Markets of Dispossession

By Julia Elyachar. 2005

530 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives. Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89e8cc94be896e5322e3d57e3618d87720cc6658

How researchers see this paper

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Koray Caliskan
2. Michel Callon
3. M. Fourcade
4. Dinah Rajak
5. Gustav Peebles
6. C. Dolan
7. T. Li
8. Isabelle Guérin

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Koray Caliskan
2. T. Li
3. Dinah Rajak
4. Gustav Peebles
5. C. Dolan
6. Isabelle Guérin
7. M. Fourcade
8. Michel Callon

In Urban Studies

1. T. Li
2. Koray Caliskan
3. Dinah Rajak
4. Gustav Peebles
5. C. Dolan
6. Isabelle Guérin
7. M. Fourcade
8. Michel Callon

Citations in the corpus

• To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations (2010, background): “The attempt to govern through communities, and make them responsible for their own fate, has been prominent in the era of neoliberalism, especially in the form of micro-credit schemes that require the poor to supply their own employment as entrepreneurs (Elyachar 2005).”
• Moral Views of Market Society (2007, background): “Elyachar (2005) and Mitchell (2002) have offered sobering accounts of the efforts by well-intentioned international experts to turn developing societies such as Egypt into laboratories of neoliberal capitalism, showing how such innovative techniques as microenterprise and titlization often end up…”
• Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets (2010, background): “For her part, Elyachar (2005), in an analysis reminiscent of Adam Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments, has shown how the evil eye an avatar of the invisible spectator contributes actively to the structuring and maintaining of a type of market relationship and behaviour that is designed to resist…”
• Juggling with Debt, Social Ties, and Values (2014, background): “See, e.g., Elyachar (2005), Fernando (2006), Karim (2011), and Rankin (2002). celebrated as a powerful tool for the eradication of poverty and informal debt, the promotion of popular capitalism, and women’s empowerment through collective action.3 In the case studied here, if women adhere to…”
• Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2016, background): “…informal economy as a space of disorder and dysfunction, a haven of tax evaders and illicit enterprises that were a ‘drag on growth’, informality has been rescripted as a potential palliative to Africa’s development ills (Dolan & Roll, 2013; Elyachar, 2005; Meagher, 2013; see also; De Soto, 2000).”
• Neoliberalism as unexceptional: Economic zones and the everyday precariousness of working life in South India (2010, background): “There has been a resurgence of interest among anthropologists in the relationships between informality, the market and the state (Elyachar, 2003, 2005; Mollona, 2005a, 2005b, 2009).”
• What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative? (2006, background): “As Mitchell shows in his chapter, in Egypt, farmers have been successfully resisting programs inspired by neo-classical economics.”
• The Anthropology of Credit and Debt (2010, background): “Such moments wherein credit/debt becomes affixed to individuals or collectivities, and moves between them, allows us to witness the inscription of social boundaries of inclusion, exclusion, hierarchy, and equality (Elyachar 2005, Foster 1995, Greenberg 1995, Verdery & Humphrey 2004).”