Final reminder Money and Moralities Panel AAS 2013

Hi colleagues,

With every apology for cross-posting, here is a quick reminder that I am
accepting abstract proposals for the following panel at the AAS Conference
at ANU on November 6-8 for another two weeks (until August 1).


Moralities of Money



Discourses about value and exchange have been at the centre of many
anthropological analyses since Malinowski and Mauss. While the way value is
constructed and distributed within the social body continues to differ
significantly from one ethnographic context to another, all local
experiences are to a growing extent shaped and transformed by the workings
of global capitalism.

In practical terms this has meant that cash, credit and capital increasingly
permeate everyday practices in even the most remote field-sites. Social
relationships within our field-sites as well as the relationships between
anthropologists and their respondents are inevitably mediated by the market.
Indeed, money has re-emerged at the centre of so many ethnographic studies
that it has been described as anthropologists "new exotic" (Maurer 2006:
18).

In this environment the relationship between notions of tradition and
modernity appears increasingly complex, and the salient points of study
for contemporary economic anthropologists are perhaps local discourses
about money and patterns of engagement with transnational market forces.

Moreover, these changing political contexts open new possibilities for
making money and reflecting on processes of exchange through competing
moral discourses.
Accumulating, spending or distributing money are practices that frequently
are viewed through a moralizing lens or at least discursively constructed
in terms of morality and ethics. As money is found or lost, used and
abused, wasted or won, hailed or condemned, fetishized or feared it
becomes inscribed with meaning in ways that can both strengthen and
challenge social orders.

This panel therefore seeks to focus on how money impacts social structures
and local dynamics of power, and becomes intrinsically linked to cultural
moralities and evaluations. We invite papers on competing moralities of
money and exchange from a variety of perspectives, including thick
ethnographic descriptions, comparative analyses, methodological
discussions and ethical reflections from various field-sites.


Please send all abstracts to the panel convener on
g.presterudstuen@uws.edu.au