17/04/23
 
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+++English version below+++ Researching Capitalism Für einen feministischen Ansatz zur Erforschung des Kapitalismus An Kapitalismuskritik besteht kein Mangel. Angesichts von Klimawandel und Finanzkrisen, Inflation und Artensterben tun wir alle gut daran, das vorherrschende Wirtschaftssystem in Frage zu stellen. Gleichzeitig ist nicht jede Art von Kritik grundsätzlich emanzipatorisch: auch rechtspopulistische Rhetorik geißelt die neoliberale Globalisierung oder […]

07/11/23
For a Feminist Anthropology of Finance
Exemplifying the Gens Approach
In this blog post, I introduce the contemporary landscape of the anthropology of finance with a particular focus on the concept of financialization as viewed through the thought-provoking lens of the feminist Gens Manifesto (Bear et al. 2015, see also Carabini 2023). The concept of financialization is difficult to confine to a single definition. Some […]

26/10/23
A Queer Marxist Perspective on Gens
Generating Capitalism, Generating Gender
The question of how non-normative sexualities and genders relate to political economy animates a diffuse and dynamic literature that has compelled our interest over the past year. Following initial conversations at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Belfast in summer 2022, driven by a strong desire to articulate forthrightly queer perspectives in political […]

20/06/23
Infrastructuring Gens
Materiality, Marx and More-Than-Capitalist Value
The Gens Manifesto gracefully opened a new debate in economic anthropology, a field that since the financial crisis of 2008 had been dominated by studies of financialisation. There, Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako argue that constraining our imagination to trading floors, databases, mathematical formulae, and computing programmes had marginalised an […]

13/06/23
Kapitalismuskritik als Sprachmagie
Im August 2019 besuchte ich in Nairobi eine Veranstaltung mit dem klangvollen Titel Why does nobody speak about capitalism in Kenya? Die Veranstaltung war das Ergebnis einer Kooperation zwischen dem Politikwissenschaftler Jörg Wiegratz, den ich kurz zuvor in Nairobi kennengelernt hatte, und der Nichtregierungsorganisation Mathare Social Justice Center, die sich erfolgreich um die Belange kenianischer […]

30/05/23
Care and its Resistances
The Gens Manifesto and the Ambiguities of Kinship
I am grateful for this opportunity to revisit the Gens manifesto, which, as the authors state in the interview, serves as a “declaration of an intention, a call to action, and a promise”. The manifesto has reignited our attention to the centrality of anthropological contributions and feminist substantivist critiques in rethinking relations and processes involved […]

30/05/23
Ökonomische Anthropologie im (Nach-)Krisenmodus
Just zu dem Zeitpunkt, als ich 2008 in Bahrain für meine Masterarbeit zum Thema Islamic Finance Feldforschung betrieb, brach im euro-amerikanischen Raum eine kapitalistische Welt zusammen. Spekulationen im US-amerikanischen Immobilienmarkt stürzten die Finanzwirtschaft in eine tiefe Vertrauenskrise, die schon bald sehr reale Auswirkungen hatte. In den USA verloren nahezu zehn Millionen Menschen ihr Eigenheim, in […]

23/05/23
An Infinity of Traces
A Commentary on Gens
I have spent the last few years studying the financialization of water utilities in Europe and the insurgencies that often accompany them. These insurgencies tend to arise from households and pose profound challenges to the liberal democratic project as it has evolved under conditions of financialized capitalism. The household has emerged as a site of […]

16/05/23
Capitalism, Acts of Labor and their Contested Recognition
Questions about capitalism, labor and class are currently receiving new interest, especially as inequalities are on the rise – along with a sense of crisis of the world economic system. We see a revisiting of the grand theories of capitalism and analyses of the reproductions of inequality, like in the work of Thomas Piketty, among […]

09/05/23
On the Poverty of Grand Theories
An Interview with the Authors of ‘Gens’: Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako
This boasblog discusses a feminist approach to the study of capitalism. At the center of our debate lies ‘Gens’, a seminal manifesto published in 2015. Proposing a research program beyond the established theories of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, or Michel Callon, ‘Gens’ argues for ethnographic detail and a relational, generative understanding of capitalism. […]

02/05/23
Gens
Ein feministisches Manifest zur Erforschung des Kapitalismus
Der zweisprachige boasblog Researching Capitalism sucht nach ethnographischen Möglichkeiten, um den zeitgenössischen Kapitalismus zu erforschen. Im Zentrum steht dabei ein Manifest („Gens“), das einen feministischen Ansatz verfolgt und sich gegen etablierte Modelle etwa von Karl Marx, Michel Foucault oder Michel Callon positioniert. Indem die Autorinnen Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Tsing und Sylvia Yanagisako eine […]