Economic Persuasions

As the transition from socialism to a market economy gathered speed in the early 1990s, many people proclaimed the final success of capitalism as a practice and neoliberal economics as its accompanying science. But with the uneven achievements of the “transition”—the deepening problems of “development,” persistent unemployment, the widening of the wealth gap, and expressions of resistance—the discipline of economics is no longer seen as a mirror of reality or as a unified science. How should we understand economics and, more broadly, the organization and disorganization of material life? In this book, international scholars from anthropology and economics adopt a rhetorical perspective in order to make sense of material life and the theories about it. Re-examining central problems in the two fields and using ethnographic and historical examples, they explore the intersections between these disciplines, contrast their methods and epistemologies, and show how a rhetorical approach offers a new mode of analysis while drawing on established contributions.

Stephen Gudeman received his PhD in Anthropology from Cambridge University and his MBA from the Harvard Business School. He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and has carried out fieldwork in Panama, Colombia, Guatemala, and Cuba. He works at the intersection of anthropology and economics. His books include The Anthropology of Economy (Blackwell), Conversations in Colombia, with Alberto Rivera (Cambridge University Press), Economics as Culture (Routledge), The Demise of a Rural Economy (Routledge), and Economy’s Tension (Berghahn).