This chapter deals with different perspectives and structural transformations between capitalist society and indigenous ways of life. I approach the A’uwẽ-Xavante myth of the theft of the jaguar’s fire, one of many versions of the story of the bird-nester, which Lévi-Strauss interprets as...

This ethnographic study explores how local and global forces influence a unique set of self-employed people in Havana’s tourism industry – dance instructors – and how these circumstances drive the strategies and rationalities they use to navigate socioeconomic transformations. Cuba’s...

Do business owners hold capitalist beliefs – relative to non-business owners? Using Latinobarómetro survey in Latin America, we find that business owners tend to see the market economy as the only system by which a country can become developed. They also tend to give a lower rank to Fidel...

Milkerie worker cooperative was created after a yearlong labor fight against a factory closure announcement. By creating the coop, Milkerie’s workers set out to prove that if workers were given more decision-making power in the economy, it would be possible to create a more inclusive economy...

This chapter explores the role of student loan debt in the lives of American students and graduates in Wisconsin, US. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States is now at a record high. While debt is considered an integral part of a “forced timeline” toward a greater good,...

Granting mortgages to customers likely to become insolvent was widespread in Spain during the housing bubble that burst in 2007, resulting in an unprecedented rate of home repossessions. The practice was usually legal, but if power relations, structural determinations, and asymmetrical access to...

This chapter outlines and critiques Japan’s Furusato Nozei tax program from an economic anthropological perspective. This chapter first introduces the socio-political organization of taxes together with the social-scientific paradigms that have been brought to analyze taxation within...

The second decade of the twenty-first century finds Brazil racked by a series of scandals that are extreme even by world standards. This chapter presents an explanation for one of the behaviors that have produced these scandals. Specifically, it is the offering of bribes to public officials by...