Department seminar: Oana Mateescu, Marc Morell and Don Kalb
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Oana Mateescu, Marc Morell and Don Kalb (all University of Bergen). The title of the session is "‘Leftovers’, ‘Entrepots’, and other Episodes of Frontline Reporting".
Main content
‘Leftovers’, ‘Entrepots’, and other Episodes of Frontline Reporting
Don Kalb will introduce ongoing empirical and conceptual work being done within the Frontlines of Value research program in our department.
Oana Mateescu and Marc Morell will narrate in more detail about their respective projects in Cluj, Romania, and in Malta. Oana will argue that the IT outsourcing-wave that is transforming Eastern Europe (as well as India, Mexico, the Philipines etc) is bound to mystify the generation of value in ‘service work plantations’ by the figure of ‘creativity’. The drop-out IT-convert embodies the constitutive contradictions of this figure, but also harbors an ongoing everyday politics of peripheral ‘leftovers’ against the background of uneven global chains of ‘cognitive value’.
In a similar vein, Marc Morell will call on his fieldwork in Malta and will maintain that the offshore-related service industries that are remaking the island on the Southern tip of the EU are not the result of a native entrepreneurial spirit but of the imperative for global corporate business to circumvent fiscal regulatory frameworks by establishing off-shore financial entrepôts. The reverberations of these liberal trends expand further the range of class contestations, but also appear to put seemingly insurmountable limits on them.
In a recap on various strands of value theory, Don will wrap up by making the case for a more relational, dialectical, and anthropological notion of ‘value regime’ against two dominant contenders: the ‘global economism’ of both World Systems Theory and Global Value Chain Analysis; and the reigning local idealism of the value concept in anthropology, including, paradoxically, in the notion of ‘moral economy’. The overriding question: how to get at a systematic perspective on ‘value struggles’ within and against the rule of capitalist surplus value?
About the researchers
Postdoctoral researchers Oana Mateescu and Marc Morell are part of the Frontlines of Value project, led by Professor Don Kalb at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Bergen.