far beyond Equatorial Guinea’s borders.

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.