Susana Narotzky

• Professor (Full) at University of Barcelona

The cost of living we envision here stems from an interpretation of the ‘cost of living’ phrase which addresses (1) macro indicators of inflation, (2) the difference between farm gate price and consumer price as a cost to farmers that endangers their viability, and (3) how this cost transfers to the wages of workers and endangers their livelihood....

The first panel of the workshop aimed at conceptualising the shift in the drivers of migration. One way to understand the shift from economic accumulation to lifestyle consumption is, in Weberian terms, as a shift from Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) to Wertrationalität (value rationality). Alternatively, one can conceptualise it as a...

El conocimiento nunca es evidente por sí mismo y es siempre una lucha por la evidencia: lo que cuenta y lo que no cuenta. El conocimiento es parte de la política de la evidencia. Necesitamos desentrañar los procesos que crean valores de verdad en un campo de poder. Aquí deseo abordar la tensión entre la experiencia, el conocimiento vernáculo y la e...

Crisis, valor y esperanza son tres conceptos cuya intersección y mutua constitución permiten repensar la naturaleza de la vida económica, tomando distancia de los modelos abstractos alejados de las realidades cotidianas de las personas comunes –modelos cuyas deficiencias quedaron dramáticamente expuestas con la actual crisis económica mundial–. Est...

Este artículo propone el concepto de «reciprocidad negativa» como un aspecto necesario y substantivo del concepto general de reciprocidad. La referencia a un orden moral es el aspecto central que diferencia la reciprocidad del intercambio. La reciprocidad se basa en una moralidad compartida en su forma positiva y en la quiebra, transformación o sus...

Feminist approaches to the economy question many taken‐for‐granted dichotomies that define what counts as economic practices. By critiquing the methodological separation between private and public realms, feminist scholars point to the political and ideological aspects of economic differentiation. The concept of social reproduction that includes bi...

Is labour a useful concept for anthropology today? This essay attempts to respond theoretically to the challenge that the contributions to this special issue empirically pose. The essay rethinks the concept of labour by addressing three questions that deal with the relation of human work effort and capital accumulation: the first refers to alienati...

By revisiting earlier debates around the definition of peasantries and new issues around farming in present-day agricultural regimes, this review underlines the uneven forms of capitalist surplus extraction. After revisiting the classic debate, I explore present-day issues such as market-led agrarian reforms, land grabs, and transnational peasant m...

This article seeks to rehabilitate the concept of ideology as a necessary tool of struggle against present-day capitalism. Post-structuralist epistemologies, by celebrating pluralism and the emergent character of knowledge and politics, have rendered the intellectual production of a unitary theory an obsolete remnant of a Modernist past. I contend...

In this paper I want to address the pressure of structural adjustment policies on teaching and learning anthropology. I will base my thoughts on the Spanish case but the reflexion is applicable to many other countries in Europe. The decline in public funding and the increase in fees have transformed the meaning of higher education. Increasingly, pr...

Los datos de que hago uso para el planteamiento de la hipótesis han sido recogidos durante dos años de trabajo de campo discontinuo entre diciembre de 1984 y febrero de 1986 en una zona rural olivarera de la comarca de Les Garrigues, Lérida. Concretamente los datos se refieren a Ceral y a la cooperativa de trabajo asociado S.J. del sector de la con...

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/bdQKmPv4D9fptjhM6baM/full Structural adjustment policies in Europe underscore the lack of sovereignty and responsibility of nation-states towards the well-being of their citizens. As a result, in popular mobilizations arguments of inequality and injustice, expressed in a demand for dignity, are intertwined. The art...

A „reciprocitas”, a „beagyazottsag” es a „tarsadalmi tőke” fogalmai szolgaltak a gazdasagi tevekenysegeket fenntarto tarsadalmi kapcsolatok leirasanak es elemzesenek a fő eszkozeul olyan teruleteken, melyeket helyi gazdasagkent vagy ipari korzetkent hatarozhatunk meg, s ezzel a sikeres europai fejlődes modelljeive valtak. A fogalmak tortenelmi kont...

La presente conferencia magistral se dictó en el marco del III Congreso Mexicano de Antropología Social y Etnología “Sociedad y Culturas en Transformación: nuevos debates y viejos derroteros en antropología mexicana” el 25 de septiembre de 2014. La misma se llevó a cabo en el auditorio Gustavo Baz del Palacio de la Antigua Escuela de Medica, ubicad...

Rising social, political and economic inequality in many countries, and rising protest against it, has seen the restoration of the concept of 'class' to a prominent place in contemporary anthropological debates. A timely intervention in these discussions, this book explores the concept of class and its importance for understanding the key sources o...

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 rethinki...

Optimism of the will permeates this article, which builds on Lefebvre’s idea of The Right to the City ([1968] 2009) and its more recent revival by Harvey, specially in his last work where, after a period of scepticism regarding recent urban social movements as potentially politically transformative, he seems to vindicate their potential as part of...

