Article

Anthropological Theory
2016, Vol. 16(4) 454475
Economization, ! The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:

moralization, and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1463499616684053

the changing moral ant.sagepub.com

economies of capitalism
and communism among
Cuban migrants in Spain
Valerio Simoni
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,
Switzerland

Abstract
This article aims to establish a dialogue between approaches in economic anthropology
and the anthropology of ethics and morality, assessing the complementarity and the
possible points of juncture between these two theoretical lines of enquiry, their analytical
potential, as well as their limits. It highlights the importance, for research on moral
economies, of uncovering what counts as economic and as moral in a given empirical
context, and proposes the analytical lenses of economization and moralization as a pro-
ductive way to address such question. The theoretical contribution is grounded in ethno-
graphic research in Spain that examines how Cuban migrants seeking to improve their
lives and livelihoods navigate different political-economic systems and changing material
conditions. While discussing their trajectories, future projects, and the expectation they
associate with capitalism, communism and their respective changes and crises, people
are led to articulate different moral economies that delineate conflicting regimes of value
and evaluations of what makes for a good life, and what ought to be the place of the
economic in it. The analysis of the empirical material enables us to consider various
instantiations of the moral economy, to explore the different realities the term can
cover, and to clarify the scope and applicability of this notion.

Keywords
capitalism, change, communism, crisis, Cuba, economization, moralization, moral econ-
omy, Spain

Corresponding author:
Valerio Simoni, Sociology and Anthropology of Development Department, Graduate Institute of International
and Development Studies, Chemin Euge`ne-Rigot 2, Case Postale 136, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland.
Email: Valerio.simoni@graduateinstitute.ch
Simoni 455

I Introduction
In this article I wish to reect on the analytical purchase of the notion of the moral
economy and outline new theoretical pathways that can improve its use while
acknowledging some of its limitations. Drawing on ethnographic research among
Cuban migrants in Spain, I illustrate, on the one hand, the usefulness of this notion
to highlight the ambiguous logics and values that guide and sustain livelihood
practices (Palomera and Vetta, 413432). On the other hand, I also suggest that
recent advances in the anthropology of ethics and morality and in the study of
economization, which are seldom incorporated in scholarly discussions of the
moral economy, can fruitfully complement current approaches to this notion and
clarify its scope without overly diluting its focus. E.P. Thompson, the British his-
torian whose groundbreaking article on The Moral Economy of the English
Crowd in the Eighteenth Century (1971) inspired a wealth of scholarship on
moral economies, was himself a staunch advocate of such clarication. Having
reviewed several uses of the concept following his original contribution, this
author called for renewed attention to how the two parts of the term
(Thompson, 1991: 345) the economy and the moral were constituted and
conceived in a given research context. Going in the direction of a [c]omparative
enquiry into what is the moral, as an agenda for forward research (Thompson,
1991: 351) to further elucidate moral economies in dierent historical and socio-
cultural contexts, current advances in the anthropological study of ethics and mor-
ality can prove extremely helpful. Complementing these approaches, the study of
processes of economization helps delineate in contextualized and ethnographically
informed ways the eld of the economic and what is made to count as such by the
subjects of our investigations. Building on these bodies of scholarship, the article
draws on empirical ndings to test dierent possible approaches to the moral
economy. The aim is to highlight what dierent approaches enable us to see and
understand, to reect on their convergences, divergences, and complementary
dimensions, and thus show what is gained (or lost), analytically, when deploying
dierent takes on the moral, the economy, and the moral economy.
My empirical material will initially point to a view of moral economy that is
closely related to the one rst articulated by Thompson (1971), an approach that,
as Edelman puts it (2005), had an explicit political dimension and placed much
emphasis on economic claims and (class) struggle and conict. This was a concern
shared in Scotts (1976 ) use of the concept to illuminate subsistence ethics among
peasants in South-East Asia, a work in which the moral economy helped draw
attention to local notions of social justice, entitlement, rights and obligations. The
theme of class struggle and exploitation is one that Palomera and Vetta (413432)
also seek to keep at the forefront of analyses of moral economies, conceptualized
as elds of meaning and practice through which . . . structural inequalities . . . are
reproduced or altered. A way to preserve the original thrust of Thompsons
notion while moving his reections forward, these authors highlight the importance
of bringing the political economy back into analyses of the moral economy. This
view builds on a long tradition of substantivist, embedded views of the economy,
456 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

stemming notably from Marxist tradition and the groundbreaking work of Polanyi
(1971 (see also Hart and Hanns [2011] reassessment of his scholarship), which nd
an exemplary development in Narotzky and Besniers (2014) recent call for a
rethinking of the economy. For Narotzky and Besnier (2014), moral economy
inquires into the grounds for claiming, the frameworks of entitlement, and the
design of reasonable expectations (p. S7), and it is in moments of disjuncture
between new practices of exploitation and past frameworks of responsibility
that the moral aspects of the economy (p. S7) can be best captured. As elaborated
by Palomera and Vetta (413432), this makes moments of change and historical
rupture, such as the one prompted by the current economic crisis in Southern
Europe, ideal elds to explore moral economies and their foundations.
Anchored in the eld of economic anthropology, Palomera and Vettas
(413432) approach to the moral economy departs from scholarship that extends
its use to consider an economy of morals, as exemplied, for instance, in Fassins
(2009) reconceptualization of Thompsons notion. Fassins approach pays atten-
tion to the production, distribution, circulation and uses of moral sentiments,
values, norms and obligations in social space (Fassin, 2009: 1257), thus expanding
the scope of the notion beyond the connes of the economy and issues of material
subsistence. In this article I take heed of Fassins reections on morality and critical
analysis in anthropology (see below), but follow Palomera and Vettas critique and
suggestion for a narrower use of the concept of moral economy, one that keeps
economic issue and concerns with the economy at its core. Drawing on empirically
grounded research on moral economic reasoning among Cuban migrants in Spain,
I argue for restraining the use of the notion to the analysis of the explicit entangle-
ments between the economic and the moral. This is a move that I see as intimately
tied to the way we understand and frame the domain of the economy, on the
one hand, and of the moral on the other. To proceed in this direction, I show
the interest of integrating current debates in the anthropology of morality and
ethics with the performativity approach to economization developed in economic
sociology and anthropology. Both these bodies of scholarship, I argue, can be
productively brought together to advance our conceptualization of the moral econ-
omy in ways that remain attuned to our empirical ndings and to the realities that
the subjects of our investigation live.
Outlining their research program for the study of processes of economization,
Calis kan and Callon (2009, 2010) have shown the usefulness of this notion
to denote the processes that constitute the behaviours, organizations, institutions
and, more generally, the objects in a particular society which are tentatively and
often controversially qualied, by scholars and/or lay people, as economic
(2009: 370). Such a performativity approach to economization (Callon, 1998,
2007) builds on anthropological scholarship on value and processes of valuation,
from the early works of Mauss (1969 [1925]) and Bohannan (1955), to those of
Appadurai (1986), Strathern (1988), and Thomas (1991), to the more recent writ-
ings of Elyachar (2005), Guyer (2004), Maurer (2006), Mitchell (2002), and
Roitman (2005), and draws attention to the fact that what is to be included in
Simoni 457

