The same is true of the decisions taken by his three brothers. He prefers the approach of James Scott [Reference Scott1976], interpreting Scott’s emphasis on a “subsistence ethic” as opening up to a fluid approach to values, as distinct from Thompson’s more sociological stress on “norms and obligations.”, In his own review of the recent literature, Fassin includes a long list to illustrate how the concept has been trivialized through its faddish application to almost everything. Economists assume that any society is composed of selfish materialistic individuals. He then proposes a middle way between these three authors (even if no simple synthesis is possible). Most projects in socio-cultural anthropology, and certainly in economic anthropology, will be concerned with both. The wave of populist nationalism throughout Hungary can be interpreted as a new ethical register (one that poses more ethical challenges for the foreign investigator, who is unlikely to find this register attractive). The new government was able (with some justification) to represent the country’s dire economic situation as the consequence of a bungled transition in which liberals and socialists alike had lost sight of traditional values while shamelessly lining their own pockets. It led many households to give up raising animals and growing vegetables, even for subsistence purposes, since the same items could now be acquired cheaply in the stores. Local commentaries in 2016 were more variegated than in previous years. The concept of moral economy is clumpish and unhelpful in grasping this transformation. The moral principle of work implied a peasant meritocracy, but this was undermined by another value, that of private property. 0000002028 00000 n But these anthropologists have so far paid relatively little attention to the domain of economy.Footnote 4. This moral economy defines the scope of contemporary biopolitics considered as the politics that deals with the lives of human beings. The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. To do this is not merely to play with words; as Oilman has rightly argued,3 a relational grasp of the world can only be understood'in terms of a multidimension ality which results from class-specific practices. He visits his employees daily but finds it difficult to organize a large and diverse group with only two foremen to assist him.Footnote 19 Work begins daily at 6.00 am in the summer, but later in the winter. Those who failed to show a registered workplace at all were classified as közveszélyes munkakerülők (literally “publicly dangerous shirkers”). In this sense, the flourishing of the material economy was out of synchrony with the moral dimension: older villagers bemoaned the loss of their private property rights; they criticized both the proliferation of bookkeepers and other white-collar employees in the new collective farms and the excessive staffing and low levels of performance of their manual work-brigades. In the immediate wake of feudalism, according to Lampland, work did not yet take the form of labour. 17 The key concept in recent years has been “public employment that creates value” (értékteremtőközfoglalkoztatás). What counts, what the economic anthropologist (or sociologist) can illuminate, is the agents’ “larger sense of value,” which can never be reduced to price. My aim is to connect “the production, distribution, circulation, and use of moral sentiments” with changes in the material economy. 10 Since 2013 the number of közmunkások has exceeded 200,000 nationwide, but the picture is marked by great regional inequalities. 22 Such sentiments are frequently expressed in Kiskunhalas, where the Roma form a significant minority. The eventual demise of the latter was due to a combination of factors, including the abundance of cheap imported foodstuffs in foreign-owned supermarket chains. It becomes relevant long after the emergence of “commodity economies” [Gregory Reference Gregory1982], at the point when, in highly differentiated societies, a normative consensus among certain groups concerning basic entitlements is threatened by an expansion of the market principle. 0000018830 00000 n This can be readily formalised in the paradigm of the neoclassical economist: the job is quite well paid, locally based and less risky than other options open to him. In Kiskunhalas the influx of unwanted migrants in 2015-2016 filled some of the unused space in the town’s abandoned barracks and created jobs for warders and policemen. Local people boast that Hungary produced so much meat in those years that consumption levels were the highest in Europe, and that there was still enough left over to export paprika salami to Italy. By the time Lampland’s study was published, further far-reaching changes had taken place in the Hungarian countryside. 20 In both Tázlár and Kiskunhalas women form the majority (two thirds in Tázlár). The general stance in Hungary resembles that documented in other Visegrád countries (and also in some countries of Western Europe). We owe the word economy to Classical Greece, and in particular Aristotle’s exploration of the well-managed, ideally self-sufficient oikos, but its meaning has been transformed in recent centuries [Hann and Hart Reference Hann and Hart2011]. Most opposition parties called for a boycott of the referendum. What changes with the rise of the “market principle” is the new prevalence of an abstract economic ideology; but for Miller this is merely a “culture of representation”; in practice, agents’ social relationships and moral values remain crucial for understanding economic behaviour.Footnote 2 Miller concludes that the expansion of a market ideology in our age should not be confused with the traction of a market logic in understanding and explaining economic behaviour. Private property, a key value of the evolved peasantry, was re-established, but respect for hard physical work clashed with the new order, in which the market was now the dominant “form of integration” in Polanyi’s [1957] sense. Götz is sympathetic to sociologists who would extend the concept beyond this encounter, e.g. One decided in 2016, after years of insecure employment in the catering and road haulage sectors, to apply for a job as a Special Forces Policeman. Those in the modern mainstream consider their discipline to be a branch of science rather than of philosophy. In this case it is clear that közmunka should serve self-sufficiency in the village but simultaneously produce commodities for the market. It is shown how discourses of work and fairness are being extended into new ethical registers to justify negative attitudes towards a new category of migrants. They criticized the concessions made to economic rationality in the decollectivization legislation, notably the failure to return land to owners in its original boundaries. He suggests deploying moral economy “as a concept to illuminate such key features of economic allocation as are motivated by ideational, rather than material expectations of personal gain” [2015: 148]. : 22]. The production of knowledge in the contemporary social sciences differs greatly from ancient traditions of moral philosophical reflection on how the pursuit of wealth contributes to “human flourishing” (Aristotle) or “people satisfaction” (Confucius) [Lin, Peach and Fang Reference Lin, Peach and Fang2014]. There is general agreement among analysts in Hungary that the programmes have had little success in meeting their ostensible goal of retraining workers for the regular labour market.Footnote 10 Nonetheless, Orbán’s party has adhered to its vision. The very category közmunkás can call forth immediate suspicion and a pejorative evaluation: why does this person not take up a proper job?Footnote 14 But when it comes to the implementation of workfare schemes at the local level, a different picture emerges. Aktuelle literatur - und kulturwissenschaftliche perspektiven auf Dorf und Ländlichkeit, Economic Anthropology. For some, this form of work was an alternative to long-distance migration, which they might notionally prefer but could not consider (for example, because they lacked the networks or had dependent relatives in the village). The peasantry of preindustrial Hungary exemplifies the centrality of physical effort in the moral order of the Christian rural community, where hard work was commonly represented as an end in itself in Max Weber’s sense. Lampland downplays the importance of landownership (surprisingly in view of the fact that the community of Sárosd was characterized by large manorial estates until the 1940s). But this hardly warrants the identification of a “moral economy”. It is considered to be only natural that people should work, rather than receive benefits from the state without working. Thanks also to countless friends and officials in Tázlár, Kiskunhalas and Budapest. 0000026425 00000 n
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