Department of Geography

This project responds to the need voiced in human geography for empirical evidence to unravel the political potentialities of everyday spaces in-between top-down and bottom-up forces. In addition to anthropological theory and method, geographer Roger Lee's (2006) concept of 'ordinary economies' or more appropriately, 'ordinary economic geographies', will be essential for the project. As Lee argues (2006: 413), the economy 'is an integral part of everyday life, full of contradictions, ethical dilemmas and multiple values that inform the quotidian business of making a living. In short, it is ordinary'. The added spatial dimension when 'ordinary economies' become 'ordinary economic geographies' adds to understandings of everyday value-formation in economic anthropology since it points not only to multiple value systems but also to various spatial trajectories flowing within and without the borders of economic 'units'. Though the idea of multiple relations of value is a cornerstone of economic anthropology, and though the spatialities of such relations of value are central, if often implicit, to its theoretical history, the 'who' of such relations were usually defined in terms of bounded communities. In Nancy Fraser's (2009: 39) terms, the 'frame' of economic activity was largely determined by the social scientist, who maintained it by a strict dichotomy between traditional communities and outside economic forces (i.e. barter versus market relations). Treating economic geographies as 'ordinary' and full of contradictions not only allows the theorist to escape a unifying logic that sublimates one form of (political and moral) economy to another, but frees economic activity and economic actors into a so-called 'heterospace' (Gibson-Graham 1996: 5) of diverse internal and external relations.

For further information, please contact Dr. Marisa Wilson.