the economy is divergent and often controversial (Calis kan and Callon, 2010: 22).
As summarized by Narotzky and Besnier (2014), this theoretical position assumes
that the economy does not preexist economic action but rather that it is consti-
tuted by it (p. S12). In this article I argue that such an analytical stance can be
particularly productive and insightful when addressing situations in which dierent
regimes of valuation alternatively qualied as economic or not confront one
another. Up to now, the performativity approach to economization has seldom
been adopted outside the study of experts knowledge eects on entrepreneurial or
nancial activities (Narotzky, 2012: 633). In her grassroots approach to economic
processes (Narotzky, 2012), which seeks to uncover dierent understandings of the
economy as they emerge through the everyday practices of ordinary citizens,
Narotzky argues that anthropologists are in an ideal position to show that grass-
roots forms of performativity also exist (2012: 633), and urges us to acknowledge
and analyse these other forms of performativity (p. 633) through which the
economic is enacted and delineated. Such is the direction I want to take in this
article, showing how the lens of economization can advance our reections on the
moral economy. While doing so, I also wish to take heed of Narotzky and Besniers
(2014) critical appraisal of this notion, when they remind us that [b]eyond econo-
mization [. . .] the design of economic models, whether expert or folk, is the eect of
human political struggles in which power relations are enacted and that result in
producing dierences that limit peoples opportunities for making a living (p. S12).
Alongside these reections on the economy, the economic, and its constitution,
but to a large extent developed independently from them, the last decade has seen a
surge of interest in ethics and morality from anthropologists, whose concern has
also been to clarify and delineate the scope of these notions (see Cassaniti and
Hickman, 2014; Fassin, 2008, 2012; Faubion, 2011; Keane, 2016; Laidlaw, 2013;
Lambek, 2010; Mattingly, 2014; Robbins, 2004; Sykes, 2009; Zigon, 2008, 2014).
The extent and sophistication of this scholarship can hardly be summarized here,
nor can nuances and dierences in argumentations. For the purposes of this article
I just wish to tease out some important insights and lines of convergence that can
illuminate my ethnographic material and, by the same token, shed new light on
the way we approach the moral economy. A fundamental issue in the anthropology
of ethics and morality, Zigon tells us, is to identify which aspects or moments of
the social might count as ethical or moral (2014: 749) in a given situation, a for-
mulation that, in my view, resonates well with an approach to economization that
also raises the question of what counts as economic. A similar point is made by
Cassaniti and Hickman (2014) when they encourage us to ascertain the aspects of
social thought that are given special moral weight (p. 256) in dierent ethno-
graphic settings. Coming from yet another perspective, but always raising the
what is moral question, the authors in Sykes edited volume reect more directly
on moral reasoning in relation to the economy, and call for a fuller understanding
of exactly what is moral about moral economy (2009b: 28), highlighting the ambi-
guities, contradictions, and paradoxes of value that inform peoples conscious
deliberation of what is good and evil in economic life (p. 28).
458 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

Following Laidlaws (2002) critique of totalizing views of morality that tended

to see the moral and the social as coterminous what Cassaniti and Hickman
(2014) call the Durkheimian collapse (pp. 2556) anthropologists have strived
to dene more precisely the object of an anthropology of morality. For Zigon
(2007), the anthropology of morality should focus on the moral breakdowns
and ethical moments of conscious reection that occur when some event or
person intrudes into the everyday life of a person and forces her to consciously
reect upon the appropriate ethical response (2009: 262). Favoring a broader
framing of the question, Robbins (2009) encourages us to pay attention to the
specic kinds of intrusions that generate such an ethical response so as to identify,
in a more structural way, the key areas of moral diculty that may exist in a given
society. For Robbins, these areas of diculty result notably from conicts between
dierent spheres of value, such as those that occur in situations of social and
cultural change (2007, 2009) e.g. the fall of the Soviet Union or the arrival
of Pentecostal Christianity in Papua New Guinea. Accordingly, it is when value
hierarchies and relations between value spheres collapse that moral breakdowns,
or what Robbins calls the morality of freedom (as opposed to the morality
of reproduction), come to the fore (2009: 284), leading people to perform
value-work [. . .] to establish new value hierarchies, or reestablish old ones (p. 284).
Robbins and Zigons reections on value conicts and moral breakdowns can
serve to illuminate the moment of economic crisis that my Cuban interlocutors lived
in Spain, and to explain the salience of the economy, and their experience of it, as a
key domain of moral investment and critique. In Cassaniti and Hickmans (2014)
words, we could argue that the economic domain was a morally saturated one for the
people I worked with, and one that absorbed much of their moral deliberations.
These considerations resonate with Narotzky and Besniers (2014) reections on
moments of disjuncture (p. S7, see above) in which moral economic consideration
are likely to come to the fore. Their view of situations of crisis as expressing peoples
breach of condence in the elements that provided relative systemic stability and
reasonable expectations for the future (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014: S4) can simi-
larly converge with Zigons and Robbins conceptualizations of moral breakdowns
and value conicts. Moving beyond these scholars dierences in terminology and in
their theoretical inclinations and interests, these points of juncture in their
approaches help shed light on the situations I encountered during eldwork
among Cuban migrants in Barcelona. In this sense, we could argue that breaches
of condence, moments of disjuncture, value conicts, and moral breakdowns
related to changes in economic conditions were at the outset of my Cuban interlocu-
tors investing of the economic realm with moral judgments and critiques.
By highlighting points of juncture and convergence between these dierent
notions, however, I do not wish to subsume these authors approaches into a
common analytical framework, but rather highlight their potential complementar-
ity to illuminate certain realities. More generally, in this article I deliberately refrain
from deploying and privileging from the start a single, unied approach to the
moral economy. Instead, my aim is to illustrate where dierent epistemological
Simoni 459

