Excerpt:
The moral economy of witchcraft: an essay in comparative history - II
2. The moral economy debate: microeconomics and culture
The central trope of the various efforts to define moral economy has been an opposition between, on the one hand, the maximizing individual and ever-expanding market of classical political economy, and on the other a community governed by norms of collective survival and believing in a zero-sum universe: i.e. a world where all profit is gained at someone else’s loss. The communal/zero-sum side of this equation is broadly consistent with African beliefs identifying capitalism and witchcraft as the dangerous appropriation of limited reproductive resources by selfish individuals. The great danger of such a set of dichotomies is that it may remain trapped where it first originated, within the discourse of capitalism itself. Exotic economies thus become constructed around either a market/non-market opposition or a subsistence-based variant of market rationality. In analyzing the history of societies confronting capitalism, even from the outside or the bottom, one cannot reject out of hand all references to capitalist terms. But a cultural account proceeding entirely on this basis represents a concession to the very hegemony which moral economy is supposed to be contesting.
The central trope of the various efforts to define moral economy has been an opposition between, on the one hand, the maximizing individual and ever-expanding market of classical political economy, and on the other a community governed by norms of collective survival and believing in a zero-sum universe: i.e. a world where all profit is gained at someone else’s loss. The communal/zero-sum side of this equation is broadly consistent with African beliefs identifying capitalism and witchcraft as the dangerous appropriation of limited reproductive resources by selfish individuals. The great danger of such a set of dichotomies is that it may remain trapped where it first originated, within the discourse of capitalism itself. Exotic economies thus become constructed around either a market/non-market opposition or a subsistence-based variant of market rationality. In analyzing the history of societies confronting capitalism, even from the outside or the bottom, one cannot reject out of hand all references to capitalist terms. But a cultural account proceeding entirely on this basis represents a concession to the very hegemony which moral economy is supposed to be contesting.
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