This podcast discusses Dr. Peebles’s forthcoming book, The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons, co-authored with the artist and illustrator Benjamin Luzzatto.  The conversation centers around the book’s groundbreaking proposal: a bank that would enable us to seize carbon from the atmosphere and offer a profound method for addressing climate change. Gustav draws on the anthropological archive to point out how currencies have been based on all manner of objects, from tobacco leaves and salt to gold and collateralized debt obligations. Building on Annette Weiner’s famous argument about the “inalienable possessions,” Gustav points out that the key thing that this assortment of goods shares is a communal belief that such objects can harness and organize economic growth. Gustav describes how atmospheric carbon could be sequestered in the earth by millions of currency users and the communally owned banks they rely on. Dr. Peebles explains how developments in digital currencies and the biosequestration of carbon have, together, made a new and radical intervention in the climate battle possible: a nonproprietary currency backed by sequestered carbon. This new currency could be managed via Wikipedia-style open-source policies that privilege sustainability and equity over endless growth and pollution. Because it is backed by sequestered carbon, the use of the currency would draw atmospheric carbon out of the atmosphere and deposit it back into the ground, following a mirror trajectory of gold during the era of the international gold standard. More information about the book can be found here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049641/the-first-and-last-bank/ 

Gustav Peebles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Before that, he taught at The New School in New York City. His publications, including a book entitled, The Euro and Its Rivals, as well as a range of academic and popular articles, track credit, debt, money, and the diverse struggles to regulate and manage these vital economic phenomena throughout human history. Most recently, he has been exploring digital currencies, including work on the Swedish Central Bank’s e-currency proposal, as well as a wilder idea that leverages digital currency as a potential tool for fighting climate change. 

Timestamps

Peebles’ Bio – 2:28

Series Co-Hosts

Ferda Nur Demirci, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, working in the Department of Economic Experimentation. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, resource extraction economies, and authoritarian governance, with a particular focus on the cycles of indebtedness affecting working-class families in Turkey. Her work has been published in both English and Turkish in outlets such as Antipode Online, Dialectical Anthropology, and 1+1. She is also a research associate in the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria.

Daromir Rudnyckyj, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. Dr. Rudnyckyj’s current project examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary

References

Weiner, Annette B.. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving. University of California Press.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.

We often do not realize that deep down economics is a battleground of competing anthropologies: implicit or explicit theories of human nature, selfhood and subjectivity, quiet beliefs about how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. In this podcast we bring together researchers from different disciplines that study economic phenomena, systems, agency and behavior, ranging from historians and political philosophers to economic anthropologists and development economists, to scrutinize the protagonist of their discipline: who is the Real Homo Economicus? What kinds of creature are they? What drives their choices and behavior? Are we still talking about the same creature?

To get the conversation started we use an experimental method: the Mythlab method. We use stories as a probe into economic thinking and quiet beliefs about the underlying anthropologies. In each episode we give our guest a story and see how they respond to it, and explore assumptions and associations in a playful way.

In this fourth and final episode we play with fables, short moralistic tales, often featuring animals, but always addressing a deeper human truth. We talk about The Dog and the Piece of Meat, The Wolf and the Crane, The Hawk and the Nightingale, The Hen with the Golden Eggs, The Cricket and the Ant. What is the moral of these stories? What can animal stories tell us about human nature? And what kind of world is the world of the fable? I try to make sense of these fables with Huub Brouwer.

Dr. Huub Brouwer is assistant professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tilburg University. His research is on theories of distributive justice, particularly on desert, responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism, and taxation. Huub is currently carrying out a 4-year research project on philosophy of taxation, funded by the Netherlands Research Council. (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/nl/medewerkers/h-m-brouwer)

Hosted by Dr. Tazuko van Berkel [https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/tazuko-van-berkel#tab-1] and Connor McMullen. Edited and mixed by Connor McMullen.

Mythlab team: Dr. Erik Bähre, Dr. Aiste Celkyte, Prof. dr. Lisa Herzog, Connor McMullen, Dr. Sara Polak

The Mythlab-project is funded by the Dutch Young Academy.

The Dutch Young Academy (https://www.dejongeakademie.nl/en/default.aspx) is a platform of fifty inspired academics who conduct research, advise, share knowledge and bring people together, and who do all this while taking a special interest in young scientists and scholars.

References:

The fables of this episode are taken from ancient fable collections attributed to Aesop, Babrius and Phaedrus.