stances can lead when confronted with a range of ethnographic situations, and what
may be gained and lost when choosing between competing analytical positions.
Juxtaposing theoretical perspectives and using my empirical material to work through
them is thus a way to compare and clarify dierent anthropological approaches to the
notion of the moral economy, exploring their possibilities and limits. If the critiques
of capitalist Spain analyzed in Section II t rather well within those views of the moral
economy that emphasize notions of rights, entitlements, and class struggle, the nor-
malizations of capitalism addressed in Section III lead to a recognition of other
expressions of the moral and economic in the moral economies at stake.
Displacing the grounds of judgment and critique from economic models and systems
(e.g. capitalism and communism) to individual economic behavior has very dier-
ent political implications. The importance of recognizing dierent takes on the moral,
the economic, and their intersections, already apparent in Section III, is further high-
lighted in Section IV, where Cuban migrants calls to rein in and delimit the economy
are considered. Moving beyond embedded views of the economy that see the moral
and the economic as coterminous and always indissociable (see Palomera and Vetta,
413432), Section IV argues that notions of economization and moralization can
sharpen our insights into what we and our research participants take as economic,
as moral, and as moral economy. Exploring the scope and applicability of this notion
across a range of ethnographic examples, the article thus helps clarify not only its
potential versatility, but also the importance of acknowledging its limits.
Before moving to the presentation and analysis of my ethnographic material, a
brief clarication of the empirical research context is also required. In the last two
decades, following the economic crisis that struck Cuba after the fall of the Soviet
Union, an increasing number of Cuban nationals migrated to Spain with the pro-
spect of improving their lives and livelihoods. Scholars working on Cuban migration
and diaspora, both in the USA (Eckstein, 2009) and in Spain (Berg, 2011), point in
this respect to a shift from a political to an economically driven migration following
the 1990s crisis. Between 1990 and 2009 the Cuban population in Spain rose from
2,637 to more than 100,000 (Garc a-Moreno, 2011: 192). Among them are the Cuban
migrants with whom I carried out eldwork in Barcelona between 2012 and 2015. In
the Cuban milieus I frequented in the Catalan capital, a common narrative saw
people leave behind a crisis-ridden communist system with the hope of joining a
more auent capitalist one and ending up in yet another crisis, this time in capitalist
Europe. The discourses explored in the article can be considered as a response to
such a political-economic context, a context of contrasting expectations and realities
and frustrated hopes, marked by a profound sense of crisis, injustice, and, within the
Spain of recent years, a clear decline in living conditions and economic possibilities.
My interlocutors were Cuban migrants whom I predominantly met in spaces of
sociability marked by a strong Cuban presence, mainly cafes, bars, and restaurants
that were owned or managed by Cuban nationals. The nature of these places, and
the fact that they functioned as a meeting point for several Cubans living in the
metropolitan area of Barcelona, helps explain the salience of conversations that
had to do with Cuba, often in relation and in comparison with Spain. Quite often,
460 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

conversation fell on topics that had to do with the economy and the economic
situation, in Cuba and in Spain, and on current changes in both countries, whose
economies were often characterized and contrasted in terms of capitalismo (Spain)
and comunismo (Cuba). While I had only limited access to other contexts in the lives
of my Cuban interlocutors, the moments of socialization and conversation to which I
refer were rich in insights on their everyday lives, including their ways of making a
living. Many of the people I interacted with relied on rather precarious, part-time,
low-paid jobs to get by. To a large extent, they also shared in structural disadvan-
tages that resulted from their condition as migrants, and several were still waiting to
receive full residence permits or Spanish nationality. Due to their structural margin-
ality in Spanish society, the eects of the current economic crisis tended to be sharply
felt by most people I worked with, and those who had arrived in Spain prior to the
economic downturn often looked back nostalgically at the better days before the
crisis struck. As I argue in this article, the current political economic conjuncture,
and the kind of questions it raised on the way the economy functioned, on ones
place in it, and on the winners and losers in the process can be considered a key
detonator of moral economic critiques and arguments. Underpinning my analysis is
a willingness to inductively link such political and moral economic dimensions,
showing how it is precisely in moments of crisis and perceived economic turmoil
that moral critiques of the economy are formulated and worked upon.1

II Moral economic critiques of capitalism from Cuba

When I asked him what he thought of the emerging force, in Spanish party politics,
of Podemos,2 Lorenzo,3 a Cuban migrant in his late 40s who had spent about 10
years living in Spain, was very vocal in his reaction, bringing to the table far more
political and economic issues that I could have hoped for:

Yes, I tell you, they [Podemos] should get to govern. I mean, the others [parties], it cant
be. A country such as Spain, a developed country, should aspire to be like Sweden, like
Nordic countries. In a developed country you should have health, education; free for
everyone from birth dentist included! These are basic things; this is what gives you
quality of life. I mean, if countries like Cuba and Venezuela manage to do that, with the
situation they have [hinting at their being less developed], and Cuba with 50 years of
US embargo, how come they arent able to do it here? This is the minimum one can
have. What happened here instead, with the crisis, is that the banks and the big cor-
porations ended up earning even more and what do you see, among the common
people? Empty houses, and seven-eight people living in a room, this cannot be!

