S4 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
䉷 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2014/55S9-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/676327
Crisis, Value, and Hope:
Rethinking the Economy
An Introduction to Supplement 9
by Susana Narotzky and Niko Besnier
Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking
of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people,
the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This
rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living for
themselves and for future generations, involving not only waged labor but also structures of provisioning, investments
in social relations, relations of trust and care, and a multitude of other forms of social action that mainstream
economic models generally consider trivial, marginal, and often counterproductive. A holistic understanding of how
people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between
different scales of value. It is attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the
future has become synonymous with geographical mobility. It is attentive to the fact that making a living is about
making people in their physical, social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions.
Rethinking the economy is an ambitious project, and the
selection of the three themes of crisis, value, and hope with
which we seek to open up a broader debate is an indication
of the starting point: the crude realities of the many, those
of ordinary people. The focus on “common” or “ordinary”
people highlights the fact that those whose decision-making
capacities are restricted by their limited assets, be it in terms
of wealth or power, are nevertheless capable of developing
sometimes complex individual or collective strategies to en-
hance their own well-being and the well-being of future gen-
erations. Here we define “well-being” as the accomplishment
of socially reasonable expectations of material and emotional
comfort that depend on access to the diverse resources needed
to attain them. The context of a breakdown of expectations
that the global crisis has produced in many regions of the
world has reconfigured values and reshuffled the frameworks
of moral obligation. As a result, the imagining of possible
futures and how to make them happen has also changed. The
Susana Narotzky is Professor in the Departament d’Antropologia
Cultural i Histo`ria d’Ame`rica i A
`
frica of the Facultad de Geografı´a
e Historia of the Universitat de Barcelona (C/Montealegre 6–8, 08001
Barcelona, Spain [narotzky@ub.edu]) and a Fellow at the Amsterdam
Institute for Social Science Research (Postbus 15718, 1001 NE
Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural
Anthropology in the Afdeling Antropologie at the Universiteit van
Amsterdam (Postbus 15509, 1001 NA Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[n.besnier@uva.nl]). This paper was submitted 10 IV 13, accepted 6
III 14, and electronically published 18 VII 14.
materials that we seek to make sense of here weave together
these questions around the central question of making a liv-
ing.
The three interlinked themes of crisis, value, and hope
support a methodological perspective that underlines scale
while focusing on everyday practices and understandings.
“Crisis” refers to structural processes generally understood to
be beyond the control of people but simultaneously expressing
people’s breach of confidence in the elements that provided
relative systemic stability and reasonable expectations for the
future. “Value” indicates a terrain where people negotiate the
boundaries defining worth, operating at the intersection of
institutional top-down normative frameworks and collective
bottom-up meanings and obligations. Finally, “hope” points
to the tension between personal expectations, the capacity to
design projects, and the actual ability to accomplish them in
a given conjuncture. Although we want to privilege a bottom-
of-the-pyramid perspective that centers on the majority of
common people’s everyday practices to earn a living, the use
of scale as a method immediately sets our inquiry in a field
of connections with other social actors, namely, those that
accumulate wealth, knowledge, and power and that can op-
erate at institutional and wide-ranging scales.
While our aim is to develop a theory of the social repro-
duction of present-day capitalism, we think that this is only
possible by understanding that the separation between the
abstract model and its concrete manifestations is itself an
aspect of the dominant economic ideology that we need to
engage critically. Specific constellations of social relations and
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S5
cultural dispositions that make the fabric of everyday life
become structurally significant for capitalist accumulation in
their relation to each other. Historically produced regional
and local specificities regarding the form in which economic
practices are embedded are decisive in a complex process
articulating multiple agents and institutional arrangements in
a global space of accumulation. We think ethnography is a
precious instrument that draws attention to the historical
production of specificity and its role in structuring differ-
entiation.
How people make a living in different social and cultural
contexts has been of long-standing interest in anthropology.