This article proposes a new approach to economic processes, one that is grounded in anthropological knowledge. The chaotic management of the crisis expresses the failure of the dominant “economic” paradigm. The time seems ripe for a new methodology and a different theoretical framework altogether. It is time for “Economic” knowledge to address an e...

This article proposes a new approach to economic processes, one that is grounded in anthropological knowledge. The chaotic management of the crisis expresses the failure of the dominant “economic” paradigm. The time seems ripe for a new methodology and a different theoretical framework altogether. It is time for “Economic” knowledge to address an e...

AJEC @ 21: A Perspective from the Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) AJEC @ 21: A Perspective from the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) AJEC @ 21: A Perspective from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE)

This lecture addresses the connection between the production in the present of particular memories of the past and the ability to frame present-day conflicts in ways that render certain possibilities legitimate while excluding others. Through the ethnographic material I have gathered during my career I will show how different projects of the future...

The major theme i propose to address in “hegemonic anthropology and the anthropologies of the south: the case of spain” is that of power and the defnition of the conditions of possibility of anthropological knowledge production. it deals with ethics and responsibility and with the relationship between anthropologists and anthropological subjects. i...

The major theme i propose to address in "hegemonic anthropology and the anthropologies of the south: the case of spain" is that of power and the defnition of the conditions of possibility of anthropological knowledge production. it deals with ethics and responsibility and with the relationship between anthropologists and anthropological subjects. i...

Ethnography underscores the need to historically contextualize and spatially localize economic models such as the "industrial district" and concepts used as ahistorical typologies such as "social capital." This article is based on ethnographic research in Spain, where decentralized footwear production is structured around informal subcontracting ne...

■ In this article I address conflict during the Spanish Civil War and the immediate post-war years by searching for any discernible social bases for the coalitions that confronted each other locally in a particular rural area in Catalunya. I try to address the real complexity of how civilians locally, and often violently, confronted their close nei...

El aprovisionamiento de recursos es un proceso complejo en el que deben considerarse conjuntamente relaciones de producción, distribución, apropiación y consumo, y en el que el desarrollo histórico va a definir en cada caso las vías particulares de aprovisionamiento de bienes y servicios que están disponibles en sociedades concretas, para grupos co...

Concepts such as "reciprocity," "embeddedness," and "social capital" have been the main tools for description and analysis of social relations sustaining economic activities in areas defined as regional economies or industrial districts, becoming models for successful development in Europe. Historicizing these concepts, stressing the concrete polit...

The article is a critique of models of successful economic development in Europe based on the "economic region" idea. These models stress the usefulness of embedding economic relations in the social fabric ("social capital"). The ethnography reveals, however, a conflict-laden space where increased embeddedness produces increased tension within the...

The article is a critique of models of successful economic development in Europe based on the "economic region" idea. These models stress the usefulness of embedding economic relations in the social fabric ("social capital"). The ethnography reveals, however, a conflict-laden space where increased embeddedness produces increased tension within the...

This superb historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's "Regional Economies," takes up the difficult question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining rich oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanc...

This chapter appraises the postwar habitualization of personalized repression characterized by a complex dialectic that arose between the exercise of power in controlling people's conducts and the imbrication of power within the structured ways people feel about themselves and the kind of world they live in. The one does not determine the other; ra...

This chapter revisits the images of society and the economy that are hegemonic in the European Union today. In doing so it not only interrogates the now vast literature of regional economies and regional development, but also explores the way institutional structures arising under neoliberal regimes have affected the intellectual production of thes...

This chapter explores the regional space as a historical site, focusing on the threshold between two subzones. One forms a curve running from Callosa del Segura through Orihuela to Crevillente, Elche, and then Alicante, and the second runs from the extreme south of the province, La Marina, and along the coast to Guardamar del Segura. It emerges les...

This chapter identifies the discontinuity between agricultural work and industrial work. While to families rooted in corporatist dependencies characterized by the aniago contract, the 1940s and the 1950s represented more a period of organic integrity and geographic fixity, those rooted in the daily uncertainties characterized by the jornal contract...

This chapter focuses on politics by briefly touching on the two bodies of literature. One proposes a turn away from the major figures of history and the sweeping political movements toward the study of the everyday, the other advocates a way of studying political movements that attends to their cultural dimension, the spaces they opened and the pra...

This chapter takes a schematized and selective path—from the post-civil war interface of coercion with a shadow economy to the embedding of regional development programs within neoliberal doctrine—to illustrate how historical ethnography can raise questions. There are so many crosscutting histories to be dealt with. There are bends and dead ends al...

This chapter examines how public politics was intertwined with social relations of production. One theme comes up insistently: the production of a culture of fear which took uncertainty to the extreme that one's mere existence was always threatened. This was accomplished by the Francoist state by both widespread direct and violent repression, and t...