We often do not realize that deep down economics is a battleground of competing anthropologies: implicit or explicit theories of human nature, selfhood and subjectivity, quiet beliefs about how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. In this podcast we bring together researchers from different disciplines that study economic phenomena, systems, agency and behavior, ranging from historians and political philosophers to economic anthropologists and development economists, to scrutinize the protagonist of their discipline: who is the Real Homo Economicus? What kinds of creature are they? What drives their choices and behavior? Are we still talking about the same creature?

To get the conversation started we use an experimental method: the Mythlab method. We use stories as a probe into economic thinking and quiet beliefs about the underlying anthropologies. In each episode we give our guest a story and see how they respond to it, and explore assumptions and associations in a playful way.

In this third episode we interpret a story about a mythical king who cuts a sacred tree and gets punished with insatiable hunger. The more he eats, the hungrier the king gets. The king turns to devouring his cattle, his estate, everything dear to him—until he ends up eating himself. What does this story mean? What does this story tell us about human nature? I try to make sense of the story with Erik Bähre.

Dr. Erik Bähre is an economic anthropologist. He is associate professor at Leiden University with fieldwork experience in South Africa and Brazil. He works among others on money, finance, violence, solidarity, and personhood (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/erik-bahre#tab-1).

Hosted by Dr. Tazuko van Berkel [https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/tazuko-van-berkel#tab-1] and Connor McMullen. Edited and mixed by Connor McMullen.

Mythlab team: Dr. Erik Bähre, Dr. Aiste Celkyte, Prof. dr. Lisa Herzog, Connor McMullen, Dr. Sara Polak

The Mythlab-project is funded by the Dutch Young Academy.

The Dutch Young Academy (https://www.dejongeakademie.nl/en/default.aspx) is a platform of fifty inspired academics who conduct research, advise, share knowledge and bring people together, and who do all this while taking a special interest in young scientists and scholars.

References:

The Myth of Erysichthon has come down to us via Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter (3rd century BCE) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD) (https://www.theoi.com/Heros/Erysikhthon.html).

Rural speech is often denigrated, but how might it also be valuable? How might rural economies benefit from their linguistic diversity through tourism? In this third and final installment of our “Is Talk Cheap?” series on language and value, Kate and Ariana interview Dr. Thea Strand about a highly valorized dialect of rural Norway that won a national popularity contest and is increasingly being used commercially. Dr. Strand gives us some background on how the political and cultural history of Norway has produced a deep appreciation of dialect diversity and an ethos against language standardization. We talk about how the Valdres dialect is now used commercially for tourists in diverse places, from wayfinding signs on ski trails to advertising car washes at gas stations. Learn the significance of a single vowel in advertising a festival for fermented fish! We discuss hyperlocal language use, language change over time, and why some kinds of linguistic difference are available to use in marketing when others are not. In the last part of the episode, Thea tells us about her new research with Michael Wroblewski on another aspect of this rural economy: the decline of transhumance (the seasonal movement of grazing livestock) among local family farmers. Residents lament the resulting reforestation and their changing landscape alongside their changing dialect, underscoring how people experience economic transformations through landscape and language.

Thea Strand is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research is sited in rural Valdres, Norway, examining language and political economy, broadly construed. She has studied changes in linguistic structure, value, and ideologies surrounding the distinctive Valdres dialect since the late 2000s. Her current project focuses on the deeply intertwined environmental, cultural, and linguistic effects of tourism development and declining transhumant farming in Valdres’ mountain areas.

Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance.

References from our conversation with Thea Strand:

Strand, Thea. 2024. A Winning Dialect: Inventing Linguistic Tradition in Rural Norway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges.” Social Science Information 16, no. 6 (1977): 645–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847701600601.

Valdres Nature and Culture Park: https://www.valdres.no/

Rakfisk Festival: https://www.rakfisk.no/

In this episode, Kate and Ariana catch up with Montserrat Pérez Castro in the midst of her fieldwork in Mexico. Transnational food companies and palm oil mills employ sustainability workers to ensure they are ethically sourcing raw materials from farmers using sustainable practices. But what do industry insiders count and communicate as “sustainable,” and what kinds of value does this practice add? Pérez Castro describes her fieldwork and argues for why we need to think of sustainability workers in the palm oil industry as engaging not just in “practices” but in an important form of labor. Along the way, we talk about supply chains, transparency, secrecy, expertise, the meanings people attach to their work (or don’t), the crucial differences between primary/industrial and charismatic commodities, interdisciplinary research, and the work of translation.