Over the decades, anthropologists have generated a sizeable
corpus of ethnographic materials documenting the diversity
of practices and reasonings that earning a livelihood involves
in different situations. The issue has been addressed at dif-
ferent moments in the history of the discipline through var-
ious theoretical and methodological lenses. Some anthropol-
ogists (Mintz 1986; Roseberry 1988; Wolf 1982) have focused
on the material conditions and social relations that made
production possible (e.g., access to resources, ownership),
while others have emphasized the circulation of resources and
the frameworks of obligation that mobilized transfers and
defined differential allocation (e.g., gift, commodity; Gregory
1982, 1997; Malinowski 1961 [1922], 1961 [1926]). Recent
works, however, have tended to view production and circu-
lation as inextricably entangled with one another in social
practice.
In the context of the gradual worldwide expansion of the
market system as the dominant mode of resource allocation,
exchange has come to dominate as both a concept and an
anthropological concern. Moreover, the rise to prominence
in the course of the twentieth century of economics as a
scientific discipline whose main goal is the creation of models
of market coordination based on calculability has contributed
to the market principle becoming a powerful metonym of the
economy. This has been facilitated by the expansion of market
principles to most social domains and areas of the world. In
turn, exchange and calculability have increasingly become is-
sues that anthropologists have had to address in order to
conceptualize value and valuation processes.
Anthropologists’ interest in exchange harks back to the
historical foundations of the discipline, particularly in the
works of Malinowski (1961 [1922], 1961 [1926]) and Mauss
(2003 [1923–1924]), and it has given rise to important debates
about value. Some of the most productive of the last half
century have focused on the recognition that people simul-
taneously engage in different “spheres” or “regimes” of value
in their daily life (Appadurai 1988a, 1988b; Bloch and Parry
1989; Bohannan 1959). An important aspect of what makes
something valuable is its capacity to preserve, increase, or
transform its worth as it moves in time and space (Graeber
2001; Munn 1992), which often has the effect of altering scales
of value or constructing them in complex ways (Besnier 2011;
Guyer 2004; Thomas 1991). Here, however, we seek to go
beyond exchange as the main paradigm; instead, we inves-
tigate the economy in terms of focusing on social reproduc-
tion, that is, continuity and change of human collective life-
sustaining systems.
Making a Living
In rethinking the economy, our aim is to build on a wealth
of anthropological knowledge, both empirical and theoretical,
that has documented practices for making a living in different
parts of the world. We are particularly concerned with what
ordinary people understand by “a life worth living” and what
they do to strive toward that goal, particularly under con-
ditions of radical uncertainty (“crisis”). Our emphasis on eth-
nographically grounded research aims to compare sociolog-
ically and culturally what emerges as valuable across different
ethnographic cases (“value”). Finally, we recenter our under-
standing of the economy around social reproduction, that is,
around the objective and subjective possibilities to project life
into the future (“hope”).
Social reproduction entails addressing different scales in
terms of which ordinary people evaluate the possibility of
continuities, transformations, or blockages. Residents of post-
war Sarajevo, for example, are deeply conscious of the lack
of “progress” in their current existence colored by the many
obstacles in the “road to Europe” in contrast to the accom-
plishment of “normal” expectations and hope for a better
future that they experienced before the war, a contrast that
projects the future at different scales in each case (Jansen
2014). Social reproduction is selective, and an understanding
of it must contend with the boundaries of what needs to be
reproduced, boundaries that are the result of social negotia-
tions. What compels a focus on social reproduction is the fact
that anxieties about livelihood are often couched in terms of
the relations between generations, be it at the individual and
household levels (“Will my children find a job? Will I be able
to form a family?”) or at the level of the state (today’s youth
as a “lost generation”). These tropes highlight the centrality
of a time-space dimension in the way in which ordinary peo-
ple reason about well-being and its achievement. Past expe-
riences provide a horizon of expectations configuring present
aspirations and hopes for the future.