For some areas of Europe, the shift has been less a near-total exodus from the countryside than a shift from industry as an appendage to agriculture to agriculture as an appendage to industry. Therefore, the ways these processes were experienced by people going through this kind of transition are considered. This chapter examines smaller entreprene...

This chapter introduces the wide variety of actors who are entangled in the contemporary “flexible” industries of the region. This history, economic, political, social, and cultural, engenders relationships between people that are classlike and thereby produces people who relate to each other as members of classes. The industry has truly achieved d...

This historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's “Regional Economies,” takes up the question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understa...

This chapter is based on an ethnography of the Vega Baja del Segura (Valencia in southeast Spain).1 It is an area of small- and medium-size family firms, some of which, however, are among the more profitable in their sector (shoewear). Following recent sociological and economic models, the area has been described as an industrial district, in refer...

This article proposes the concept of negative reciprocity as a necessary and substantive aspect of the general concept of reciprocity. We contend that the concept of reciprocity is useful only when conceived simultaneously in its negative and positive forms as they are articulated in historical processes. If treated in all its complexity the concep...

History & Memory 14.1/2 (2002) 189-228 This article focuses on attitudes toward participation in public politics (being político) in contemporary Spain and the ways in which they have been affected by the violence and fear generated by the Francoist regime (1939–1975). Social memories and silences are an important part of the processes that produce...

In this introductorypaper the authorpoints out several theoretical problems related to the polisemic and ambiguous uses ofthe concept ofreciproty. However the author concludes that this concept can be very operative to explain transfers that are embedded in domains structured by cultural and social relations. Ya lo sabíamos: la reciprocidad es algo...

En: Cuadernos de Pedagogía Barcelona 2002, n. 319, diciembre ; p. 49-52 La educación intenta dar respuesta a dos grandes demandas sociales: formar profesionales y formar ciudadanos. Los autores analizan estos dos aspectos y consideran que para conseguir un reto tan ambicioso, el sistema debería garantizar el acceso a tres pilares imprescindibles: l...

L’analyse que je propose de deux economies regionales en Espagne souligne l’importance de la perspective historique pour l’etude des regions concretes ou s’etablissent des reseaux de rapports personnalises de production. C’est grâce a l’histoire qu’il va etre possible de percevoir le poids du « culturel » dans ces economies regionales, mais aussi l...

The Vega Baja del Segura is a region in southeastern Spain with a long history of combining commercial agriculture and labor-intensive manufacturing (producing footwear, wooden boxes, fishing nets, carpets, and other items). At present, manufacturing firms competing in a global market put pressure on the local subcontractors for lower costs. Creati...

This article proposes the concept of «negative reciprocity» as a necessary and substantive aspect of the general concept of reciprocity. Reference to a moral domain is the central tenet that differentiates reciprocity from exchange. Reciprocity is based on a shared morality in its positive form and on the break, transformation or suspension of the...

Introducción En esta intervención' voy a intentar aportar un elemento comparativo a partir de unas sociedades muy distintas a las nuestras, muy alejadas geográfica-mente y a menudo marginadas de nuestra reflexión. Las incursiones antropo-lógicas suelen ser un viaje de ida y vuelta. Nos aproximamos a otras sociedades con la ayuda de nuestros concept...

Este artículo se basa en material obtenido durante un trabajo de campo realizado en colaboración con Gavin Smith (University of Toronto) durante varios periodos cortos y un periodo más largo en 1995 (un trabajo de campo de año y medio de duración en la misma zona fue realizado en solitario por G. Smith en 1978-9) en la zona del Bajo Segura, Alican-...

The aim of this paper is to show how women's work in manufacture, within a worker's cooperative framework, is necessary for the social reproduction of the farming enterprise system and for the physical reproduction and maintenance of the individuals that make up the associated domestic group. It is the articulation of the two objectives of farm and...

Abstract This article proposes the concept of negative reciprocity as a necessary and substantive aspect of the general concept of reciprocity. Wecontend,that the concept of reciprocity is useful only when conceived simultaneously in its negative and positive forms as they are articulated in historical processes. If treated in all its complexity th...

Esta mesa redonda fue dedicada a nuestro querido colega y amigo Eduardo 'Lali' Archetti que nos acompañó en muchos debates y nos transmitió su alegría de vivir. Desde hace ya algunos años un colectivo de antropólogos y antropólogas 2 de distintos lugares participamos en un proyecto que tiene como objeto desvincular el quehacer antropológico de las...

Traducción de: New Directions in Economic Anthropology

Informe de investigación realizado a partir de una estancia en la University of London entre el 3 de marzo al 10 de abril 2007. Redacción de un artículo sobre aspectos metodológicos centrales para las ciencias sociales en su vertiente tanto teórica como aplicada: la articulación entre la investigación etnográfica y los modelos abstractos. Tanto la...

Incluye bibliografía