Montserrat Pérez Castro is a PhD candidate in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society graduate program at Dartmouth College. She is interested in the relationship between desire, capitalism, and ethical-political imagination. Her previous research focused on class relations, affect, food practices, and urbanization. For her dissertation, she examines sustainability labor in the production of value in the palm oil supply chain in Mexico. Her research is at the intersection of economic anthropology, geography, political ecology and science, technology, and society studies.

Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance.

References from the conversation:

Pérez Castro, Montserrat. 2023. “Plantationocene “On the Ground”.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/plantationocene-on-the-ground

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.

Sanchez, Andrew. “Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work”, Social Analysis 64, 3 (2020): 68-94, https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2020.640305

Rofel, Lisa and Sylvia J. Yanagisako. 2019. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. Durham: Duke University Press

In this episode, Dr. Kathryn (Kate) Graber and doctoral student Ariana Gunderson interview linguistic anthropologist Jillian Cavanaugh about all things language and value. Much of Dr. Cavanaugh’s research in Bergamo, Italy, summarized here, has been on the political economy of code choice–that is, why people choose the ways of speaking they do, whether to access economic opportunities or to have a language of regional belonging, intimacy, and home. Turning to questions of authenticity and materiality, Dr. Cavanaugh discusses how to approach language not only as an expressive system but also as an embodied, material practice. We talk about how food gains value through the different kinds of linguistic labor that are undertaken in its production and ask whether language and food are analogous semiotic systems (spoiler alert: not quite). Thinking about her current work with small-scale, hyper-local sausage producers, Jillian discusses the roles of individual choice and consumption, and/versus the role of production in the construction of value. At the end, we talk about intersections between linguistic and economic anthropology in Jillian’s role as President-Elect of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA).

Jillian R. Cavanaugh is a linguistic anthropologist whose research, centered in northern Italy, has considered language shift and social transformation, value, language ideologies, materiality, gender, and heritage food. Her current research focuses on heritage food producers and the labor they undertake to make good, safe, and valuable food. She is interested in how people use the semiotic and material resources available to them to make sense of their pasts in order to live in the present and envision their futures. Her publications include Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) and Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge University Press 2017, co-edited with Shalini Shankar). Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Ethnos, among other venues. She received her PhD in anthropology at New York University and is Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center CUNY.

Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance.

References from our conversation with Jillian Cavanaugh:

Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2009. Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town. Chichester, U.K: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. “The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges.” In Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gal, Susan. 1988. The Political Economy of Code Choice. In Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Monica Heller, ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 245–264.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2023. “Authenticity and Its Perils: Who Is Left Out When Food Is ‘Authentic’?” Gastronomica 23 (1): 28–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2023.23.1.28.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R., and Shalini Shankar. 2014. “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value.” American Anthropologist 116 (1): 51–64.

Riley, K. C., & Cavanaugh, J. R. 2017. Tasty Talk, Expressive Food: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Food-and-Language. Semiotic Review 5: The Semiotics of Food and Language.

Chumley, Lily Hope, and Nicholas Harkness. 2013. “Introduction: QUALIA.” Anthropological Theory 13(1/2):1–11.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2007. “Making Salami, Producing Bergamo: The Transformation of Value.” Ethnos 72(2):149–172.

Woolard, Kathryn. 2016. Singular and Plural. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Society for Linguistic Anthropology: https://linguisticanthropology.org/

In this conversation, Nikita Taniparti interviews Dr. Carolyn Rouse, who gives us a preview of her forthcoming book. Based on almost a decade of fieldwork in Lake County, CA, her book looks at an economy of care as opposed to an economy of things, and how the relations that emerge through care work are linked to life expectancy and health outcomes. Dr. Rouse explains her interlocutor’s search for freedom, and the narrative threads of hope that emerge to bind a community together.

Today’s guest is Dr. Carolyn Rouse. She is the Ritter Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work is wide-ranging and has focused on issues of race, religion, inequality, political and economic development, and more. Her first book, Engaged Surrender: African-American Women and Islam (2004), is an ethnography of African American Sunni muslim women in Los Angeles, CA – the book shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligation. Her next book, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009) provides an examination of what it means that black Americans are sicker and die earlier than white Americans and the implications for health care in the United States. This book provides important framing to our discussion today, which is about Professor Rouse’s forthcoming book on declining life expectancies of white Americans. Her book Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment, co-authored with John Jackson Jr and Marla Frederick and published in 2016, argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing perceptions of African Americans by claiming that they are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites, if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans’ rights to citizenship in the United States. As a filmmaker, Prof. Rouse has also produced and directed numerous documentaries, including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Teaching Mental Illness in Bali (1998), Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015), and more. She is dedicated to expanding forms of visual anthropology, a theme that we’ll touch upon a bit later in this episode. Her forthcoming book builds on her decades of research on racial disparities in health and medicine, development and policy efforts, and ongoing political and economic shifts in the US. The book project began when she visited Lake Country in Northeast California in 2016 to investigate research claims being made at the time that showed that life expectancies for white Americans was declining. Today she’ll talk about that ongoing research and how it is linked to the emergence of hope, trust, and community.