On other occasions, in the evenings that followed, we continued discussing the

present economic situation, and it was once again in reference to Cuba that
Lorenzo voiced his complains and articulated his moral economic critique.

I am talking about quality of life (calidad de vida), I am not talking about standard of
living (nivel de vida). I remember, when there was the construction boom [referring to
Spain in the mid-2000s], the number of Cubans that worked in building sites! You had
Simoni 461

days of 1415 hours of work, working, working, earning 1800 Euros [a month], and
happy for it wow, great! But let me ask, nowadays, these people, how much do you
have left [of that money]? Nothing, nothing I tell you, whats left from those years is a
broken back. It would make sense if you did that job for, say, ve years, and then you
left with a good pension, with some savings, but no. Here people are exploited, they
work and work, and they dont even realize that! The quality of life [is not good]. It
cant be like this. If I was now in Cuba, in my 20s, and knew how this is here, I would
just stay there.

Lorenzos critique of a lack of economic security, his frequent complaints about

uncertainty and the constant worry for the future and tomorrow (el manana), was
echoed in the narratives of other Cuban migrants I encountered in Barcelona.
Recently arrived from Cuba, Yusniel, a young Cuban man in his late 20 s, com-
plained to me about the insecurity of his life in Barcelona. To get by, Yusniel relied
on a part-time, badly-paid security job three evenings a week, which was barely
enough for him to survive. Reecting on his current predicament, he recognized
that, at the end of the day, he was far more worried now living in Spain, than he
had been back in Cuba:

Here you need to have the money, to pay for the accommodation, the electricity, the
water, the gas, etc. In Cuba its not like this: the house I have it already, I havent got
to pay anything for it. Even if they were to cut my electricity supply, I can always ask
my neighbors and they will give it to me.

In this sense, he added with a measure of irony, Cuba is the best country in the
world to be poor! In Spain one had all freedoms, continued Yusniel, who referred
to Cuba as a dictatorship, but well, you need a job, obviously, thats the main
preoccupation. Hinting at neighborly reciprocal help in Cuba, Yusniel pointed at
an informal network of support that he felt was lacking here in Spain: the possi-
bility, for people in Cuba, to always nd a way to provide for ones basic needs.
In the European country, money was the key, and if you did not have any you were
screwed there was not much safety net, so to speak. Yusniels moral economic
reections and the contrasts they entailed raised the question of poverty in a
capitalist context versus a communist one, of the impact of dierent redistribu-
tive economic systems and their implications in making a living.
Lorenzo and Yusniel, albeit in slightly dierent ways, articulated moral
economic critiques via the comparison of dierent economic models. Both drew
in this sense on what Edelman calls a historical reservoir of moral economic
sensibilities (2005: 341) in this case a reservoir of experiences and images of
life in Cuba. In spite of the profound dierences in historical and socio-cultural
terms, we are confronted here with the kind of co-presence of competing economic
models that informed Thompsons work (1971, 1991). In the context studied
by Thompson, it was the arrival of the free market (1991: 340) model of the
economy and its monetary rationalization (p. 340) that had come to threaten
previous customs and usages (p. 340). This is how the latter ultimately became
self-conscious as a moral economy (p. 340). Such a process of taking
462 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

consciousness and of making moral economic considerations explicit, of summon-

ing the moral economy into being (p. 340) in response and in resistance to com-
peting economic models is also at stake in the examples presented above, and
resonates quite well with the broader reections on morality, its moments of emer-
gence and salience, developed by Zigon, Robbins, and Cassaniti and Hickman
(see Introduction).
The fundamental theoretical idea is of moral economies, and of the moral invest-
ments in the economy, as a reexive and explicit response to moments of conicting
co-presence of dierent economic models and frameworks of expectations. The
work of other scholars dealing with economy and morality lends further support
to the observations made here. Accordingly, in the introduction to her edited book
on anthropological approaches to economics and morality, Browne (2009) writes
that [w]hen people participate in dierent economic systems at the same time,
when profound economic change is occurring, there are unusual opportunities to
glimpse how those moral convictions that are anchored to economic habits get
drawn into question (p. 14).
The comparison of two models, which nds useful parallels in ethnographies of
socialist and postsocialist contexts (Burawoy and Verdery, 1999; Humphrey, 2002;
Jansen, 2014; Mandel and Humphrey, 2002; Pine, 2014; Verdery, 1996), appears
clearly foundational for the articulation of Lorenzo and Yusniels moral economic
demands (Edelman, 2005: 341) and critiques. While Lorenzo emphasized legal
rights and entitlement and the positive intervention of the government to provide
the minimal requirements health, education, subsidized food to guarantee a
good quality of life, Yusniels moral economic critique was less politicized and
more grounded on the value of the informal networks of support that family,
friends, and neighbours provided in Cuba. Both narratives expressed a critique
of the economic system in Spain, which they saw as exemplifying capitalism
more at large, and pointed to the advantages of alternative economics
(Thompson, 1991: 340), to borrow on Thompsons characterization of his notion
of the moral economy an economy that includes ideal models or ideology [. . .]
which assigns economic roles and which endorses customary practices [. . .] in a
particular balance of class or social forces (p. 340). Taken together, Lorenzo and
Yusniels arguments seem well attuned to the perspectives on the moral economy
presented by authors like Thompson (1971, 1991), Scott (1976), and Edelman
(2005), whose work, in spite of their subtle nuances and divergences, tends to
emphasize notions of rights, obligations, entitlements, norms and customs that
escape and oppose the more orthodox economic doctrines of the time.
After this rst empirical test of a notion of the moral economy that espouses
rather well the ndings and perspectives of the above-mentioned authors, I now
wish to turn to the analysis of other narratives in which the comparison of diver-
gent economic models played out in markedly dierent ways, pointing to the emer-
gence of other, competing articulations of moral economic reasoning that, in turn,
bear other political and analytical implications for the way we apprehend and
conceive of this notion.
Simoni 463

