Surprise Reveals the Affective-Moral Economies in Cancer Illness Narratives

2021 ◽  
pp. 104973232110444
Author(s):  
Stefanie Plage ◽  
Rebecca E. Olson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
Illness Narratives ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Individual Risk ◽  
Restricted Access ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Societal Expectations

Emotions, like joy and sorrow, feature in illness narratives, dramatizing stories of becoming: sick, well, controlled, in control. However, brief emotions, such as surprise, have received limited analytic attention in cancer illness narratives. Drawing on 20 interviews with 11 participants with diverse cancer diagnoses, along with the 455 photographs they produced for this study, we address the complex interactions between discourse, societal expectations, and perceptions in moral-affective economies. Tracing the emergence, deployment, and silencing of surprise provided an avenue to explore connections between affect, morality, advocacy, and philanthropy. We show how surprise works to deny uncertainties couched in individual risk, and situate cancer causation within the logics of anticipation, (re)producing socio-cultural etiology narratives. Attending to surprise reveals how some cancers are situated as individual responsibilities, with restricted access to compassion and collective resources. Thus, we interrogate the affective-moral economy underpinning cancer illness narratives, and surprise’s pivotal role in its analysis.

Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitra Kofti
Keyword(s):  
Employment Status ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
Flexible Production ◽  
Flexible Work ◽  
Production Site ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Moral Frameworks

In this article I discuss some of the theoretical implications of adopting moral economy as an approach to analysing new forms of flexible production and work. Despite a growing interest in the anthropology of precarity and work, the linkages between political and moral economies have been relatively neglected. By discussing E.P. Thompson’s approach to moral economy as well as ways moral economy has been discussed in anthropology, the article argues it is a timely and encompassing approach for the study of flexible work and precarity, as well as compliance and resistance to inequality. A nexus of diverse moral frameworks of value converge at the production site and back home, contributing to the reproduction of precarity and capital under flexible forms of accumulation. The article suggests that moral economy may offer an encompassing approach to studying individual ideas and practices and their relation with collective moral frameworks and confinements and to exploring change and change potential. It draws from an ethnography based on long-term fieldwork in a privatized factory in Bulgaria, in the context of radical economic transformations and privatization projects. It scrutinizes solidarities, tensions and inequalities developed around the conveyor belt, with a particular focus on gender and employment status inequalities and their intertwinement with managerial and household practices.

Transnational moral economies: The value of monetary and social remittances in transnational families

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 760-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia D Solari
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
State Building ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Migrant Children ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Social Remittances ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Building Project

Although migration scholars have called for studying both ends of migration, few studies have empirically done so. In this article the author analyzes ethnographic data conducted with migrant careworkers in Italy, many undocumented, and their non-migrant children in Ukraine to uncover the meanings they assign to monetary and also social remittances defined as the transfer of ideas, behaviors, and values between sending and receiving countries. The author argues that migrants and non-migrant children within transnational families produce a transnational moral economy or a set of social norms based on a shared migration discourse – in this case, either poverty or European aspirations – which governs economic and social practices in both sending and receiving sites. The author found that these contrasting transnational moral economies resulted in the production of ‘Soviet’ versus ‘capitalist’ subjectivities with consequences for migrant practices of integration in Italy, consumption practices for migrants and their non-migrant children, and for Ukraine’s nation-state building project.

scholarly journals The Moral Economy of Thrift: The Production of the Indebted Self in the Reality Series Getting out of Debt and Life or Debt

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 485-500
Author(s):  
Silke Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Tv Show

In this article, the intersection of the economic and social dimensions of thrift is analysed under the special condition of debt. The debt context serves as a focal glass exposing agents, their social practices and strategies of accumulation capitals with regard to appropriate spending. In order to capture the many layers of thrift, the concept of moral economies is applied. This concept tries to reconcile two seemingly divergent dimensions of human behaviour which can be described as individualistic, calculating and serving a self-interest (economy) on the one hand and community-oriented and benefitting a common good (morality) on the other hand. Starting out with an overview over studies on moral economies in historical and social science since the early 1970s, I will explain the heuristic use of the concept for the case of debts research and apply it to representations of thrift as visualised and popularised in the reality TV shows Raus aus den Schulden (Getting Out of Debt) and Life or Debt. Here, the images of homes are clues for the cultural productions of appropriateness on TV: What are suitable ways of living when in debt? What are adequate scenes of dwelling and narratives of dealing with debts and which normative structures regulate those stories, the perception of the self and potential social exclusion? By examining the TV show as a strong voice in the debt discourse, thrift turns out to be a cornerstone in the internal and external regimes of governing debt in the micropolitics of TV.

