Cover of Legacies, Logics, Logistics
Legacies, Logics, Logistics Essays in the Anthropology of the Platform Economy
by Jane I. Guyer
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cloth: 978-0-226-32673-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-32687-0 | Electronic: 978-0-226-32690-0
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Legacies, Logics, Logistics brings together a set of essays, written both before and after the financial crisis of 2007–08, by eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane I. Guyer. Each was written initially for a conference on a defined theme. When they are brought together and interpreted as a whole by Guyer, these varied essays show how an anthropological and socio-historical approach to economic practices—both in the West and elsewhere—can illuminate deep facets of economic life that the big theories and models may fail to capture.

Focusing on economic actors—whether ordinary consumers or financial experts—Guyer traces how people and institutions hold together past experiences (legacies), imagined scenarios and models (logics), and situational challenges (logistics) in a way that makes the performance of economic life (on platforms made of these legacies, logics, and logistics) work in practice. Individual essays explore a number of topics—including time frames and the future, the use of percentages in observations and judgments, the explanation of prices, the coexistence of different world currencies, the reapplication of longtime economic theories in new settings, and, crucially, how we talk about the economy, how we use stable terms to describe a turbulent system. Valuable as standalone pieces, the essays build into a cogent method of economic anthropology. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jane I. Guyer is the George Armstrong Kelly Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, also published by the University of Chicago Press.             

REVIEWS

“Superbly crafted essays that draw on vibrant ethnographic material and creative rendering of social and cultural theory. This collection makes clear the profound nature of Guyer’s writing, including her decisive concept of ‘platforms,’ which stabilizes theoretical and empirical inquiry around key financial issues. Here we see the powerful impact of her career trajectory on the establishment of the foundations of the anthropology of finance.”
— Douglas R. Holmes, author of Economy of Words

“Legacies, Logics, Logistics is a tour de force. With a fantastic, theoretically astute, and groundbreaking introduction, it situates some of Guyer’s most important work in light of new approaches to economies and markets coming out of anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies. Central to the whole is a searching empiricism and Guyer’s own toiling ingenuity as she patiently pokes, prods, and pulls apart the compositions of economic platforms and theoretical pedantry that make up much of our world. For, as Guyer writes, it is of course the case that economics performs the economy. But ‘equally self-evidently, not alone.’”
— Bill Maurer, author of How Would You Like to Pay?

“Guyer is one of our most brilliant anthropologists, and for decades her thinking has deepened our understanding of economic life. Legacies, Logics, Logistics focuses in on the contemporary financial economy, attending to its crafting across scales from conceptual invention to everyday practice. The book’s original theoretical ideas present inspiring new ways to think about the most fundamental economic forms. A masterpiece.”
— Caitlin M. Zaloom, author of Out of the Pits

"Examines national platforms in the globalizing economy, exploring how the performance of economic life in practice is made practical through past experiences, imagined scenarios and models, and situational challenges."
— Journal of Economic Literature

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Part I: Foundations


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0001
[Life and Times, Legacies, Logics, Logistics, ANT-Economics]
The Introduction has three sections. The first traces the theoretical and situational provocations for the composition of each of the papers: all but the first, published in 1993, written over a period of fifteen years after 2000. The second explains the grouping of the papers under the five subthemes, explores the concepts that do so, and introduces the concepts for the “elements” of a platform economy that compose the title of the book: legacies, logics, logistics. The third introduces the book’s engagement with French ANT Economics by picking up themes in the work of Michael Callon and his colleagues, and the past and potential mutual reference between their own work and mine. (pages 3 - 39)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0002
[State regulation, Food systems, Colonialism, Global processes, Nigeria]
The paper addresses the history of British and Nigerian food regulation as an example of the logic of regulatory processes in the modern history of metropolitan, colonial, and postcolonial countries. I argue that three relatively internally coherent models of regulation have been developed in Britain and a fourth is under current construction. These models have replaced one another, but incompletely in the metropolitan repertoire. The previous models remain available, and groups within the metropolis advocate their mobilization with respect to other populations. Nigeria is used as an example of the struggle over implementation and advocates anthropological study of formal sector regulation. (pages 40 - 64)

Part II: Public Economic Cultures


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0003
[Hayek, Economic rhetoric, Nigeria, Structural adjustment, The economic press]
The chapter draws on von Hayek’s argument, in The Road to Serfdom, that the search for coherent comprehensibility in economic life favors the development of authoritarian forms of expertise. We explore the rhetoric of the public sphere in Nigeria under structural adjustment and military rule (1980s and 1990s) to trace out how the public engaged with the government about key policy categories that became increasingly unclear under turbulent conditions. The press is used to explore phases in the debate on subsidies, deficits, perceived manipulations of the national budget, and the consonance amongst consumer prices, and moments of national confrontation. The sources can show how the discussions fell into what we refer to as “cacophony and silence”, when no sensible (intelligible) accounts were forthcoming. The question of “intelligibility” in public economic life is revisited. (pages 67 - 88)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0004
[Time, Macroeconomics, Evangelism, Events, Future]
A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long-term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals’ views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event-driven temporal frames. (pages 89 - 109)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0005
[Market, Platform, Durability, Present capitalism]
The chapter suggests the concept of “platform” in the place of “market” to depict “the economy” in terms that are amenable to historical and anthropological analysis of its process of construction (and selective destruction), its moving parts, and varying occupants, with novel problems and agendas. Central focus is given to currencies, prices and the creation of advantage through applications (designated as “apportunities”). I return to the problem with “market economy” as recurrently designated by contrast with a contrastive type of economy, in a conceptual binarism that leaves insufficient space for a detailed empirical focus on configurations of parts and labor. It also draws less attention to durability than a concept such as “platform." (pages 110 - 128)