III The normality of capitalism: Framing the economic,

relocating the moral
The lines of economic reasoning I consider in this section depart in signicant ways
from the ones outlined above and, to be fully accounted for, call for a slightly
dierent take on the moral economy, one that widens the view of what may count
as moral beyond claims to custom, rights, entitlements, and social justice.
The alternative articulations of the moral and the economic that emerge in these
narratives bring other moral economic concerns to the fore. To fully grasp their
contours and implications, recent advances in the anthropology of ethics and mor-
ality and of processes of economization are useful analytical allies. Rather than
relying on a comparison with Cuba to develop a moral economic critique of the
situation in Spain, the reasonings considered here dismissed any credible alterna-
tive to capitalism, and showed a more fully-edged allegiance to its economic
logics and the kind of subjectivities it called forth. In such a scenario, which
relied on the normalization of Spains capitalist system and its metonymical exten-
sion as the economy, Cuba appeared as a dysfunctional, failed, and non-normal
economy, an economic system in which informality, corruption, and personal con-
siderations tarnished proper, good economic thinking and functioning.
In the course of conversations about Cuba and the economic situation on
the island, I often heard Cuban migrants refer to the fact that people did not
know how to work, or that no one really worked there. What prevailed, allegedly,
were endemic corruption, theft and the law of the jungle (la ley de la selva). Cuba
had, in short, no economy that could be called as such, and was an exception
slowly moving towards normalization. When discussing the recent changes
prompted by Raul Castro, the rise of private business, and the fact that some
entrepreneurs were getting richer by the day on the island, Saul, a Cuban man in
his mid-40 s who had lived for about 10 years in Spain, commented that nally
Cuba was becoming a real country (un pas de verdad), a country where, like in
any other, there were rich people and poor people. Class formation and
rising inequalities were thus seen as a sign of alignment and normalization with
the natural order of things, equated here with a capitalist economic system free of
interventionist biases, where each individual made a living in accordance with
his/her economic skills and abilities. Following these lines of reasoning,
which emphasized individual economic competences and rationalities, the blame
for ones economic failures in crisis-ridden Spain could be put on the shoulders of
the people at stake, rather than on faults in the system, as had been the case in the
narrative of Lorenzo considered above. Everyone complains about the crisis,
explained Marjenis, who had lived in Spain for over a decade and was himself
juggling two jobs to get by, when actually they are unable to run their business
well. When business is at stake, he maintained, I dont look at anyones face (no
miro la cara a nadie) [i.e. I dont discriminate on personal/relational grounds], no
matter if you are my family, my friend, or anyone else. Business is business, and
when money was involved, no other logics could interfere: one had to be formal,
464 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

respect economic rules, and act in accordance to them. Such was the European
way according to Marjenis, as opposed to the way of Cubans and Latinos more
generally, which he criticized. For Saul and Marjenis, rigor and formality were all the
more necessary in the unforgiving economic climate of present-day Spain, which had
raised the stakes of the game, and where the specter of economic failure was always
around the corner. In this context, their reasoning seemed to suggest, only a dis-
ciplined embodiment of homo economicus could keep ones livelihood aoat.
Saul, Marjenis, and other Cuban migrants I met did not hesitate to criticize
informality (informalidad) as bad economic behavior typical of Cubans, a perni-
cious mixing of personal considerations with economic rationality, which was
allegedly endemic in Cuba but needed to be corrected if one wanted to succeed
at doing business in Spain. Everything has a price: this is what capitalism has
taught me!, maintained Saul, as he complained of yet another service that he
had been asked to provide, for free, to a fellow Cuban migrant. The number of
such requests seemed indeed to be on the rise since the economic downturn of 2008,
as more and more people tried to mobilize relations of reciprocity to eschew formal
payment. Sauls stance, that services were to be paid for and that he was not doing
favors for nothing, nds a tting parallel in what Palomera (2014) describes as the
commodication of informal relations among Latin American migrants in
Barcelona, which this author links with wider restructuring moves towards nan-
cialization (in his case in relation to the housing market).4 Such informality I left in
Cuba, maintained Saul, in this [i.e. economic behavior] I am European, very
formal. An interesting dialogue is also possible here with Gkintidis insightful
reections (476497) on the consolidation of neoliberal discourses (2016: 492)
in relation to the European integration process, which in his case saw the blame
for Greeces economic crisis attributed to Greeks own economic malpractice and
the moral decit of cunning recipients (2016: 492) squandering away the help
(and money) that Europeans had allegedly oered. As Gkintidis argues, at play in
these narratives was also the particular self-image of Greek elites and the corres-
ponding construction of class others as somewhat awed Europeans (Herzfeld,
1987) (2016: 493). In Sauls comments, we nd a similar construction of dierence
and status as (good) European based on ones ability to behave as a (good) eco-
nomic agent and leave aside the informality and cunningness that was typical of
Cubans (bad) economic practice.
What Sauls and Marjenis narratives delineated was a view of the economy akin
to the one that Thompson ascribed to the tenets of the new political economy of
the free market, whose breakthrough at the turn of the 18 century, according to
this author, had signaled the breakdown of the old moral economy of provision
(1971: 136). Their logic, to draw a further parallel with the rationales described by
Thompson, may be seen as implying a demoralizing of . . . trade and consumption
(1971: 89).5 It is important to highlight here that any such demoralizing move in
relation to the functioning of the economy was often counter-balanced in the nar-
ratives of my interlocutors by a very moralizing stance towards intimate relation-
ships with partners, friends, and family, which, accordingly, were to eschew any
Simoni 465