We propose to rethink practices of making a living, their
materiality, and the concepts that contribute to produce them
by asking the following questions: “How do ordinary people’s
experiences shape the livelihood projects that they under-
take?” and “How do material, social, and cultural realities
constrain these projects?” We think of “the economy” neither
as a reified domain of inquiry isolated from the rest of human
existence nor as a particular form of social action such as
calculability. Rather, we conceptualize the economy as con-
sisting of all the processes that are involved, in one fashion
or the other, in “making a living,” taken in a very broad sense
and stressing both the “effort” involved and the aim of “sus-
S6 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
taining life.” But making a living is equally about cooperation
and about being part of a collective that gives meaning to
life, makes it “worth the trouble.” We agree with Graeber’s
(2001) reinterpretation of the labor theory of value that de-
fines value as the spending of creative energy in producing
and maintaining society (68), but we also stress the insight,
found in numerous ethnographic accounts, that the way a
society enacts people’s worth is a clear expression of its eco-
nomic and political organization (Terradas 1992; Wolf 1999).
We thus need to understand what the significant differences—
boundaries, institutions, categories of people—those in power
strive to reproduce in order to maintain their worth and their
wealth.
This expanded understanding of the economy cuts across
a broad range of human activity beyond the purely material
and is attentive to different coexisting regimes of value. Mak-
ing a living does not only depend on people taking part in
the market by selling their labor for wages—or alternatively
by selling their products or services outside state regulatory
frameworks, using microcredit financing, or appealing to the
state or NGOs for subsidies. It also involves dynamics that
are not commonly thought of as “economic” or that are often
defined by mainstream economics as malfunctioning, defi-
cient, or signs of “developmental backwardness.” For exam-
ple, sacrifice among the Luo, for whom the domains of re-
ligion and economic rationales overlap, forges connections
between material and immaterial entities and forces, past and
future, that are central to the production of a sense of be-
longing, hope for the future, and physical and spiritual well-
being across generations (Shipton 2014). Even in the market-
dominated environments in which most people live today,
many livelihood resources are produced and circulate outside
or on the margin of market practices. They follow unpre-
dictable paths along provisioning circuits, alternating between
commoditized and noncommoditized valuation, dependent
on the framework of available opportunities, constrained by
political instruments, and regulated by different modalities of
responsibility (Besnier 2011; Narotzky 2012b). In times of
crisis, people operate with coping strategies that enable them
to locate increasingly elusive resources. These strategies may
include relations of trust and care, economies of affect, net-
works of reciprocity encompassing both tangible and intan-
gible resources, and material and emotional transfers that are
supported by moral obligations. Many consist of unregulated
activities or activities that cannot be regulated (Hart 1973;
Humphrey 2002; Lomnitz 1975; Procoli 2004; Smart and
Smart 1993; Stack 1974). But these strategies can also have
the effect of defining and marginalizing categories of people
(e.g., on grounds of ethnicity, gender, or race) whose access
to resources will be violently curtailed (Li 2001; Sider 1996;
Smith 2011).
In order to make life worth living, people invest in multiple
aspects of existence that appear at first glance to have little
economic substance but end up having economic conse-
quences. Among the poor, social relations often constitute a
much safer “investment” than petty entrepreneurship, con-
trary to the assumptions that underlie development policies
that prioritize microcredit and the entrepreneurial self. Thus,
poor Brazilians in the impoverished Pernambuco region af-
firm that “money is good, but a friend is better”: while money
disappears as soon as it is earned, ties of friendship can be
counted on in times of need (de L’Estoile 2014). In a similar
vein, women in r ural Tamil Nadu, who have long been ac-
quainted with a wide range of borrowing practices, including
those that the microcredit development programs promote,
know well that indebtedness generates recognition and sup-
port (but also political patronage, forms of labor obligation,
and shame) through the wide social network that it presup-
poses (Gue´rin 2014), while Latin American migrants in Bar-
celona juggle complex dynamics of reciprocity, mutual care,
and financial transactions in order to “make it” under difficult
circumstances (Palomera 2014). But while people in situations
of serious precariousness are most adept at developing com-
plex coping strategies, the parsimony of the not so wealthy
but not poor is also constituted of multiple and diverse live-
lihood projects. These dynamics have been analyzed exten-
sively in the context of family firms, ethnic entrepreneurship,
and industrial clusters in most regions of the world (Blim
1990; Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993; Smart and Smart 2005;
Yanagisako 2002). They have also received considerable an-
alytic attention in developing nations, where even doctors and
civil servants may moonlight as taxi drivers and small-scale
business entrepreneurs to secure their families’ economic
base, or where civil servants might become moneylenders or
the door to subsidies (Besnier 2009; Owusu 2008). Similarly,
in postapartheid South Africa, it is the new black middle
classes (as well as whites) who engage in what some term
“reckless borrowing,” bearing witness to the fact that these
salaried families need more than just the salary they receive
to maintain the consumption practices associated with their
class position (James 2014).
