Lecture | Radical Spotlights Seminar
Radical Spotlights: Personhood, the Economy, and Values
- Date
- Tuesday 16 December 2025
- Time
- Series
- Radical Spotlights in Economic Anthropologies
- Location
- Zoom
We are excited to announce the next Radical Spotlights seminar, a collaboration of the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) in the AAA and the Network Anthropology of Economy in the EASA. The series spotlights critical research in economic anthropology across the globe twice a year. Please feel free to share widely. Want to be involved in Radical Spotlights? Please contact the organizers.
Theme
Economic practices (exchanges, production, labour, consumption, etc.) shape personhood. One can think of neoliberalist ideologies that goes along with notions of the person as an individual entrepreneur in charge of her own destiny. But one can also think of government policies (taxation, development aid, etc) that establish a relationship between identity and resources.
A key strength of ethnography is to nuance deterministic approaches to personhood. The economy matters, but people also develop notions of personhood that oppose or reshape economic practices and discourses. People’s aspirations for themselves and others are not only shaped by the economy as people reinterpret and challenge assigned identities. For instance, some notions of personhood challenge chrononormativity; the idea that there is a ‘right’ moment to have the ‘right’ romantic and sexual relations, to have children, to work, or how and when to retire. How can we analyse personhood in a way that examines economic forces these forces becoming overdeterministic? Where and how do humans show creativity and diversity in personhood, sometimes against the grain of economic logics and powers?
With this question in mind, this spotlights seminar encourages a conversation on incommensurabilities between the economy and personhood; when and how does personhood not (completely) align with economic forces; when and how do people nurture notions of self that do not match with economic or rational calculations?
Speakers
Peter Geschiere
Emeritus Professor for the Anthropology of Africa, University of Amsterdam and Leiden University
The Return of Amos Tutuola: Animism and Economic Logics
Gabriel Feltran
CNR Research Professor in Sociology, SciencesPro
Morality and Economic Interest in the Life of an 'Organized Thief'
Rachel Smith
Lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies, The University of Aberdeen
The Body and the Gift, and the Spirit of Capitalism: Grassroots Entrepreneurialism in Vanuatu
Organisation
Andreas Streinzer, University of Vienna and Erik Bähre, Leiden University, and Elena Sischarenco (University of Bergamo).