The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating, caring for and repairing the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by a utilitarian positioning of natural environments by economic science. Ecologists have gone further in capturing the interdependence of economies and ecologies with the concept of socio-ecological resilience. Of concern, however, is the persistence of a vision of an economy ordered by market determinations in which there is no role for ethical negotiation between humans and with the non-human world. This paper reframes economy-ecology relations, resituating humans within ecological communities and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It advances the idea of community economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) and argues that these must be built if we are to sustain life in the Anthropocene. The argument is illustrated with reference to two construction projects situated in Monsoon Asia.

A diversity of place‐based community economic practices that enact ethical interdependence has long enabled livelihoods in Monsoon Asia. Managed either democratically or coercively, these culturally inflected practices have survived the rise of a cash economy, albeit in modified form, sometimes being co‐opted to state projects. In the modern development imaginary, these practices have been positioned as ‘traditional’, ‘rural’ and largely superseded. But if we read against the grain of modernisation, a largely hidden geography of community economic practices emerges. This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place‐based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William’s cultural analysis of keywords into a non‐western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. The paper has been collaboratively written with co‐researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post‐development agenda.

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Located on the high altitude slopes in China's mountainous southwestern hinterlands, the Nuosu (Yi) have long been characterized by ethnologists in China as a slave society. In this essay I explore the appropriateness of the label with reference to the distinction, associated with the classicist Moses Finley in his studies of Greco-Roman society, between slave societies and societies with slaves (Finley 1983, 79–83). But my main purpose in focusing on Nuosu slavery, as we know it from the first half of the twentieth century, is to gain a better understanding of Nuosu identity. It makes sense to me that the process by which outsiders, that is, slaves brought in as captives, became insiders reveals a great deal about the constructs of the Nuosu ideology of common origins and identity and about how this transformation from alien to native worked in practice among people historically “remarkably resistant to acculturation,”with boundaries that remain to this day sharp, clear, and relatively impenetrable (Harrell 1995, 101, 104).

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