hint of economic interest or calculation. Coming to the fore here was a case of the
hostile worlds perspective described by Zelizer (2005), which strived to erect a rm
boundary between intimate and economic relationships, purifying both from
the contaminating eects they could have on each other. There are people who
no longer know how to separate business from friendship, Saul told me, who are
confusing everything, and mixing what was for him antithetical, that is, sentiments
on the one hand, and interest and economic calculations on the other. The critique
of hybridization of social and economic relations, which I have discussed else-
where in relation to Cuba (see Simoni, 2015, 2016a, 2016b), operated both ways in
this sense: when informal social relationships threatened to corrupt proper eco-
nomic functioning, and when economic rationalities unduly interfered with friend-
ship, love, and other intimate forms of relationality.
Here, I want to unpack further the analytical implications of Thompsons (1971)
reference to demoralizing, since I believe that this can help us move forward in
our reection on the moral economy and its conceptualization, notably in light of
recent insights on processes of economization and in the anthropology of ethics
and morality. By naturalizing capitalism as the economy, Sauls and Marjenis
reasoning bypassed any possible reservations as to the politics and rightness of
the economic model at stake.6 Moral deliberation did not revolve around the
righteousness of the model at hand. Rather than the economy, what was invested
morally was the divide between the economic and the social, between sentiment
and interest and calculation, a divide between two radically dierent spheres of
value and modes of being, cast here as incompatible. This sort of teasing out and
disentangling of economic from social relations can be fruitfully accounted for
when adopting a performativity approach to economization (Callon, 1998;
Calis kan and Callon, 2009, 2010), one that pays attention to the contentious pro-
cesses and framings that constitute certain types of behaviors, agencies, and ration-
alities as economic, and others as not.
If we take Thompsons de-moralizing to refer to the naturalization and ensuing
invalidation of moral grounds for critique of a capitalist economy, and moral
reasoning and critique had to do instead with patrolling the frontiers of the eco-
nomic and the social, this would also result in monitoring the individuals
activities and behaviors. In other words, once capitalism was accepted as the
economy, and any questioning of the model made irrelevant, the source of dier-
ence and dierentiation lay in how well you performed as an economic agent within
the given economic frame. In this sense, we may argue that rather than taking
morality out of the picture altogether, the logics deployed by Saul and Marjenis
down-scaled its domain of concern: no longer the larger economic frameworks
and systems at hand (e.g. capitalism and communism), but the economic
actions and practices of individuals. The realm of judgment and moral critique
was thus narrowed to the issue of ascertaining how well individuals performed
within the normative economic system at hand, delineating a moral economy
that departed strikingly from the claims and demands seen in the previous section
with Lorenzos example, for instance.
466 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

It is useful to bring into this discussion the work of Didier Fassin, who has
argued for the need to pluralize the moral economy and to consider its dierent
instantiations in a given social eld.7 In a move that leads him to draw together in a
single analytical framework, for instance, the moral economy of marginalized
youth with the moral economy of the security forces that confront them in
France (2009: 12623), Fassin encourages us to recognize the moral dimensions
of claims and perspectives that come from dierent, sometimes conicting sides in a
given controversy or struggle, as opposed to simply labeling as moral those that
best correspond to our own judgment of what is and what is not moral. Advocating
a perspective from within peoples legitimations and political subjectivities
(as opposed to a political economic view from without), this stance requires us
to be reexive of our own moral assumptions (Fassin, 2008) if we wish to engage in
critical analysis rather than moral discourse that knows, a priori, where good
and evil are located.8 In the light of Fassins remarks, it seems important, for our
analyses, to recognize the moral dimensions of Sauls and Marjenis views on eco-
nomic practice and subjectivity. By referring to what was appropriate and right in
terms of economic practice, their reasoning brought moral assumptions to the fore,
making good economic practice count as moral (Zigon, 2014).
To recognize such a moral dimension, however, is also to address its specicity
and dierence from the moral economic critiques of capitalist Spain examined in the
previous section, which diered markedly in scope and scale, implied dierent pol-
itical subjectivities, and carried equally diverse political implications. As Thompson
already pointed out when dealing with his critics and with the moral dimensions in
Adam Smiths work and the new economic theories it proposed (Thompson, 1991:
26872), what is important to highlight is precisely the dierence in uses and con-
ceptions of the moral, an issue that recent advances in the anthropology of ethics and
morality can help us address with much analytical subtlety. Attention should then
focus on unpacking the scope of moral considerations related to the economy, on
examining the realms they aect and those they leave intact and unquestioned, and
on ascertaining the consequences and implications of this. What, we may argue in
the case of Marjenis and Saul, was exactly moral about such a moral economy
(Sykes, 2009b: 28)? The articulation of justice at stake in their moral reasonings was
guided by liberal notions and values of freedom (see Browne, 2009: 11), non-dis-
crimination, responsibility, and autonomy.9 I dont look at anyones face, said
Marjenis of his way of doing business, expressing the value of transparent, dispas-
sionate, and impartial economic action.
Sauls and Marjenis actualization of a hegemonic model of economic rationality
they associated with Spain, Europe, and capitalism could help them signal their
integration in the host society and its economic system. But to explain their views
we may also need to consider the political economic situation that informed their
opportunities to make a living, and the increased pressure to help fellow Cubans in
need. Reecting on derelict Cuban migrants having to sleep on the street for lack of
means of subsistence, Lorenzo, for instance, had once complained to me that even
if one wished to help, to host and provide for them in ones house something that
Simoni 467

was imaginable and rather feasible in Cuba one could not aord to do it in the
current times of crisis in Spain. This might also explain Sauls impatience with
people constantly asking favors: he simply could not help them all for free, since
he also needed to make money to get by. Rather than a moral economy that
celebrated informality, reciprocity and mutual support, as seen in Yusniels exam-
ple in the previous section, it was a moral economy that valued individualism,
autonomy and self-governance, which was called upon by Saul and Marjenis in
justifying their stance. To develop these reections further, and probe deeper into
these theoretical matters and their implications for how we see the moral economy,
its analytical purchase, and potential application, let me now turn to a third scen-
ario, in which economic logic and rationality received yet a dierent treatment.

