About the Authors

Péter Berta is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and a senior researcher at the Institute for Ethnology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary). His special research interests are the economic and social practices of Romanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma, with a special focus on the politics and materialization of difference (prestige consumption and marriage politics). He has published in journals such as Romani Studies, Social Anthropology, Research in Economic Anthropology, Museum Anthropology, and Journal of Consumer Culture.

E. Anthon Eff is professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. He has a BA in anthropology from the University of Louisville and a PhD in economics from the University of Texas at Austin (1989). His interests include economic anthropology, urban and regional economics, and the history of economic thought.

Liliana Goldín is Professor at New York University, Silver School of Social Work and Fellow at the Mc Silver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. She has conducted extensive research in Guatemala exploring economic strategies of mostly indigenous Maya people in the central and western highlands. She has worked with populations engaged in several productive strategies including petty agricultural commodity production for the internal market, nontraditional export crops, petty industrial production, and wage labor in the export processing industries. In her book “Global Maya,” she considered the ways in which economic practice interacts with economic ideology to generate changing and diverse world views and particularly assumptions about capital accumulation, cooperation and community solidarity, competition, and division of labor.

Sidney M. Greenfield is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Co-chair of the Columbia University Seminars on Brazil, Studies in Religion and Knowledge, Technology and Social Systems. He has conducted ethnographic research in Barbados, New Bedford, Massachusetts, but mostly in Brazil and ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems ranging from family and kinship, patronage and politics, the history of plantations and plantation slavery and entrepreneurship to Spiritist surgery and healing, syncretized religions and Evangelical Protestants in Brazilian politics. He is author and/or editor of eight books, producer, director and author of five video documentaries, and has published some 140 articles and reviews in books and professional journals.

Christa D. Jensen (Court) is a Staff Scientist within the Energy Division at MRIGlobal, and is the Industry Liaison for the Regional Research Institute at West Virginia University. She has undergraduate degrees in Economics and Spanish from Middle Tennessee State University and a Masters and PhD in Economics from West Virginia University. Her interests include: spatial interaction modeling, environmental accounting, and integrating models of the economy, energy, and the environment.

Carolyn K. Lesorogol researches international social development and the dynamics of social change processes. Her work in these areas is conducted through intensive fieldwork in rural Kenya in East Africa. Using a combination of ethnographic approaches and quantitative and qualitative methods, she investigates the impetus for and impacts of social change. Her recent book, “Contesting the Commons” (2008) explains the transition from communal to private property among Samburu pastoralists, examining the economic and social outcomes of this change in property rights. She continues to analyze the long-term changes in land-use patterns and social norms flowing from privatization. Her ongoing, NSF-funded research involves linking household decision-making to ecological conditions combining household-level data and agent-based and simulation computer modeling to examine diverse scenarios for land use. In addition, she designs and implements capacity building community programs to enhance quality of life and opportunities for social development in rural Kenyan communities. Currently, she is working with a community association in Kenya to introduce a highly productive breed of dairy goats that will improve household nutrition and income as well as build the community’s capacity to implement and evaluate innovative initiatives. Dr. Lesorogol is also collaborating on community-based conservation projects in Madagascar and child nutrition research in Haiti.

Brian Moeran is Professor of Business Anthropology at the Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor in the School of Modern Languages & Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the on-line Journal of Business Anthropology (www.cbs.dk/jba). A social anthropologist specializing in Japan, he has conducted research over almost 40 years on different forms of cultural production, including ceramics, advertising, women’s fashion magazines, publishing, and incense. He has published several monographs and edited volumes, including “The Business of Creativity: Toward an Anthropology of Worth” (Left Coast Press, 2014) and “The Fashion Magazine: Magic, Enchantment and Spells” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). He may be reached at bdm.ikl@cbs.dk.

Patrick Neveling is Associate Researcher at the Historical Institute of Bern University, Switzerland, and Associate of the Max-Planck-Fellow Group “Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean.” Currently, Patrick is writing a book entitled “Relocating Capitalism: Export Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones Since 1947,” which is based on more than five years of worldwide research funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. His D.Phil.-thesis in Social Anthropology from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg is forthcoming in the renowned German-language social history series “Industrielle Welt” and is entitled “Manifestationen der Globalisierung. Kapital, Staat und Arbeit in Mauritius, 1825–2005.” Patrick’s work cuts across the social sciences and humanities to address the problems caused by the persistence of capitalism. He has edited volumes and published articles and book chapters on the anthropology of tourism, the invention of tradition debate, development, neoliberalism, the Cold War, export processing zones, and global commodity chains.

