Discussions on session 4 - Moral Economies

The seminar began with discussing E.P. Thompson’s article on the slow breakdown of the prevailing moral economy in England, which led to many bread riots throughout the 18^th century. These riots coincided with the transition of England undergoing an industrial revolution. This transition had freed serfs to become wage labours and who in the process had stopped producing for themselves, thereby depending on state subsidies and regulations to get subsidised crops and bread. With Industrial revolution came the push for a market economy breaking subsistence for the poor. The poor felt they had a claim on subsidised bread and corn, the lack of which forced them to revolt against market defined prices. The poor workers demanded fair price. Their demand was not spasmodic, but more organised in the lines of a class movement - distributing pamphlets, creating awareness, organising themselves and making demands. There was an unspoken idea of a community, and a pre-existing moral economy provided the basis for collective action. A question raised in the class while discussing this piece was if it was not for food (a basic sustenance) could the people have organise themselves in other situations as well? The example of the Luddite movement was given where the workers had similarly organised themselves demanding better wages.  Another point raised during the discussion was can the famines in India be seen as a parallel development where the breakdown of the moral economy led to famines? In India the Jajmani system could also be seen as a moral economy that prevailed in villages where exchange of goods and services between landowning higher castes and landless service castes occurred.

The discussion then proceeded to look closely at the book by Parry and Bloch which deals with Jajmani system and other issues pertaining to the morality behind economic exchanges. The introduction of the book revolved around the specificity of change in societies in which money as a form of exchange was introduced. We reiterated that while a new order of exchange did bring about several significant changes in the way these societies functioned, it was not to money that all such changes could be attributed. Instead, money took on various symbolic meanings which spoke to existing practices. We also noted that in this paper we see that money as something of an "empty signifier", in that it takes on meanings which differ not just across cultures, but also within a particular culture. There was also a discussion on short and long time cycles of exchange, noting that while it always existed it underwent a change in significance with the emergence of capitalism.

Fuller’s chapter on the grain heap was a critique of Dumontian idea that the village functioned within a moral economy whereby the produce of the village was divided and distributed to all the lower castes by the upper landed castes. The grains did not belong to the farmer alone and every service caste got a cut. It was a village moral economy. Jan Breman called this a system of patronage – it was an obligation to provide livelihood to all. Caste system provided this stability for distribution. This system of patronage was similar to what Kaviraj has shown about the emergence of the modern state where resources were channeled through patronage to the village community by the bureaucracy divided into higher and lower level. This system of patronage later paved way to exploitation and we see a breakdown of the system of payment from kind to cash. It was not a uniform process and some part of India where the transition not complete, or partly happened. The state had to then step in to provide for the poor’s subsistence and NREGA can be seen as an example of this. 

The next paper up for discussion was Zelizer’s piece on the insurance companies and how the idea of monetarily quantifying loss after death gained ground in 18^th century USA. In this discussion we spoke about the specific conditions under which commodification of death begins to get legitimized. It was noted that this particular moment must be viewed as a culmination of several factors - urbanization, loss of traditional assets such as land, the dependence on one person in the family for income - along with the marketing techniques employed by insurers. A question was raised as to whether the article explains how the business of insurance emerged within American society which had a particular ethical understanding of death. Were the insurers not embedded in the same ethics? A comparison was made with Weber's Protestant Ethic which speaks specifically of the process and conditions within which an ethic towards capitalism emerged. Such an analysis seemed to lack in Zelizer. However, some participants believed that the author adequately dealt with this question by pointing the readers to practices of care conducted by the church.

Next we discussed the piece by Robbins which argued that it is not just reciprocity but politics of recognition that defines social relationships. Coming from a phenomenological approach, Robbins says that recognition is a meaning making process amongst individual, which we argued has similarities to Bourdieu’s symbolic capital. His research on Urapmin shows that “economic” progress is an expansion of relations of mutual recognition and economic failure is failing to expand this relation of mutual recognition. Robbins quotes Fraser and Honneth to bring out the parallels between recriprocity and recognition. Fraser puts economic sphere as separate from cultural sphere and it is in the latter where the recognition occurs. Honneth goes a step further and explains that we can not see the two as separate spheres and recognition in the economic sphere is not only important but also crucial to social recognition. For Robbins the morally binding motivation in any exchange, noncapitalist or capitalist, is powered by the need for mutual recognition, and through this we can begin to see new potential connections between gift and commodity economies that are usually seen as analytically discrete systems. The question we then raised was is there something still distinctive about modern western capitalism as opposed to non western societies?

The last piece to be discussed was on Islamic finance. The paper focused on the dilemmas facing Islamic bankers between religiously determined values or ethics and those purveyed as rational under the rubric of neoliberalism. Participants noted the use of Foucault by the author to explain how neo-liberal ideas are shaping identities / subjectivities in spaces not traditionally pervaded by these values ("Economy in practice"). This gives rise to multiple subjectivities, which forms a discursive field, in which opposite positions (such as that between the reformer and the liberal) come into strong contestation. These positions are also informed by other global events, such as the financial crisis. A central point in the paper is that the field of contestation also gives rise to a position which inverts the overt distinction between religiosity and rationality, by positing that Islamic banking is inherently rational. This leads the author to ask questions pertaining to the link between economy and society.   

 Sanam and Nafis