IV Beyond the economy? Economization and moralization

The logics on which I want to reect in this section are directly linked to those
examined in the previous one, in that they were also premised on a clear-cut framing
and reication of the economic vis-a`-vis the social. They were equally grounded in
the political economy of contemporary Spain and the substantial reduction of
sources of livelihood resulting from the economic crisis. Nourished by experience
of economic diculty, failure and dejection the frustrated hopes that, as
Narotzky and Besnier put it, can aggravate a sense of crisis and worthlessness
(2014: S13) these stances articulated a radical critique of the economy and of
economic behavior. However, and in contrast to what we have seen above, this
moral critique was not geared at proposing a better model for the economy
(Section II), or at (re)asserting a good and correct way of acting economically
(Section III). Rather than reforming the economy, imagining alternatives, claiming
entitlements, and calling for improvements in the provision of basic necessities, or
virtuously making do with and adapting to the normative precepts of the (capital-
ist) economy, the posture here was to reject the economy altogether and downplay
its overall value. In contrast to the hostile worlds discourses examined in the pre-
vious section, which called for good economic and social behavior and a reasonable
balancing of the two, it was the social dimension of life that was morally invested and
given unparalleled preeminence here, outlining a clear hierarchy between a social
and an economic sphere of value. Let me ground these rather abstract considerations
in some examples, before turning to a theoretical appraisal of their implications.
It was late into the night at a party in the house of one of our Cuban friends,
when Saul made the following considerations, as we smoked a cigarette on the
balcony:

You know, it seems to me, anthropologically speaking, that many Cubans came to
Spain to improve their economy (mejorar su economa), but then with the crisis, as the
economy got screwed (se jodio), people are kind of rediscovering and seeking senti-
ments, they look for other Cubans, for things they are familiar with, for their stu
(lo suyo).
468 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

In the three years that preceded this exchange, the sort of sentimental turn that
Saul described, exemplied in the (re)valuation of social relations and intimacy,
notably with fellow Cubans, had come up repeatedly in the course of conversation
among Cuban migrants. The case of Wilson, a Cuban man in his early 40 s who had
spent about 12 years in Barcelona, seemed to epitomize such a turn. When we rst
met in 2013, Wilson had a very precarious and poorly remunerated part-time job in
the security sector, and was nding it very hard to make ends meet. Visibly worried
about his current economic predicament, and not seeing any chance for improve-
ment, he told me that Spain for him, right now, was useless (no sirve): with the
crisis, he explained, things had become very bad. In Wilsons case, and in that of
other Cubans in similar precarious conditions who had lost faith in the prospect of
economic recovery and success, the critique of shitty jobs, low remuneration, and
the economy tout court, could lead to emphasize the unparalleled importance of
more social and cultural values and pursuits. This was often exemplied by an
idealized Cuban way of fun-loving, cheerful, warm, and supportive people. We
[Cubans] are much more developed [than Europeans]; at the level of sociability, in
the ability to relate with one another: Gustavo, a Cuban man in his 60 s who liked
to assert the value of sentiment and of the heart (el corazon) above all else, thus
turned on its head the more common use of the notion of development in relation
to the economy. Whats important is not business or entrepreneurship, what mat-
ters is life, is love, said another Cuban migrant in his 50 s, with whom I only had a
brief exchange one evening. Disillusioned with Spain, he was evaluating the possi-
bility of going back to live in Cuba.
What emerged in such narratives was a disenchantment with economic systems
at large, a lack of trust in any economic framework, be it communism or capital-
ism, and embracing, instead, a bottom-up rhetoric that put people and social
relations at the center, that found renewed value in the family, in ones friends,
and in neighborly and communitarian networks of solidarity. As in the cases exam-
ined in Section II, Cuba could be used as a source of comparison and critique.
However, this time the goal was not so much to elaborate a moral economic critique
of the Spanish system, but to advance the primacy of another, radically dierent
sphere of value altogether and one, crucially, in which the person at stake was
meant to excel by simply being Cuban. Disentangling the economic from the social,
positing the primacy of the latter over the former, and using this sphere of valuation as
a framework to measure ones worth, people were able to highlight their personal
qualities, and to downplay the signicance of ones economic shortcomings or failures.
Narotzky and Besnier (2014) have recently outlined a research agenda in eco-
nomic anthropology that is concerned, among other things, with what ordinary
people understand by a life worth living and what they do to strive toward that
goal, particularly under conditions of radical uncertainty (crisis) (p. S5). These
authors emphasis on ethnographically grounded research aims to compare socio-
logically and culturally what emerges as valuable across dierent ethnographic cases
(value) (p. S5). Social worth, they argue, is how a society values people (p. S10),
and is a central aspect of what the economy is about (p. S10). Care and mutual
support, in this sense, are seen as key elements making life worthwhile, as much as
Simoni 469

they provide ways of accessing resources (p. S10). In the light of these consider-
ations, we could certainly argue that the Cuban migrants emphasis on social rela-
tions and sentiment in the examples above also played a role in their making a living,
in that it called for reciprocal support among friends, family and the community,
both on an emotional and material level, thus ensuring social reproduction
(Narotzky and Besnier, 2014: S5). While recognizing the interest of adopting this
broad, overarching, highly embedded view of the economy, in complement to it I
also think that our analyses should be able to recognize and account for our inter-
locutors eorts to frame and delimit the economy in more circumscribed ways,
especially when this becomes a key strategy for them to dierentiate and reclaim
other sources of value, when disentangling the economic from the social becomes a
privileged path to foster other sources of self-worth.
Questioning the analytical purchase of an overarching notion of the economy,
De lEstoile (2014) has recently taken issue with the ontological belief shared
not only by the extollers of market economics but also by their staunchest critics
that the economy exists in itself everywhere and at all times, underlying all
situations, even if it takes specic forms in noncapitalist settings (p. S63).
De lEstoile invites us to challenge more fundamentally the very framework of
the economy (p. S71), and recognize other frames of reference through which
people talk about how to live and to live well (p. S71), without interpreting such
statements, for example, as yet another instance and variation of a peasant view
of the economy or a moral economy (p. S71). The realities described by such
statements may not be perceived as pertaining to anything economic in the rst
place by the subjects of our investigation and this, for De lEstoile (2014), should be
accounted for in our investigations. While his argument is geared at encouraging us
to go beyond our own taken-for-granted division of life into distinct spheres
(p. S72) the typically western distinction of the economic, the political,
the social, and the religious (p. S.71) following a performativity approach
to economization, I consider that a similar stance can also help us shed light on
how our research participants incorporate and work over such distinction to
(re)frame, reproduce, or contest established conceptions of value, (de)stabilize
value hierarchies, and position themselves in relation to them. In this sense,
I argue that it can be analytically interesting and productive to account for ways
in which these compartmentalizations emerge and work, to understand what is at
stake in them and what eects they have on the way people live their lives and
perceive of themselves and others. There is, in other words, something to be gained
by following and unpacking such emic conceptualizations of the economic (or, for
that matter, the social, the political, etc.).
I see current advances in the anthropology of ethics and morality, and more
particularly Robbins (2013) proposal for an anthropology of the good, as pos-
sibly leading in similarly fruitful directions. Pointing to current anthropological
work on value, morality, and well-being (p. 457), Robbins shows interest in inves-
tigating the way people understand the good and dene its proper pursuit (p. 457)
and encourages us to be attentive to the way people orientate to and act in a world
that outstrips the one most concretely present to them, and to avoid dismissing their
470 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

