Legacies Logics Logistics

Download or read book Legacies, Logics, Logistics written by Jane I. Guyer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-27 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume consists of a collection of essays written since the economic crash of 2007-8 by the eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Guyer. In a substantial Introduction written especially for this volume and eleven chapters, two of which are also new, divided into four parts--"Public Economic Cultures," "Cultures of Calculation," "Platforms," and "Toward Ethnography and the People's Economies"--Guyer gives a comparative analysis of different aspects of public culture during recent economic transformations in West Africa (primarily Nigeria), Britain, and the United States. Her analysis is at once deeply comparative and historically and theoretically wide-ranging. The emphasis is not on the power of things or concepts to shape economies or markets, but on the effectuation of those things, the making of the elements, their own composition and their concatenation into new compositions, always tenuous, destined eventually to fall apart but not fade away entirely from the earth. This places the focus on those makings, the craft involved, the coordination needed to make the elements work and do work even though they might not always fit so nicely together. For the economy is a platform, lashed together from often unlikely, incongruous elements, duct tape where screws and nails are required. Far more than the sum of its parts this book will help set the stage for what may well be the some of the most exciting adventures of an anthropology in the making.