Ethical economic practice

Abstract

This chapter calls for a renewed focus on questions of value, distribution and fairness in economic anthropology. It revisits literature on ethical consumption, corporate social responsibility and solidarity economies and contrasts it with ethical economic practice from the Right. It claims that regressive value mobilisations are on the rise and calls for an analytic reorientation to make sense of their claims on things economic. It proposes three elements of such a reorientation: (1) a stress on ambivalence and everyday politics of value mobilisations, (2) a comparative and contrastive approach on ethical economic practices, and (3) a historical sensibility to explore genealogies and distant histories of how the economic and the political have been related to one another. The chapter proposes to engage with other sub-disciplines such as feminist anthropology and the anthropology of race to build alliances for understanding changing moral economies.