Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place

By Mayfair M Yang. Current Anthropology, 2000

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article takes up J. K. Gibson‐Graham’s call for a theoretical move away from a model of monolithic global capitalism and notions of one‐way “penetration” of capitalism. The notion of “economic hybridity” (derived from Bakhtin’s writing on linguistic hybridity) is proposed as an alternative to the Marxist concept of “articulation of modes of production” to account for the coming together of economic logics and practices from different epochs and cultural histories. The ethnography that sustains this discussion addresses the significance of popular religious revival in rural Wenzhou, on the southeast coast of China, and its role in the postsocialist market economy. Borrowing from Georges Bataille’s notion of “ritual expenditure” and from early Baudrillard on symbolic economies, the case study shows that rural Wenzhou’s ritual economy harbors an archaic economic logic which is subversive of capitalist, state socialist, and developmental‐state principles. The older strains of an alternative economic logic in this hybrid are shown not as complementing, adapting to, or serving capitalism’s expansion but as contesting it and rechanneling its movement toward other ends.

Subfields: Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5cb030f3b4c51fdbb56477cdb18e9adfa4c5768

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Anthropology

1. J. Gibson‐Graham
2. Yehua Dennis Wei
3. A. Rehn
4. Saara L. Taalas

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Gibson‐Graham
2. Yehua Dennis Wei
3. Chunbing Wang
4. A. Rehn
5. Wangming Li
6. Saara L. Taalas
7. A. Roy

Citations in the corpus

• Cultural economy: a critical review (2005, unknown): “Our use of encompassing phrases might blind us to the extent that the economic formations are merely imagined into solidity, only made hegemonic entities through our representation of them, rather than through an a priori 'natural' existence (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Yang, 2000; K. Gibson, 2001).”
• Restructuring Industrial Districts, Scaling Up Regional Development: A Study of the Wenzhou Model, China (2007, background): “Yang (2000) viewed the “capitalism” in rural Wenzhou as the hybridization of different economic forms—indigenous, state socialist, and overseas capitalist elements.”
• Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory (2014, background): “In turn, many anthropologists have found our rethinking of diverse economies useful (see, e.g., Callon 2007; Fisher 2013; Palmer 2010; Yang 2000).1 In this short paper I would like to rehearse the thinking steps involved in reading the landscape for economic difference and theorizing diverse…”
• SURPLUS POSSIBILITIES: POSTDEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITY ECONOMIES (2005, background): “Mayfair Yang’s (2000) exploration of the relationship between ritual and economic development in south”
• ‘Znakomstva I Svyazi’ (Acquaintances and connections) – Blat, the Soviet Union, and mundane entrepreneurship (2004, background): “Additional inquiry into this could entail the study of entrepreneurship in what has been called ‘hybridity of economies’ (Yang 2000), i.e. cases where the market economy is entangled with earlier, more ritual economies.”