Embodied value: Wealth‐in‐people

Abstract

In a world of social inequality, health disparities, and poverty, the economic value of people remains unrecognized, undervalued, and exploited. Recently, the ongoing conflict between capitalist markets and human value came to the fore again during the coronavirus pandemic, when many health systems were unprepared. In the United States, business and government leaders feared that quarantines would damage the economy. Their public statements urging the reopening of stores and public spaces pitted market value against the value of human lives. How can anthropology bring the value of people to light? How have varied societies valued human lives, qualities, and works? The articles in this special issue develop the 2019 Society for Economic Anthropology conference theme “Wealth‐in‐People.” Inspired by ethnographies of certain African societies, the wealth‐in‐people literature has moved from politics and demography to inequality and marginalization to the pricing of life, and has settled on wealth‐in‐people as a collective that assembles individuals with diverse and complementary qualities. Collectives of wealth‐in‐people build on these qualities, including knowledge, skill, beauty, emotional and distributive labor, and artistic expression. They become more than the sum of their parts. Seen from our current moment, wealth‐in‐people as a theory of value takes us beyond false choices between the economy and people. By illuminating forms of economic life from the ground up, the wealth‐in‐people approach, like similar recent concepts, including the human economy and social worth, can catalyze a more democratic economy.