The Human Economy

The idea of an informal economy emerged from, and is a critique of, the ideology of ‘economic development’. It originated from Keith Hart’s recognition of informal economic activity in 1960s Ghana. In the context of four colonialisms – German, British, Australian and Dutch – this book recounts Hart’s effort in 1972 to introduce the informal ‘sector’ into development planning in Papua New Guinea.

The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods.

This is the first comprehensive economic history of the Basotho people of Southern Africa and spans from the 1820s to the present day. The book documents what the Basotho have done on their own account, focusing on their systematic exclusion from trade and their political efforts to insert themselves into their country’s commerce.

Investigates the political reasons for South Africa adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order.

Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more — as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has embraced these mediums as a simple solution to the issue of financial inclusion. Money at the Margins is a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

Contributors to this volume attempt to think about money as a category of thought, offer theories on luxury and sex in capitalist development, and follow the evolution of money today from the role of the global South in shaping its future, to cross-border investment in China, to Bitcoin as politics. Money in a Human Economy offers multiple perspectives on capital’s central role in the formation of world society, as well as in the shaping of its current discontents.

From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.

Roma and Gypsy economic arrangements are complexly related to social position. Authors ethnographically studied these complexities, exploring how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies.

Contemporary economies, dominated by global finance and political rent-seekers, often inhibit the realization of democracy. This volume features comparative essays and case studies to examine the antagonisms between the economy and democracy and the struggles and visions to make things more equitable.

The Cold War was fought between “state socialism” and “the free market.” That fluctuating relationship between public power and private money continues today, unfolding in new and unforeseen ways during the economic crisis. Nine case studies -- from Southern Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and Atlantic Africa – examine economic life from the perspective of ordinary people in places that are normally marginal to global discourse, covering a range of class positions from the bottom to the top of society.