When “the Logic of Capital Is the Real Which Lurks in the Background”

Abstract

What might an ethnographic study of late capitalism look like? Anthropologists have answered this question by increasingly assuming that what distinguishes their discipline is the study of culturethe culture of capitalism, of globalization, and so forth. Instead, we need to balance such concerns with a focus on the material conditions of capitalist reproduction that are not immediately available to experience so that we can expose the way in which processes of social reproduction relate to our experience of being in the world. An exploration of programmes for the development of regional economies in Europe shows how these programmes have repositioned social science intellectuals, thereby affecting the ways in which they configure their research and their images of reality. Insofar as these findings become the basis for policy, they produce a reality with which the people in these sites have to deal.