scholarly journals ‘People are willing to fight to the end’. Romanticising the ‘moral’ in moral economies of irrigation

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-217
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Development Policy ◽  
Rural Economy ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Irrigation Development ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Emic Perspective ◽  
Moral Discourses

This article is about the continued salience of a particular understanding of moral economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the fact that a significant body of anthropological theory argues against simplified binaries of market and moral economies, such binaries persist. These either romanticise or vilify moral economies and exist in both policy and academic contexts. Thus, moral economies are said to drive corruption or shape anti-market cultural stances. Meanwhile, a romantic fantasy of a non-capitalist rural economy oriented by morality rather than economic rationality continues to animate areas of development policy and to direct funding. My argument is not with the concept of moral economy itself, but with how it is marshalled in support of both romantic and sometimes negatively essentialised conceptions of people and places. The article sets out the case for the persistence of these ideas, focusing on their application to irrigation development and the problems with this. I then use an example from southern Malawi to illustrate how moral ideas of fairness and reciprocity interplay with processes of differentiation in access to (and exclusion from) land and labour and influence how people manage scarce resources. Whilst there are moral discourses and a mutual embeddedness of the moral and economic, these reflect a range of ethically informed positions which are influenced by social position and power. However, this emic perspective is largely absent from the more romanticised models. I conclude by reflecting on the politics of their persistence.

Moral economies of exclusion: politics of fear through antagonistic anonymity

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Søren Mosgaard Andreasen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Politics Of Fear

This article examines the discourse-technical means through which illiberal political logics are legitimised in constructions of xenophobic populism by a ‘prominent’ Norwegian extreme-right organisation, Human Rights Service (HRS). I argue that recent HRS publications featuring six secretly shot photos of Muslims in the Norwegian public sphere engender a moral economy of exclusion in which Muslims consistently are produced as an anonymous yet ubiquitously present threat to liberal democratic and human rights values. Within this framework, micro-humiliating performances against the ‘Muslim other’ are constituted and encouraged as a necessary, morally justified defence of democratic virtues to ensure the existence of a vulnerable majority self. I claim that the HRS circulation of constructions of faceless, yet easily recognisable, categories of designated ‘enemy others’ as a threat to the liberal democratic ethos can ultimately be understood as a hegemonic intervention to push anti-Muslim illiberalism from the fringes towards the dominant cultural outlook. <disp-quote>He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. <attrib>(<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="CIT0034">Nietzsche, 1989[1886]</xref>: 157)</attrib></disp-quote>

scholarly journals Imagined, Real and Moral Economies

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Real ◽  
Moral Economies

This article explores three different inflections of the idea of economy: imagined, real and moral. Each offers a distinctive way of thinking about economies and each raises the possibility of providing critical purchase on the formations of ’actually existing capitalisms’. The article begins from the idea of imagined economies given the proliferation of such imaginaries, not least in the wake of the fi-nancial crisis. In political, public and policy discourse, economies have become the focus of intense fantasy and projection. The resulting imaginaries underpin a range of economic, public and social policies. Importantly, they articulate a foundational distinction between economic and other sorts of policy. The idea of imag-ined economies opens the space for a certain type of critical engagement with contemporary political economy. In a rather different way, ideas of the ’real economy’ have also been the site of critical work - distinguishing between ’real’ relations and practices involved in the production of material objects (and value) in the contrast with virtual, digital, financialised economies. This article treats the ‘real economy’ as one further instance of an imagined economy. Like the concept of the ’real economy’, E.P. Thompson’s exploration of a ’moral economy’ also offers a standpoint from which critical analysis of the current economic, political and social disintegrations might be constructed. Thompson’s articulation of a moment in which collective understandings of economies as fields of moral relationships and obligations dramatises the contemporary de-socialization of economies, even if it may be harder to imagine twentieth and twenty first century capitalisms as moral economies that the current crisis has disrupted. Again, the article treats ’moral economies’ as another form of imagined economy, in part to make visible the shifting and contested character of what counts as ’economic’.