Links:

https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/carolyn-rouse

https://www.epicpeople.org/racist-by-design/

In this conversation, Nikita Taniparti interviews Dr. Kelly McKowen, who explains Norway’s system of social democracy and the privatization of welfare services for the unemployed. We talk about “business of unemployment” and how it is part of Norway’s unique form of welfare capitalism. People in Norway feel a moral social obligation to get a job, which in turn speaks to the relationship between society and the state. Dr. McKowen also turns to highlight his upcoming research on the emergence of convenience as a value that might be upending certain service sectors.

Today’s guest is Dr. Kelly McKowen. He is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University and is also, more familiar to our listeners, the Book Review Editor for Economic Anthropology. His research and teaching interests include capitalism, the state, cash transfers, work value, morality, and more. His first book project is Down and Out in Utopia, based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Norway. The book examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in Norway in order to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral incorporation. His recent research includes writing about the “business of unemployment,” which we’ll talk a lot more about in a moment, about unemployment and migration, migration and identity, work ethics and welfare regimes, and job-seeker training and neoliberalism. He teaches courses on the anthropology of business, economy and morality, and society and culture in contemporary Europe.

Links:

https://kellymckowen.com/

https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9655.13820

https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.13820

In this conversation, Nikita Taniparti interviews Dr. Tania Li, who talks to us about her long-standing ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia. It focuses on assemblages of land reform – who is included and who is excluded, the history of land reform movements in Indonesia, and the implications of such assemblages. In particular, Dr. Li talks about the capitalist relations that emerge when indigenous highlanders self-organize to institute property rights. We see that it is not as straightforward as conventional neoliberal narratives suggest.

Today’s guest is Dr. Tania Li, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. After her early research in Singapore, she has dedicated much of her career to researching land, labor, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity in Indonesia. She has written about the rise of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples’ movement, land reform, rural class formation, struggles over the forests and conservation, community resource management, state-organized resettlement and the problems faced by people who are pushed off the land in contexts where they have little or no access to waged employment, and more. Her most recent book, Plantation Life (2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi, examines the structure and governance of Indonesia’s contemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia; the book theorizes the notion of “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. Her book Land’s End (2014) draws on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia and offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. This is the book that inspired the topic for this episode, so we’ll be digging into this more in a moment. Some of her other books include The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (2007) which incidentally was a huge inspiration for my own journey into anthropology, her book Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (2011), co-authored with Derek Hall and Paul Hirsch, and Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production (1999). Her scholarship engages interdisciplinarily with geography, philosophy, religion, politics, and much more. I’m delighted but also honored to be able to interview her for this episode, and I know there will be more to talk about than we have time for, so let’s get started.

Links:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2021.1890718

https://www.taniali.org/papers/what-is-land-assembling-a-resource-for-global-investment

Why are all our teachers quitting?

From 2021 to 2022, straight after the pandemic 40,000 teachers in England left the profession before retirement, the highest number in a decade. Figures from the Department of Education also show unfilled teacher vacancies were at a record high and sick days taken were up 50 percent on pre-pandemic levels.

But why?

In this three-part podcast we will hear true accounts from staff on the front line spoken at the most frightening time of their careers. To maintain the anonymity of the people and the schools included in this research, the excerpts you will hear have been re-recorded with other people’s voices, but these are their words and their stories.

In the first two episodes of this podcast, we explored how and when the research was conducted and what that research revealed. In this final episode we highlight four key areas that contribute to low teacher retention levels and examine the impact of how teachers were seen, purely as a source of labour, not as people going through the same crisis. We end with a discussion on what needs to change, both at a policy level and generally in attitudes and expectations of teachers.

We would like to sincerely thank all the teaching staff who took on this project during the most stressful time of their careers. We hope their voices have been heard.

Host: Judith Koch

Interviewees: Dr. Dinah Rajak, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan and Dr. Jenny Hewitt

Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan

Dr. Jenny Hewitt

Dr. Dinah Rajak

Producer: Elisa Kennedy and Judith Koch

Music: Thanks to Universfield and Ashot Danielyan for the use of their music from Pixabay