Title: Legacies, logics, logistics : essays in the anthropology of the platform economy /
Authors: Guyer, Jane I.
Year: 2016
Subjects: Economic anthropology.; Economics History; Economic anthropology Africa.; Economic anthropology; Economic history; Economics; 73.30 economic conditions of existence: general (ethnology); Africa Economic conditions; Africa
Abstract: "Legacies, Logics, Logistics brings together a set of essays, written both before and after the financial crisis of 2007{u2013}08, by eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane I. Guyer. Each was written initially for a conference on a defined theme. When they are brought together and interpreted as a whole by Guyer, these varied essays show how an anthropological and socio-historical approach to economic practices{u2014}both in the West and elsewhere{u2014}can illuminate deep facets of economic life that the big theories and models may fail to capture. Focusing on economic actors{u2014}whether ordinary consumers or financial experts{u2014}Guyer traces how people and institutions hold together past experiences (legacies), imagined scenarios and models (logics), and situational challenges (logistics) in a way that makes the performance of economic life (on platforms made of these legacies, logics, and logistics) work in practice. Individual essays explore a number of topics{u2014}including time frames and the future, the use of percentages in observations and judgments, the explanation of prices, the coexistence of different world currencies, the reapplication of longtime economic theories in new settings, and, crucially, how we talk about the economy, how we use stable terms to describe a turbulent system. Valuable as standalone pieces, the essays build into a cogent method of economic anthropology."--Publisher's website.
Contents: Foundations -- The themes of legacies, logics, logistics -- "Toiling ingenuity": food regulation in Britain and Nigeria -- Public economic cultures -- "The craving for intelligibility": speech and silence on the economy under structural adjustment and military rule in Nigeria (with Laray Denzer) -- Prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time -- From market to platform: shifting analytics for the study of current capitalism -- Cultures of calculation -- The eruption of tradition?: on ordinality and calculation -- Percentages and perchance: archaic forms in the twenty-first century platforms -- Intricacy and impasse: dilemmas of value in soft-currency economies -- Indexing people to money: the fate of "shelter" -- Toward ethnography and the people's economies -- Composites, fictions, and risk: toward an ethnography of price -- Soft currencies, cash economies, new monies: past and present -- Is the "real economy" disaggregating, disappearing, or deviating?