Economies of affect

Cet article développe le concept des «économies de l'affect>> pour attirer l'attention des anthropologues sur le rôle de l'affect dans la facilitation des transformations économiques. Il s'appuie sur les résultats de deux projets de terrain ethnographiques, l'un au Mexique et l'autre en Indonésie, pour montrer comment l'affect a été mobilisé pour créer des sujets pouvant être appréhendés selon les normes néolibérales. Les auteurs montrent comment l'étreinte, les pleurs et les discours sur l'amour et le chagrin ont été associés à des transformations impliquant la cessation de prestations de l'État et l'application des lois du marché. En faisant de l'affect et de son articulation avec le changement économique un objet d'étude anthropologique, l'article affirme l'utilité d'une notion d'affect se démarquant d'autres approches qui mettent l'accent sur l'émotion. Les auteurs affirment que l'affect est utile parce qu'il est, par nature, réflexif et intersubjectif. L'affect renvoie aux relations pratiquées entre les individus, à la différence de l'émotion, toujours marquée par le spectre d'un individualisme psychologique.     

Parenting Strategies in Modern and Emerging Economies

Independent of ecology, subsistence strategy, social complexity, or other aspects of socioecology, the altricial nature of young humans requires mothers to have help raising their offspring. What seems to be context-dependent, however, is who the helpers are, how they invest, and what the impacts of that investment are. In a series of papers that focus on parental and alloparental investment across five populations, this special issue of Human Nature uses evolutionary theory to examine how socioecological context influences modes of direct parental investment among the boat-dwelling Shodagor of Bangladesh (Starkweather), modes of indirect paternal investment in the modern United States (Anderson), and the biological outcome of paternal investment for men in Jamaica (Gray et al.), as well as direct alloparental investment among village Bangladeshis (Perry) and indirect alloparental investment in breastfeeding practices in the United States (Cisco).     

Cultural Economies: Past and Present

Cultural Economies: Past and Present. Rhoda H. Halperin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. 309 pp.     

The Ecological Footprint Intensity of National Economies

At least three perspectives—industrial ecology (IE), ecological modernization theory (EMT), and the “environmental Kuznets curve” (EKC)—emphasize the potential for sustainability via refinements in production systems that dramatically reduce the environmental impacts of economic development. Can improvements in efficiency counterbalance environmental impacts stemming from the scale of production? To address this question we analyze cross‐national variation in the ecological footprint (EF) per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). The EF is a widely recognized indicator of human pressure on the environment. The EF of a nation is the amount of land area that would be required to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the wastes it generates. The most striking finding of our analyses is that there is limited variation across nations in EF per unit of GDP. This indicates limited plasticity in the levels of EF intensity or eco‐efficiency among nations, particularly among affluent nations. EF intensity is lowest (ecoefficiency is highest) in affluent nations, but the level of efficiency in these nations does not appear to be of sufficient magnitude to compensate for their large productive capacities. These results suggest that modernization and economic development will be insufficient, in themselves, to bring about the ecological sustainability of societies.     

The Articulated Peasant: Household Economies in the Andes.

The Articulated Peasant: Household Economies in the Andes. Enrique Mayer. Boulder: Wesrview Press, 2002. 390 pp.     

Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology

Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Richard R. Wilk. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 189 pp.     

Subsistence Economies and the Origins of Andean Complex Societies

Recent arguments stating that marine resources were relatively unimportant in cultural developments on the coast of Peru during the Preceramic Period are incorrect on several counts. It is shown that the economics and technology of maritime subsistence of coastal Peru are more complex than previously thought, that the nutritional values of terrestrial versus maritime foods are debatable, that the dynamics of El Niño events are complex, and that maritime resources must still be seen as important for Preceramic Period economies. [Central Andes, coastal adaptations, ecological anthropology, origins of complex societies]