According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people’s economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Ritual, Economy and the Institutions of the Base
Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann
Chapter 1. Economy as Ritual: The Problems of Paying in Wine
Jennifer Cash
Chapter 2. Animals in the Kyrgyz Ritual Economy: Symbolic and Moral Dimensions of Economic Embedding
Nathan Light
Chapter 3. From Pig-Sticking to Festival: Changes in Pig-Sticking Practices in the Hungarian Countryside
Bea Vidacs
Chapter 4. Kurban: Shifting Economy and the Transformations of a Ritual
Detelina Tocheva
Chapter 5. The Trader’s Wedding: Ritual Inflation and Money Gifts in Transylvania
Monica Vasile
Chapter 6. “We don’t have work. We just grow a little tobacco”: Household Economy and Ritual Effervescence in a Macedonian Town
Miladina Monova
Appendix: The “Economy and Ritual” Project and the Field Questionnaire
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Chris Hann is a Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle. He formerly taught anthropology at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent (Canterbury). Hann is co-author of Economic Anthropology. History, Ethnography, Critique (2011) and co-editor of Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today (2009).
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