We wish to think about making a living without privileging
a particular domain of activity (exchange), a particular in-
tentionality of action (gain), or a particular valuation process
(calculation). We do want to stress that the practices we define
as economic have one important objective, namely, sustaining
life across generations. While our perspective can be thought
of as neosubstantivist, we would rather think of it as realist
and as emerging from a long intellectual history focusing on
how people cooperate or clash around the will to produce
and reproduce a livelihood.
This perspective is positioned at the crossroads of several
theoretical traditions. First, the political economic tradition
in its neo-Marxist and post-Marxist variants has inspired so-
cial scientists to explain the unequal distribution of wealth
through an analysis of the historical processes that produced
relations of production, which can variously be cooperative,
conflictual, or exploitative (Roseberry 1988, 1989). This tra-
dition, whose relevance to the world’s present-day realities
has not waned, approaches social reproduction through the
Narotzky and Besnier Rethinking the Economy S7
lens of the structural dialectics that produces political and
economic differentiation (Harvey 2003; Mintz 1986; Wolf
1982).
Second, theoretical approaches that showcase moral econ-
omies seek to understand the mutual obligations and re-
sponsibilities that render exploitation acceptable, at least for
a time, and enable particular forms of socioeconomic differ-
entiation to endure (Moore 1978; Scott 1976; Thompson
1971, 1993). The moral dimensions of economic practices
have garnered increased attention in the last decade (Browne
2009; Edelman 2005; Fassin 2009; Fontaine 2008; Hann 2010;
Robbins 2009; Sayer 2000) as an alternative to rational choice
theory to explain the motivations that guide human behavior.
However, we want to stress the need to articulate this view
with political economy for it to have meaningful purchase.
Indeed, moments of disjuncture between new practices of
exploitation and past frameworks of responsibility capture the
moral aspects of the economy as they are being challenged
by those in power.
Finally, approaches from feminist economics constitute an
important basis for thinking about the “economy otherwise.”
Feminist voices have stressed that unpaid work and an ethics
of care are key to an understanding of economic processes
beyond self-interested individual maximization (Benerı´a
2003; Elson 2001; Lawson 2007; McDowell 2004; Nelson
2006). Central to well-being, care can be provisioned in or
out of market circuits of exchange, but it is also framed by
the tension between love and money (Ferber and Nelson 1993,
2003; Zelizer 1997). The practice of care involves a constel-
lation of agents that operate in domestic, market, state, and
voluntary sectors, forming what Razavi (2007) calls the “care
diamond.” The interdependence of these various agents
means that changes in care practices in one sector (e.g., the
household) are often related to changes in another sector (e.g.,
state services). In a similar vein, caregiving articulates with
care receiving along care chains that connect these multiple
agents (Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Parren˜as
2001; Weber, Gojard, and Gramain 2003; Yeates 2004). Fem-
inists have also problematized the unequal distribution of
intrahousehold resources and responsibilities, their relation
with life-cycle dynamics, and their articulation with inequal-
ities elsewhere in society (Dalla Costa and James 1975; Har-
even 1977; Hartmann 1981; Narotzky 1988). The most im-
portant theoretical breakthrough of feminist economics is
possibly the showcasing of relations of personal dependency
(as opposed to the imagined autonomy of the individual ra-
tional actor) and of emotional value as central to social re-
production. The tension between moral frameworks that
stress dependency and those that underscore autonomy un-
derlies contemporary practices of making a living.
The articulation of these three theoretical strands responds
to the scalar methodology. Care relations observable in the
household, for example, result from gendered frameworks of
moral obligation in a particular society. These are often pro-
duced as local or diasporic expressions of the global move-
ments of social differentiation and wealth accumulation and
are subject to institutionalizing forces. For example, Polish
labor migrants from various parts of Poland and at different
times establish particular forms of care configurations with
families and friends, forms that are shaped by the economic
and political contexts of the decision to migrate (Pine 2014).
In a similar vein, Mexican labor migrants in California juggle
between different regimes of value that are interwoven with
different responsibilities to families back home, the need to
appear to have “made it,” and the political economic struc-
tures of labor and migration policies (Villarreal 2014). While
feminist economics recenters the economy around the human
need of mutual support and political economy attends to the
movements that produce differentiation and enable wealth
accumulation and unequal distribution, moral economy in-
quires into the grounds for claiming, the frameworks of en-
titlement, and the design of reasonable expectations.
Crisis
Times of crisis expose the fragility of economic structures in
particularly dramatic fashion. At the same time, they drive
people, if not compel them, to adapt their old modes of
livelihood to changing conditions and to create new ones.
Crisis signals a breakdown in social reproduction, a mismatch
between configurations of cooperation that used to “work,”
by producing particular expectations and obligations and a
different configuration of opportunities and resources. As a
concept, crisis holds together two meanings of different orders
that defy resolution.
Crisis contrasts with forms of stability that enable the de-
sign of projects and that support the trust that existing con-
figurations will enable the realization of those projects. Against
this idea of normality, crisis signals a rupture that emerges as
a menace at the same time that it forces ingenuity and cre-
ativity. There is a long scholastic history of thinking about
rupture as being limited in time and eventually giving way
to stability that has informed both popular and analytic un-
derstandings (e.g., Koselleck 2006). A faith in relative stability
achieved through monetary policy is the epistemological basis
of mainstream economics’ predictions about the future. The
observable reality, however, is that crisis may not be as ex-
ceptional as economists assume, which explains why they are
often hard pressed to explain their failed predictions, as the
global economic crisis that began in 2008 has illustrated in
particularly dramatic fashion. In Marxist theory, on the con-
trary, crisis is an inherent feature of capitalist structure, where
the drive toward profit making results in the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall and in overproduction, overcapacity, and
overaccumulation. Although cyclical in nature, these ruptures
become increasingly damaging to the resilience of the overall
system because they escalate the conflict among classes to an
irresolvable point that would push the entire system to its
breakdown. The temporality aspect of crises, however, needs
attention both in its popular and expert understandings,
S8 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 9, August 2014
whether it appears expressed as a punctuated time of signif-
icant turning points (Guyer 2007; Jansen 2014) or as an en-
during time of waiting (de L’Estoile 2014), whether the break-
down is situated at the systemic or at the subjective level.
Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that instability
and uncertainty have been the norm in most social, cultural,
and historical contexts. Periods of stability, such as the mo-
ment of economic growth and welfare expansion that followed
World War II in North America and Europe (France’s les
trente glorieuses) are in fact historical anomalies, which in any
case only benefitted a comparatively small portion of the
world’s population and were predicated on neocolonial ex-
tractive practices that made life harder for many elsewhere.
Under most circumstances, people must contend with the
unpredictability of their projects, making crisis rather than
risk an integral part of their horizon of expectations. However,
other than in extreme circumstances, they innovate practices
and institutions, often of an ad hoc character, that cushion
the effects of instability and enable a relative sense of con-
tinuity over time.
An increasing proportion of the world’s population is un-
able to achieve well-being or only achieve it precariously. At
the same time, while some institutions (e.g., state, family,
church) that regulate moral and political frameworks of re-
sponsibility and support the transfer of resources are being
undermined in various ways, other institutional frameworks
(e.g., religious, ethnic, nationalistic) for guiding human be-
havior and channeling goods are being created or recon-
figured. This creativity, however, may involve exclusionary
practices that create and demonize an Other (in terms of race,
gender, ethnicity, nationalism, or other forms of human dif-
ference), which becomes the target of violence in struggles
over access to resources and respect (Gingrich 2006; Hage
1998; Holmes 2000; Kalb 2009). These effects underline the
need to understand the ingenuity and creativity, as well as
their potentially dark undertones, that social actors deploy in
coping with an environment that is largely not of their own
making but in which they have to live.
The current worldwide financial crisis of 2008, for example,
has produced uncertainty of both an economic nature
(shrinking resources, decreasing employment opportunities,
precarious job structure, failing credit, higher indirect taxa-
tion, reduced state benefits) and a political nature (disem-
powerment, loss of entitlements, “technical governments,”
democratic deficit) in the old centers of Western capitalism,
a s ituation that was long present in other spaces of capitalism.
This uncertainty affects people’s ability to reproduce mate-
rially and emotionally, creating difficulties in forming new
families, maintaining existing ones, forming caring relations,
and feeling respected. Focusing on intergenerational relations
such as those expressed through transfers of tangible and
intangible assets (e.g., property, care, knowledge, skills, and
values) highlights the complexities of social reproduction on
different scales. Indeed, social reproduction can be defined as
continuity that brings generations together around micro-
projects of making a living and enhancing future opportu-
nities and around macroprojects of social configurations of
power and asset distribution. At the same time, crisis may
create new understandings of “generations” that have impli-
cations beyond the confines of intimate social groups, namely,
for the reproduction of society as a whole. In particular, the
realities of crisis and its discourse transform the material and
moral environments that support inter- and intragenerational
transfers.
In southern Europe, for example, crisis has now become
part of ordinary people’s everyday reality, one with which
they have to contend in trying to make a living and when
thinking about how to invest in the next generation. While
experts and governments insist that the crisis is an “excep-
tional” situation, an interlude before things get back to nor-
mal, for many people around the world, the experience of
chaos and permanent vital insecurity is the situation that
designs the field in which they need to play. I n our view,
crisis—both as an experienced reality and as a folk and expert
conceptual category—is a good place to ground an inquiry
into the economy given its overwhelming presence in the lives
of many people around the world.
Value
In “Essai sur le don,” Mauss (2003 [1923–1924]) demon-
strates how different kinds of value-making practices (e.g.,
juridical, religious, economic, aesthetic) are valued and in-
corporated in valuables, but he is also concerned with un-
derstanding equivalence reached in exchange and thus grap-
ples with the tension between “values” and “value.” The other
tension he negotiates is between the material object and the
social relations it expresses. More recent ethnographies have
argued that these tensions are not resolved with the expansion
of capitalist market principles. In The Great Transformation,
what Polanyi (1971 [1944]) calls “fictitious commodities”—
namely, land, people, and money—appear as disembedded in
the process of market exchange, but in fact this disembedding
is artificial because they are really constituted in different value
frameworks. In his chapter on commodity fetishism, Marx
(1990 [1867]) approaches this insight in a different but com-
plementary fashion: things, people, and land are always em-
bedded in the social relations that produce them as com-
modities. Both Marx and Polanyi see these transformations
of embedded values into exchange value as having a negative
effect on most people and, more generally, on social repro-
duction. At the same time, because commodities are produced
through concrete social relations within particular regimes of
value, when they enter the market, the concrete values that
they acquire within these regimes increase their value in mar-
ket terms. For example, the “authenticity” of a rug produced
in a Turkish village as part of a dowry bestows on it added
market value when it reaches a New York gallery (Spooner
1988; see also Villarreal 2014 on the need to provide tourists
in Chiapas an “authentic” experience). More generally, the