Embodied value: Wealth‐in‐people

Abstract

In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people remains unrecognized, undervalued, and exploited. Recently, the ongoing conflict between capitalist markets and human value came to the fore again during the coronavirus pandemic, when many health systems were unprepared. In the United States, business and government leaders feared that quarantines would damage the economy. Their public statements urging the reopening of stores and public spaces pitted market value against the value of human lives. How can anthropology bring the value of people to light? How have varied societies valued human lives, qualities, and works? The articles in this special issue develop the 2019 Society for Economic Anthropology conference theme "Wealth-in-People." Inspired by ethnographies of certain African societies, the wealth-in-people literature has moved from politics and demography to inequality and marginalization to the pricing of life, and has settled on wealth-in-people as a collective that assembles individuals with diverse and complementary qualities. Collectives of wealth-in-people build on these qualities, including knowledge, skill, beauty, emotional and distributive labor, and artistic expression. They become more than the sum of their parts. Seen from our current moment, wealth-in-people as a theory of value takes us beyond false choices between the economy and people. By illuminating forms of economic life from the ground up, the wealth-in-people approach, like similar recent concepts, including the human economy and social worth, can catalyze a more democratic economy.

Introduction to special issue: Value, values, and anthropology

“…While the authors of this special issue think that this heightened analytic vantage is a great place from which to look, think, and speak about humanity, the articles here will suggest that we have spent enough time at this rather high level of generalization to begin mapping out some of the specific implications for how we think about our world when we center questions of value. It is worth noting that this issue's intervention follows a tendency in recent work in Economic Anthropology seeking to theorize specific articulations of value theory, for example: as valuation manifests via “wealth in people” (Kusimba, 2020), and as valuation occurs on landscapes (Rissing & Jones, 2022). And, put a bit more simply, this special issue answers the following question: Once we accept the basic premises of value theory, what can we say that is more specific about how life works?…”

“Jobbos” and the “wageless life”: Exploring work and responsibility in the anti‐fracking movement in Lancashire, United Kingdom

“…I build on research on prefigurative practices and its focus on ethical world‐making by exploring work not as fixed entity in a web of sociality but rather as practice related to the realization of a “wealth of human values” (Kusimba, 2020, 173). Guyer (1993, 255), focusing on the equatorial African context, suggests that reality emerges through “culturally delineated … kinds of work.” Harris (2007) explores how her interlocutors in the Andean region celebrate arduous forms of communal activities, contrasting this with servitude associated with such work elsewhere.…”

Usurious strangers and “a better tomorrow”: Agricultural loans, education, and the “poverty trap” in rural Sierra Leone

“…Being in debt is not necessarily a morally negative position for an individual, as human history is contoured by relationships of credit and indebtedness (Graeber 2011). Especially in Africa, where “wealth in people” models dominate thinking about sociality, one cannot be human outside of relationships of debt and credit, whose valences of indebtedness can last a lifetime (Bolten 2020a; Guyer and Belinga 1995; Guyer and Salami 2013; Kusimba 2020; Nyerges 1992; Richards 1995; Shipton 2007). Debts are contoured by generations of exchanges of land, labor, and seed.…”