A Cry for Care But not Justice: Embodied Vulnerabilities and the Moral Economy of Child Welfare

Affilia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zlatana Knezevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Children’S Accounts ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
Assessment Reports

This study explores the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in child welfare “moral” interventions. I examine how the bodily figures in child welfare assessments, linking these manifestations to the concept of the moral economy of care. A sample of assessment reports from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children’s bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. I show how the psychosomatically suffering child is being best “heard” as vulnerable. I also argue that such a moral economy of care silences children’s accounts of gendered and racial injustices. Furthermore, racialized moral divides are indicated when assessments of different child bodies are considered. A concluding remark points to a need for a child welfare moral economy of social justice that responds to structural intersecting injustices in childhoods, including to those of a racialized child welfare and its individualized and symptom-oriented services.

scholarly journals Moral economies of consumption

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Moral Economy ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Multilevel Perspective ◽  
Post Purchase

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to bring together debates about enduring normative concerns surrounding the morality of consumption with more recent concerns about the ways specific moralities are constituted in and through markets. The second aim is to develop the concept of ‘moral economy’ and call for an approach to its study, attentive to how moralities of consumption develop through interactions between instituted systems of provision, forms of state regulation, customs within communities and the everyday reflections of consumers about the things that matter to them. As consumers are increasingly asked to factor environmental and fair labour concerns into their purchase and post-purchase habits, there is a real need to understand how moralities of consumption are both formatted through institutional frameworks and shaped everyday by actors from within. After developing a framework for the study of moral economies, this article explores in depth the experiences of one couple in relation to the cessation of a cardboard recycling collection in Shropshire (England) to show why a multilevel perspective is needed to appreciate the place of morality within the market.

European integration as a moral economy: Greek technocrats amidst capitalism-in-crisis

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitrios Gkintidis
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
Dominant Classes ◽  
Moral Frameworks

This article engages in the ongoing anthropological discussion on the concept of ‘moral economy’ and opts for its multileveled use. It affirms the concept’s suitability for grasping class-specific sets of moral values and considerations on the economy, as well as universalized moral frameworks through which the economy is commonly addressed by both dominated and dominant classes. In dealing with such universalized moral economies, it is suggested that our analysis should critically address the symbolic construction of the economy as an essentially moral process. The value of such a focus lies in analyzing and historicizing the recurrence of epistemologies that deny the centrality of structural oppositions in capitalism and, rather, place emphasis on moral categories, such as fairness, intentionality, and obligation. This multileveled understanding and use of the concept of moral economy can help us to further comprehend the delineation of neoliberalism in European space and the moral reformulation of the political economy of capitalism-in-crisis. The article is based on ethnographic material addressing the course of action taken by Greek technocrats specialized in the policies and cohesion funds of the European Union.

Disrupted migration projects: the moral economy of involuntary return to Ghana from Libya

Africa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nauja Kleist
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Home Town ◽  
Rural Town ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
Moral Economies ◽  
International Labour Migration ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Migration Regimes

AbstractThis article contributes to the theorization of involuntary return and moral economies in the context of economic crisis and vulnerability prompted by restrictive migration regimes and conflicts. Drawing on fieldwork in a rural town in Ghana where international labour migration is an established livelihood, it analyses deportations from North Africa, Israel and Europe and emergency return from Libya following the civil war in 2011. The article argues that return to the home town, rather than being detained or stuck en route, constitutes a particular context precisely because migrants face family and community expectations upon their return. Involuntary return constitutes a disruption of migration projects when migrants return empty-handed, going from being remitters to burdens for their families. This creates conflicts and disappointments within family and the local community, especially in relation to norms of provision and gender ideals. The paper highlights three effects of the moral economy of involuntary return. First, that involuntary return does not constitute a priori termination of migration, as many involuntary return migrants migrate again, often in high-risk ways. Second, it discusses the ambivalence of reciprocity and interdependency in families. And third, it shows how involuntary return challenges dominant ideals of masculinity.

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