Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy

Abstract

Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people, the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living for themselves and for future generations, involving not only waged labor but also structures of provisioning, investments in social relations, relations of trust and care, and a multitude of other forms of social action that mainstream economic models generally consider trivial, marginal, and often counterproductive. A holistic understanding of how people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between different scales of value. It is attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the future has become synonymous with geographical mobility. It is attentive to the fact that making a living is about making people in their physical, social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions.Rethinking the economy is an ambitious project, and the selection of the three themes of crisis, value, and hope with which we seek to open up a broader debate is an indication of the starting point: the crude realities of the many, those of ordinary people. The focus on "common" or "ordinary" people highlights the fact that those whose decision-making capacities are restricted by their limited assets, be it in terms of wealth or power, are nevertheless capable of developing sometimes complex individual or collective strategies to enhance their own well-being and the well-being of future generations. Here we define "well-being" as the accomplishment of socially reasonable expectations of material and emotional comfort that depend on access to the diverse resources needed to attain them. The context of a breakdown of expectations that the global crisis has produced in many regions of the world has reconfigured values and reshuffled the frameworks of moral obligation. As a result, the imagining of possible futures and how to make them happen has also changed. The

Producing Value among Malagasy Marriage Migrants in France

“…Efforts to sustain life across generations and to accrue value by moving through space is indeed central to "making a living" and negotiating the current period of economic crisis, much as Narotzky and Besnier (2014) argue in the introduction. It is precisely because women take a socially valued gendered social role that has long existed in Madagascar and try to achieve it through the very different conditions of life in France that Franceline's case reveals actors' cultural work as they sustain life by negotiating between competing and unequally situated horizons of expectation.…”

Valuable Subversions: Gendered Generativity and Sorcerous Production in Central Mozambique

“…Informed by these latter perspectives from Narotzky and Besnier (2014), Graeber (2001) and Uzendoski (2004), values-and the value of generativity in this case-may be assumed neither to be stable and passive, as slots or categories in a cultural schema, nor as merely being the residue of sociological circumstances. Nor must they be understood representationally, as various metaphors of the market and transactions or as terrains upon which worth is ascertained and unidimensional and monosemic hierarchical indexes are systematized and generated.…”

“Deeper into a Hole?”

“…Informants' models provide a more local, "house"-centered, or "human" view (Gudeman 2001(Gudeman , 2010Hart, Laville, and Cattani 2010). They yield a view of mutual obligations between persons, families, and generations that is akin to "entrustment" (Shipton 2007), in which wealth is held and managed on behalf of others, and that also aligns with ideas outlined by Narotzky and Besnier (2014).…”