Alexander Parkinson worked as a qualified “retail” stockbroker for several years before undertaking postgraduate studies in anthropology in 2009. He completed a taught Masters and then a Research Masters in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. From 2012 to present, he has been a Social Anthropology PhD student at Manchester, specializing in economic anthropology and the anthropology of finance. During his fieldwork, he worked for 18 months as a “sustainability” analyst for an institutional investment agency based in London. He also worked as a team member for the Investment Commission of the United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative. He is exploring the changing paradigm in institutional investing with a strong focus on practice.

Ludger Pries holds a Chair of Sociology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. He taught and did research in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Research interests concentrate on Sociology of Organisations, Work and Labour Regulation; Migration and Transnationalisation in international comparison. Recent publications include: Pauls, Robert/Pries, Ludger, 2013: Changing labour relations in China’s automotive industry. International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 12(4), 376–394; Hauser-Ditz, Axel/Hertwig, Markus/Pries, Ludger, 2013: Between instrumentalization and co-determination. Patterns of collective employee representation at plant level in Germany. Employee Relations, 35(5), 5, 509–526.

Kristiano Raccanello, earned his PhD in economics in 2007 and since 1999 has worked at the Fundación Universidad de las Américas Puebla (Mexico) at the Department of Economics teaching microeconomics, econometrics, and finance at both undergraduate and graduate level. His research areas focus on social development, informal finance, financial literacy, and microfinance. In 2008, he joined the National Researchers System (Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, level 1 – SNI 1). He has published more than 30 papers in English and Spanish in different countries. Alongside the academic trajectory, in 2012 he has been appointed as citizen counselor at the Policy Evaluation and Recommendations Council (Evalúa-DF) – a decentralized office of the Secretariat of Social Development of the Mexico City Government – evaluating the social development programs and actions promoted by the Secretariat. He also collaborates as associate consultant in Reigyasociados®, a private sector consulting firm in Mexico City.

Martin Seeliger (*1984) holds a master’s degree in social science from the Ruhr-University of Bochum, where he was subsequently employed as a researcher in organization studies. Currently he works on a PhD-thesis about European trade unionism at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His research interests include international labor relations, comparative political economy, and social inequality.

Sarah A. Tobin is a Carnegie Visiting Scholar and the Assistant Director of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies at Northeastern University. She is an anthropologist with expertise in Islam, economic anthropology, and gender in the Middle East. Her work explores transformations in religious and economic life, identity construction, and personal piety at the intersections with gender, Islamic authority and normative Islam, public ethics, and Islamic authenticity. Ethnographically, her work focuses on Islamic piety in the economy, especially Islamic Banking and Finance, and in production and consumption, as well as the Arab Spring. Recently, Dr. Tobin published “My Life is More Important Than Family Honor: Offline Protests, Counter-Cyberactivism, and Article 308” in Cyberorient in 2014. Her current book manuscript, “Everyday Piety: Islam and the Economy in Amman, Jordan” is under contract at Cornell University Press. Dr. Tobin’s research has been funded most recently by The Carnegie Corporation and the Free University in Berlin, Germany.

Tamar Diana Wilson has published articles on the informal economy in Urban Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, Review of Radical Political Economics, and Critique of Anthropology. Her first book, Subsidizing Capitalism: Brickmakers on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2005, SUNY Press) explored, among other things, the self-exploitation and the subsidy to capitalism involved in the work of making bricks by these petty commodity producers and emerging capitalists in the informal economy. Her most recent book, Economic Life of Mexican Beach Vendors: Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, and Cabo San Lucas (2012, Lexington Books) explores the aspirations and living and working conditions of the informally and semi-informally self-employed beach vendors in three Mexican tourist centers.

Donald C. Wood is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Medicine, Akita University, Akita, Japan, where he has worked since completing a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo in 2004. Prior to that, he studied anthropology under Norbert Dannhaeuser at Texas A&M University. He spent more than 15 years researching social conditions at the Hachirogata reclaimed land area in Akita Prefecture, which culminated in the publication of “Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village,” by Berghahn Books in 2012. He has also investigated tourism and the effects of depopulation in the Akita region, and was a contributor to the edited volume, “Japan’s Shrinking Regions in the 21st Century” (Cambria, 2011). The paper in the present volume reflects his current ethnohistorical research project. He has been editor of REA since 2005.