Mergers & Acquisitions

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, and unspoken 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 kind of creature are they? What drives their choices and behaviors? Are we still talking about the same creature?

Erwin Dekker

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

 The first episode delves into the Parable of the Leaky Jars, a thought experiment on two persons engaged with the project of filling a number of vessels with precious liquids. One of them has intact vessels; the other works with broken jars. Who do we identify with in this story? Who do we want to be? And to what extent does this story reflect the human condition? We will talk about these questions with Ingrid Robeyns and Erwin Dekker.

Ingrid Robeyns; photo by Keke Keukelaar

Dr. Ingrid Robeyns is a political philosopher, holding the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. (https://www.uu.nl/staff/IAMRobeyns)

Dr. Erwin Dekker is historian of economics, working as Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. (https://www.mercatus.org/hayekprogram/scholars/erwin-dekker)

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

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

References:

The Parable of the Leaky Jars is taken from Plato’s Gorgias 488e-499e (380 BCE). 

The story:

Imagine two people, somewhere in time and space. Imagine that both of these people have a number of jars or vessels, containers. And suppose that both persons are engaged with the same project of filling these vessels with precious liquids: wine, oil, honey, milk. Each of these liquids is rare and hard to come by and it takes a great deal of strenuous work to get them.

The first person has taken proper care of their vessels, their jars are intact. Their job is an arduous one—it’s time- and energy-consuming—but at the end of the day, their vessels are filled and full and he can rest easy. It’s a lot of hard work, but they do get it done. The first person has a finite job.

The second persons has neglected their vessels. In their quest for more content, they have forgotten to take care of the containers. The jars are cracked and flawed. Every time they pours in liquid, it leaks away, keeping them busy night and day. The second person has an infinite job; they will never be done.

Who are you in this story?

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

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?

Trust, Risk and Responsibilisation. These are the main findings that emerged from research conducted during the pandemic via audio diaries. Primary school teachers were asked to record their everyday experiences into an MP3 player allowing them to express whatever concerns or observations they had, whenever they wanted. The result is a first-hand account of life as a primary school teacher on the front line.

In this three part podcast we will hear what their lives were like at the time, the pressures they were under and what they personally sacrificed to do the job. The findings of the research showed just how these three key areas contributed to the low rate of teacher retention, then and now.

In order to maintain the anonymity of the people and the schools included in this research, the excerpts you hear have been re-recorded with other people’s voices, but these are their words and their stories.

Hosted by Judith Koch, a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of International Relations at Sussex University, she will be speaking to Dr. Dinah Rajak, Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Jenny Hewitt, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London who collaboratively designed and undertook this research.

The first episode focused on the methodology used to conduct this research, exploring how audio-diaries accessed real-time insights on teaching staff’s own terms, and practically how this research was able to be done during the lockdowns.

This episode delves into the findings of this research and identifies the three keys issues that impacted hugely on how teachers did their jobs and still do – Trust, Risk and Responsibilisation.

The final episode will look at future implications and policy recommendations.

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

Producers: Elisa Kennedy and Judith Koch

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. In order to maintain the anonymity of the people and the schools included in this research, the excerpts you hear have been re-recorded with other people’s voices, but these are their words and their stories.

Dr. Dinah Rajak

Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan

Dr. Jenny Hewitt

Hosted by Judith Koch, a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of International Relations at Sussex University, she will be speaking to Dr. Dinah Rajak, Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, Dr. Sarah-Jane Phelan, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Jenny Hewitt, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London who collaboratively designed and undertook this research.

In this episode we look at the methodology used to conduct this research, exploring how audio-diaries accessed real-time insights on teaching staff’s own terms, and practically how this research was able to be done during the lockdowns.

The next episode will look at the findings and the final episode looks at future implications and policy recommendations.

Host: Judith Koch

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

Producer: Elisa Kennedy and Judith Koch

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