Part III: Cultures of Calculation


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0006
[Calculation, Ordinality , Great Chain of Being, Icons]
Numerical ordinal rankings (or ratings) are proliferating in the current social and economic world. Many are used to derive and justify relative monetary valuation, by modes of equation and calculation. The article shows how these composite manipulations of order and value tend to produce a parabolic curve: very few at very high value at the top, descending in a curve to very many of very low value at the bottom. The article illustrates the form of this ordinal curve and assesses the metaphors that evoke its persuasiveness. The Great Chain of Being is explored as a source of terminology. (pages 131 - 139)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0007
[fairness, future, modal logic, percentage]
This paper focuses on an old numerical expression, in both technical and public domains, the percentage. It argues that the long and expanding genealogy of use, from descriptive to governmental to probabilistic, gives it persuasive as well as instrumental power, offering a sense of understanding, while there appears to be an increasing vagueness of the denominator and a new potential for one hundred to gesture towards an aspirational future. It engages with Verran’s approach to number, and modal logic, then illustrates the applications of percentage in different domains of social life: as proportion in governance (the tax regime) and political philosophy (Rawls on ‘fairness’. The final section describes a current representation of the city of Baltimore in ordinals and percentages, oriented towards a future whose nature has become indeterminate. The conclusion reaffirms the importance of an ethnographic approach to widely used numerical forms, such as percentage. (pages 140 - 162)

Part IV: Platforms


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0008
[Exchange rates, Salaries, Nigeria, Petrol]
This chapter examines instances of monetary fluctuation in popular experience in Nigeria, and extrapolates to the study of moneys in the twenty-first century. The monetary world in the era of post-Bretton Woods exchange rates is highly intricate, and people can find themselves in impasses, especially with respect to temporal projections of value in private and public worlds where key prices fluctuate independently of each other. In spite of claims to the coherence of markets and modernity, the paper argues that there have always been configurations that are relatively stable precisely in the instability they provoke, and in the combination of elements from different models. Historical examples are offered of monetary transactions between the countries with hard and soft currencies, especially in Africa. The price of petrol at the pump in Nigeria, and in relation to salaries, to the fluctuating oil price on international markets, and to the exchange rate for the naira, is examined as an example of the enduring power of some intricacies and impasses. (pages 165 - 180)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0009
[Consumer Price Index, Housing history, Official economic definitions]
Certain commodities are given official definitions since they appear in the Consumer Price Index (which is used to assess inflation and make inflation-adjustments, especially for social payments). Housing as a category is one of the most complex “commodities” ever submitted to markets, and is as old as food in the assessment of standards of acceptable living for a person. Discussions of how housing should be conceptualized, composed and transacted, relative to personhood, and figure in assessments of standards of living, have recurred for centuries. The paper reviews these briefly, and focuses on an exemplary moment with respect to the CPI revisions in 1996, as housing became more a capital asset than a consumption item. The overall argument is for the importance of ethnographic attentiveness to compositional processes relative to market prices and official designations of value. (pages 181 - 198)

Part V: Toward Ethnography and the People's Economies


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0010
[Polanyi, Finance, Risk, Prices]
In the 21st century, and contra the marginalist concept of price as the intersection of demand and supply curves, there is an increasingly open claim that prices are composites, apparently harking back to the classical theorists. The relationship between narratives of revelation and concealment, the commodity form and market price, developed theoretically by Marx (in commodity fetishism) and Polanyi (in “fictional commodities”), is re-opened as an ethnographic question. The first part of the paper reviews the problem of price composition; the second looks at oil as an example of popular and formal sector price breakdowns given to explain crisis; the final section suggests that the elements are themselves very conventional, and thereby conceal the rise of new elements such as risk mitigation and other financial payments. (pages 201 - 219)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0011
[Soft currencies, Multiple currencies, Conversions]
Current variation in the forms of money challenges economic anthropologists and historians to review theory and comparative findings on multiple currency systems. The four sections address: (i) the present continuum of hard to soft currencies as an instance of multiplicity, (ii) the logic of anthropological inquiry into multiple currency economies; (iii) the case of the monies of Atlantic Africa, and (iv) economic life in a present day Nigerian economy lived in soft currency and cash. The paper identifies five findings that suggest foci for future research. (i) The widespread occurrence of conversions, which bring together ranking principles within transactions. (ii) Several types of positional ranking (iii) Fictional units of account that serve to mediate both the memorization of nonreductive transactions and their nature as conversions. (iv) The importance of the temporal reach of what constitutes wealth: over the short run, the life span, intergenerational succession, and in (legal) perpetuity (as for corporate and sovereign debts and varied assets). (v) The social niches in which these qualities are brought together in transactional regimens. In conclusion, the paper returns to the exchange function of cash, soft currencies, and money forms. (pages 220 - 237)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326900.003.0012
[Quantity theory, Imaginary monies, Real exchange economy, Real wages and prices, Real life, ANT-finance and pragmatism]
The chapter traces out the changing meanings of the “real economy”, from the assumptions behind the quantity theory of money (Copernicus), through Einaudi’s work on value and imagery monies, to Keynes on the real exchange economy, then its application to macro-economic indices such as real prices and wages, and the metaphorical uses of the term in public life and economic debate. It indicates the range of counterparts that “real” evokes in binary thinking, and alternatives such as Wall St. and Main St. The final section comes back to “real” in the sense of effects on life, and then works through the concept of “realisation” in new ANT-finance research to a frontier of questions about the relationship of these issues to philosophical schools (pragmatism; critical common sensism). (pages 238 - 264)

Notes

References

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2016. Page maintained by BiblioVault.