Organizers: Chryslen Mayra Barbosa Gonçalves, Universitat de Barcelona (Spain); Tania Estefany Jiménez Cala, Universidad Arturo Prat (Chile); Antônio Augusto Oliveira Gonçalves, Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais (Brazil)
The studies on economic relations in Anthropology are well known: Mauss (1925), Godelier (2001), Sahlins (1992, 2003), and Polanyi (1947) are some of the “classic” references focus on this issue. Their works cover reciprocity, gift relations (give-receive-return), senses of value and critics to the classic theory of economy (substantivists vs. formalists) in the understanding of the economic relations in our societies. Authors such as Strathern (1988), Seligman (1993) and Carsten (2000) bring issues of gender and kinship to the debate of economies, contributing to the understanding of meanings of reciprocity, production, and affective relationships that are linked to exchange processes.
Works such as Tassi et. al. (2013) and Juliane Müller’s (2015, 2018, 2020) demonstrate the insufficient of theories of informality and neoclassic economies to understand the experiences of popular and/or indigenous economies in Latin America. Both Andeanest authors show that the popular economy sector is composed of people who have been marginalized by economic elites (who have specific racial, ethnic, and class characteristics) and by formal state policies. Despite the marginalization process, these people have been able to build economic networks and creative relationships, beyond the deficiencies present in their condition of self-employed (autonomous). Other references (e.g. Verónica Gago, 2014) show us the relevance of producing ethnographies in these spaces considered marginal by informal theories: fairs, shantytowns (“favelas”), sidewalks, squares, popular markets, borderlines, and so on. The occupation of urban spaces and the construction of specific cartographies on these economic networks transformed the relationships of these societies, their ties, their ways of eating, and, as in the case of the Andean high plateau of Bolivia, have precluded the establishment of some transnational supermarkets monopolies.
Similarly, in the low-lands, there is a set of studies carried out as of Lévi-Strauss (1942), in War and trade among the Indians of South America, to Humphery and Hugh-Jones (1992), Overing (1992), Gallois (2005), Gordon (2006), among other specialists, that have sought to understand exchange networks and the relationships between indigenous peoples without necessarily interpreting them as gradients of contact and/or a result of expansion fronts of the national society, but seeking to approach them based on their own perspectives, most often describing complex multi-communal, multiethnic, and multinational systems. It is interesting to notice that, in these studies, economies are generally not conceived as a separate phenomenon, but rather as a relational articulation in which people, names, rituals, goods, language exchanges, conflicts, wars, and other flows are combined in multiple ways.
Thus, the proposal of this dossier is to make visible the economic experiences of the peoples and popular economies of Latin America. We are interested in understanding the challenges and contributions that these economies give to the debate of Economic Anthropology, beyond the meanings proposed by economic theories of informality, marginality, and survival/subsistence.
The proposed thematic axes for the dossier are the following:
- Economic experiences in everyday life, between borderlines and local spaces
- Economies and affections
- Economies and gender
- The relationship between humans and non-humans in economic production
- Networks of relationships and exchanges between communities
The works must be unpublished and original, in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese; they must comply with our publication rules and be submitted to our website: https://econtents.bc.unicamp.br/inpec/index.php/maloca/about
Deadline: 30/06/2023