Habits of the Heart Individualism and Commitment in American Life

COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.

Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

Andrea Muehlebach, (2012) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 228 pp, ISBN 9780226545400, $27.50, soft cover Recounting the vicissitudes of Milanese Italians who have become gradually more invo...

The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy

Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity

New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China

This article explores the angst of deeply committed volunteers in China, engaging with anthropological debates on ethics under conditions of “moral breakdown.” Under market socialism, sacrificial v...

Ethics of the heart: Moral breakdown and the aporia of chinese volunteers

Patch‐work: The economic and moral complementarity of informal entrepreneurs' multiple projects in
 Congo‐Brazzaville

Abstract Africanists have written much about interactions between multiple currencies in Africa, yet paperwork-based regulations that apply to these interactions remain less studied. Meanwhile, ethnographic studies of paperwork examine the roles of documents more in state administration than in commercial transactions. Based on ethnographic research with individuals and institutions involved in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville during a severe foreign exchange (forex) shortage from 2016 to 2021, this article argues that the participants in forex transactions manoeuvre paperwork to regulate the speed of the forex outflow – where paperwork functions as what I term ‘bureaucratic valves’. Responding to the outflow of forex caused by the oil price slump since 2015, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) required numerous documents from buyers of forex to justify their demand. This policy slowed down international money transfers because it took more effort to meet the paperwork requirements. Yet banks, money-transfer agencies and individuals in Congo subsequently developed their own paperwork-based mechanisms to cope with this change. These manoeuvres show that paperwork is a flexible and essential tool for adjusting transactions for different participants, especially in the money markets and in (central) banking in Africa.

Rundong Ning

Papers

Ethics of the heart: Moral breakdown and the aporia of chinese volunteers

Patch‐work: The economic and moral complementarity of informal entrepreneurs' multiple projects in Congo‐Brazzaville

Bureaucratic valves: paperwork as a contested tool in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville