Who deserves financial relief in times of crisis, and on what grounds? The 2008 collapse of Iceland's banking system prompted state intervention to mitigate household indebtedness, including forbearance, pension withdrawals, repayment adjustments, and debt reductions. Divergent claims by households about eligibility sparked public moralizations on deservingness, revealing moral tensions about who should receive assistance and why. Drawing on interviews with redress applicants, this article examines the ways claims for support were framed by notions of responsibility, self-sufficiency, and reciprocity, highlighting competing logics about economic and moral obligation. Findings show that redress policies were perceived as selective amnesties rather than as structural reform, generating horizontal frictions among citizens that reinforced questions about equality in a society with historically muted class identities. Calls for moral repair have arisen through rethinking the basis of reciprocity, shifting from capitalist accumulation to restoring moral symmetry. By situating these dynamics within anthropological theories of debt and obligation, the article argues that crisis and recovery are entangled moral and economic processes, shaping ideals of fairness and social repair.
ABSTRACT In March 2020, the COVID‐19 pandemic first reached Ottawa, Ontario, dramatically shaping policy and the lives of residents in the years that followed. From the loss of jobs to the loss of loved ones, many experienced an intense period of fear, loneliness, and uncertainty in those first few months. This article explores how the introduction of the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), a social program that targeted un‐ and underemployed people, renewed public discourse about the purpose of welfare. It begins by tracing how the state incited residents to adopt certain attitudes about financial aid and how some residents took up this framing when identifying deserving recipients of aid. It then explores how some young middle‐class residents evaluated their eligibility for CERB in relation to their middle classness amid increasing precarity. Ultimately, this article exhibits the ambivalences some residents felt regarding whether they were entitled to or deserving of financial aid and contrasts the ethical and experienced differences between these two conceptions of welfare. This study is based on fieldwork conducted during the first waves of COVID‐19, combining participant observation, interviews, and online observation.
In the context of global economic and political crises, microentrepreneurship enjoys popularity both as a solution to poverty and as an empowering lifestyle based on values of independence and flexibility. While education, training, and engagement in entrepreneurship may have significant effects on self‐making, social and economic change from entrepreneurial formation remains ambivalent. In this introductory essay, we set out how becoming an entrepreneur is an unfinished project in the lives of economic subjects, entailing practices actively tested, reconfigured as adaptive responses to individual and collective crises and aspirations, and conceived as related to an anticipated and critically assessed immediate future self.
This article examines the labor that goes into the categorization of practices as "corrupt" in the context of India's popular politics. Focusing on the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a political party that emerged from a widely publicized 2010s anticorruption mass movement in India, I introduce the term corruption prospecting to describe the often laborious methods through which leaders and volunteers probed for, labeled, and publicized actions as "corrupt." The AAP's prospecting methods included informal surveys, sting operations, and helplines. It is these generative material practices that established "corruption" as a political resource for the fledgling party. "Corruption" as categorization accrued value not necessarily through eliminatory efforts but through the circulation and media amplification of corruption's purported discovery and exposure. Corruption charges have long been used to sustain political legitimacy. This article contributes to the anthropology of corruption by shifting disciplinary attention from discourse and representation to the work that goes into making a corruption allegation recognizable and actionable in an ever more mediatized and technologized context. A decade after its spectacular win in Delhi, the AAP found itself mired in corruption allegations, revealing corruption prospecting to be nonproprietorial, contingent, and multiscalar.
In this article, I explore the everyday practices of a garazhnik, a type of contemporary socioeconomic actor characteristic of post-Soviet Russia, where many garages are turned into spaces of production. On the basis of ethnographic data and secondary sources, I demonstrate that the phenomenon of garazhniki and the larger "garage economy" they take part in emerged at the intersection of Soviet urban forms and post-Soviet economic realities. Then, I examine the practices of a particular garazhnik in a monotown-that is, roughly the Soviet equivalent of a company town-in Eastern Siberia. Through this example, I demonstrate that practices of gleaning and trade on the margins of postsocialist capitalism in this town are contingent on the material remainders of state socialism. Furthermore, I highlight the critiques implicit in the political imaginary that drives the practices of this particular garazhnik, who dismisses the state-proposed postindustrial future as unsustainable and unappealing. This article is based on ethnographic data from fieldwork carried out in Eastern Siberia in the period 2019-22.
Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) are promoted as tools for financing climate mitigation, yet their effectiveness and credibility remain contested. This article examines how carbon credits are produced and destabilized as symbols of climate action, emphasizing the forms of ecological and audit labor that sustain their legitimacy. Based on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 30 interviews in Colombia, I trace the trajectory of a carbon credit from its production through local farming and auditing practices to its circulation at a chocolate fair in Paris. Drawing on Kockelman's semiotic ontology of the commodity, I show that credits acquire value only by establishing a credible equivalence between ecological practices and their symbolic representation. However, the audit labor of measuring, verifying, and certifying often outweighs or appropriates ecological labor, producing credibility rather than mitigation. When this gap becomes visible, the market responds not by aligning more closely with ecological practices but by multiplying layers of verification-an "audit spiral" that sustains credibility while deepening opacity.
Klima is a carbon-backed cryptocurrency running as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). In 2021, it had accumulated 9 million metric tons of digital carbon credits and reached a market value of more than US$1 billion. In 2023, its treasury stored twice as many carbon credits, but its spot price was a tiny fraction compared to 2021. Building on prior scholarship at the intersection of carbon markets and cryptocurrencies, we probe the devices employed by Klima during its rise and fall and how this cryptocurrency also sought to create its own carbon market. Unlike earlier studies of carbon markets and cryptocurrencies, we explore KlimaDAO's internal dynamics as it tried to create a new connection to existing carbon markets through a two-year-long digital ethnography, showing how the project and its investors embraced speculative reasoning fueled by what we term a neoliberal logic. This rhetoric sustained the project's growth and exacerbated the losses. Finally, we recognize it as the main driver of KlimaDAO's viability. Our conclusions speak to the broader critical debates about the politics of green finance and how climate mitigation has emerged as a vector to attract small investors and blockchain enthusiasts rather than impacting climate change.
Women's role in fisheries has generally been underrecognized, both in science and in society. Engaging with anthropological and interdisciplinary literature on women in fisheries, as well as discussions about gender perspectives in studies of political economy, this article explores how women in the Spanish fishery sector are organizing and strategizing to rectify their historically marginalized position and improve their social and economic rights. Drawing on fieldwork with the Spanish National Association for Women in Fisheries and in fishing communities in northwestern/northern Spain, I explore how the historical insertion of women into fisheries has relegated them to an economically, socially, politically, and symbolically inferior subject position. Furthermore, I examine how this historical marginalization is reproduced, and contested, in a context where public authorities are recognizing and supporting fisherwomen's organizations. The article foregrounds the composite challenges that women face as they endeavor to strengthen and legitimate themselves as fishery workers and how state institutions and legislation at times pose further barriers to their struggles. The analysis thus illuminates how state support is not a panacea for empowering female fishers but rather only a first step toward addressing the compound obstacles to gender equality in the sector.
Conducting ethnographic research in financial institutions is challenging because secrecy is pivotal for traders to maintain their expert image. It became more difficult in Turkey after the failed coup in 2016 as Turkish President Erdo & gbreve;an increasingly weaponized conspiracies that are historically and politically rooted in Turkish society to accuse traders of colluding with international foes and unsettling the economy. I use this highly conspiratorial aftermath of the failed coup as a critical site for analyzing the micropolitics of secrecy in finance, that is, how traders understand and reproduce secrecy on a daily basis. How does the aftermath of the coup attempt reframe the micropolitics of secrecy on which traders build their expert image? As traders also share and circulate conspiratorial thinking, how do conspiracy and secrecy form ethnographic interlocutors with traders? On the basis of my fieldwork in an investment bank in Istanbul in 2018, I track traders' shifting comprehensions of my presence on the trading floor through everyday encounters and discuss how the micropolitics of secrecy shape traders' enactments of expertise. I show that these enactments are not monolithic or static. Rather, they are affective and interactive, interwoven with the power dynamics on the trading floor, and susceptible to outside intervention.
Disillusioned by decades of financial discrimination, from the closing of bank accounts to banning by payment processors and exclusion from mortgages, LLCs, and lines of credit, sex workers find themselves in need of an alternative means of transaction. One possible alternative is cryptocurrency, where a shared sense of distrust in financial institutions has created an alliance between two industries seeking financial autonomy and a way around financial exclusion. For many blockchain developers, the goal is trustlessness: the ability of a financial system to operate free of actors whose actions cannot be foreseen or controlled. However, even the sex workers implementing blockchain technology remain skeptical of trustlessness, particularly any system's or application's ability to sustain autonomy from the economic regulations that have impacted their livelihood. Building on ethnographic data, the article explores the analytic utility of trust for understanding the contradictions that inhere in illiberal economies and offers the conceptual framework of chronotopes of currency, an approach to monetary circulation that considers temporal and spatial scalability.
For decades, anthropologists have fought against the intrusion of neoliberal policies and norms into the university. We have lost. Today, neoliberal policies are ubiquitous within the university, forming the contours of our professional practice and informing our relationships with colleagues, administrators, and students. Given this reality, this article presents a practical model for university reform and encourages anthropologists to give up our futile resistance to neoliberalism and instead, whole-ass it.
In the context of global economic and political crises, microentrepreneurship enjoys popularity both as a solution to poverty and as an empowering lifestyle based on values of independence and flexibility. While education, training, and engagement in entrepreneurship may have significant effects on self-making, social and economic change from entrepreneurial formation remains ambivalent. In this introductory essay, we set out how becoming an entrepreneur is an unfinished project in the lives of economic subjects, entailing practices actively tested, reconfigured as adaptive responses to individual and collective crises and aspirations, and conceived as related to an anticipated and critically assessed immediate future self.
The khipu knotted string records in the ancient Andes were accounting systems, but they did not indicate any concepts of commensurability or exchange value. They were not incipient money; instead, monetized commerce appears to have predated the economic organization of the Inca society. The article begins by tracing the emergence of coinage in the Aegean area around 600 bce and reflecting on the subsequent role of money fetishism in Eurasian economic history. As David Graeber has argued, the transformation of accounting systems into inherently valuable artifacts in the Axial Age (800-200 bce) appears to have fundamentally transformed social relations and cosmologies. The dramatic ramifications of coined money are highlighted by the profound differences between premodern civilizations in Eurasia and the Andes. The absence of money in the Inca Empire was a result of an elite power strategy but had the inadvertent effect of promoting local community autonomy. Accounts of the Inca economy that gravitate toward a neoformalist approach are rejected as distortions of its cultural specificity. The article argues for an acknowledgment of the momentous significance of physical money tokens. It discusses the cultural processes by which money can be transformed from an accounting system to an indexical sign attributed with intrinsic exchange value.
