Economic Persuasions [Paperback]

As the transition from socialism to a market economy gathered speed in the early 1990s, many people proclaimed the final success of capitalism as a practice and neoliberal economics as its accompanying science. But with the uneven achievements of the transitionthe deepening problems of development, persistent unemployment, the widening of the wealth gap, and expressions of resistancethe discipline of economics is no longer seen as a mirror of reality or as a unified science. How should we understand economics and, more broadly, the organization and disorganization of material life? In this book, international scholars from anthropology and economics adopt a rhetorical perspective in order to make sense of material life and the theories about it. Re-examining central problems in the two fields and using ethnographic and historical examples, they explore the intersections between these disciplines, contrast their methods and epistemologies, and show how a rhetorical approach offers a new mode of analysis while drawing on established contributions.

Preface
Stephen Gudeman

Chapter 1.Introduction
Stephen Gudeman

Chapter 2.Simplicity in economic anthropology: Persuasion, form and substance
James G. Carrier

Chapter 3.The concept of interest as rhetoric  or as a useful social science concept?
Richard Swedberg

Chapter 4.The new social science imperialism and the problem of knowledge in contemporary economics
William Milberg

Chapter 5.The persuasions of economics
Stephen Gudeman

Chapter 6.Conversations between anthropologists and economists
Metin Cosgel

Chapter 7.The craving for intelligibility: Speech and silence on the economy under structural adjustment and military rule in Nigeria
Jane GuyerwithLaRay Denzer

Chapter 8.Mass-gifts: On gifts in advanced clS°