This entry draws on my ethnographic research in the Rust Belt region of Pennsylvania. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social movement and labor organizations waged campaigns in relation to the state-designation of “essential” work and against the exclusion of migrant workers from federal...

There are two distinct conceptions of “skill” at play in Anglo-American discourse. The first, apparent in the phrases “craft skill” and “hand skills”, points to the fulfillment of cognitive potential and the expression of non-propositional intelligence. This worker is skilled,...

Criminal economies have become global, and we know little about how their value chains operate. We also lack an analytical framework that transcends the outdated dichotomies of formal/informal economies or state versus organized crime. Drawing on an emerging literature in social sciences, this...

The following entries explore diverse performances and notions of skill against the backdrop of local and global economies. Ethnographic narratives from Brazil, Poland, Mongolia, Trinidad, China, and the US setthe stage for various forms of precarious labour. From the ‘affective labour’...

Money's technologies have undergone rapid change since the global financial crisis altered people's credit, debt and payment practices, and revenue models from new entrants into the business of moving money began to disrupt the banks and card networks. Anthropologists and other social scientists...

Digital money exploded onto the scene during the “crypto” bubble. Over the course of a few years, new private, non-state, cryptocurrencies were seemingly launched every few weeks. Some cryptocurrencies were clearly fraudulent; others, however, have proven resilient and must be taken...

Private equity investors are a relatively new form of financier who play an outsized role in the management of capitalist economies and who, over the last fifty years, have accumulated a vast amount of wealth and power. This entry offers an overview of some recent scholarship on private equity...

This entry examines the relation between ports, infrastructure, and logistics within the context of global capitalism. Focusing on the Port of Rotterdam, I highlight how ports, once integral to urban centers, have now shifted towards remote locations due to burgeoning global trade demands and...

The six entries in this section are focused on infrastructure, technology and digitalization in the Netherlands, the U.S, Sweden, Brazil, and international political relations. The entries reveal what economic anthropology has to offer to our understanding of new infrastructures and...

The commensurability of different realms of values is a long-standing and unresolved question in anthropological inquiry. Without aiming to find a definitive answer, this encyclopedia entry shows the power of the ethnographic method and the centrality of insurance products (and payout procedures...