ideals as unimportant or, worse, as bad-faith alibis for the worlds they actually
create (p. 457). The signicance of such an analytical posture becomes apparent
when reecting, for instance, on Wilsons and Gustavos stance on the economy and
their critique and desire to reach beyond it. The moment of crisis, the perception of
failure, the disruption of a certain horizon of expectation and self-realization and
the moral breakdown (Zigon, 2007) and value conict (Robbins, 2007) that
ensued can help us explain their reaction and willingness to reject the economy
altogether, no matter how abstract, puried, and hegemonic their notion of it may
be. While clearly tied to the political economic context at hand, and a response to
adverse economic conditions, the discourses considered here explicitly refused to
be categorized as economic. That is why, rather than considering them as
articulating a moral economic demand, and looking at them solely from an eco-
nomic anthropology lens, I think there is much to be gained by integrating and
making use of the current scholarship in the anthropology of ethics and morality,
and by following some of the analytical pathways I have delineated in this article.

V Epilogue
To conclude, I would say that paying attention to how processes of economiza-
tion and of moralization operate, and raising the key related question of what
counts as economic and moral in a given social, cultural, and political economic
situation, can give new analytical purchase to conceptualizations of the moral
economy, while also ensuring a rigorous acknowledgment of the notions scopes
and limits. To this eect, analytical consideration should be directed at how people
conceive of and address the economic and the moral, at the conditions in which
concerns with these matters emerge, and the struggles and implications that
their articulation may bring about. Adopting a more encompassing approach to
these notions, embedded views of the economy and of the moral economy
(see Narotzy and Besnier, 2014; Palomera and Vetta, 413432) are well suited to
debunk and problematize aprioristic dichotomies between, for instance, intimate
relations and market logics, or economy and morality, and to highlight their
entanglements and ways they can sustain patterns of capital accumulation
(Palomera and Vetta, 413432). While recognizing the theoretical and political
merits of such an approach, we should not overlook the eorts of our interlocutors
to work through these distinctions and dichotomies, and the way they may use them
to articulate claims and demands on themselves and the world they live in. These
eorts may counter and unsettle our theoretical assumptions on what counts as the
economy, as morality, and as moral economy, calling for a reformulation of our
conceptual apparatus and the recognition of some of its limits too, but we must take
them seriously if we wish to account for the realities that the people we work with are
experiencing. When analyzing our interlocutors claims and demands, we should
therefore be ready to decouple and unpack the moral and the economic that
make up our notions of the moral economy, rather than treating the two as neces-
sarily coterminous, embedded in one another or, in the worst case, taking them for
granted. The concepts of economization and moralization, I argue, can help us in
Simoni 471

this task, sharpening our analytical grasp of what counts as moral economy and
what does not in a given ethnographic context. Encouraging us to reconsider and
renew our understanding of this notion in the light of our ndings, these two con-
cepts can thus jointly pave the way to new empirically-grounded theoretical insights.
The comparative analysis of the ethnographic material presented in the dierent
sections of this text illustrates that much is to be gained in paying attention to what
qualies as economic for our interlocutors, and to look at how and why such
qualication becomes an important and contentious matter of concern. These
are the questions that the performativity approach to economization enables us
to focus on and address. As shown in this article, dening and delineating the realm
of the economic be it ideal economic models (Section II), proper economic func-
tioning (Section III), or the value of the economic itself (Section IV) can become
an explicit matter of moral preoccupation and deliberation. The notion of moral-
ization, in this respect, encourages us to be attentive and try to understand when,
how, and why such moral concerns emerge, and what is at stake in them. Brought
together, economization and moralization help us identify and explain not only
what is moral about the moral economy (Sykes, 2009b: 28), but also what is
economic about it, bringing to the fore our research participants conceptualiza-
tions. As shown here, such conceptualizations do matter and make a lot of dier-
ence, and it is therefore important and epistemologically sound to follow them and
take their lead, if we wish to fully grasp and understand, without condescension,
the realities our interlocutors live and aspire to live. To this eect, the scholarship
on economization and on ethics and morality addressed in this article can certainly
prove very useful. Building on the approach proposed here, which calls for ne-
grained ethnographic work and the sensitive recognition of emic conceptualization
of the economic, of the moral, and of their reciprocal (dis)entanglements, the hori-
zon for anthropological research on the moral economy seems to me wider than
ever, and for this, I think, all the more challenging and exciting to explore.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta as well as the editors of
Anthropological Theory and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and sug-
gestions on earlier versions of the article. Any shortcomings are my responsibility. The
article would not have been possible without the collaboration of the Cuban men and
women I worked with in Barcelona, and my deepest gratitude goes to them.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following nancial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for the research and writing was provided by
the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione Fellowship, PZ00P1_147946) and the
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Post-Doctoral Grant SFRH/BPD/
66483/2009).
472 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

Notes
1. The narratives I present here are grouped in three different sections to highlight and
reflect on their main divergences. The people I worked with, however, could sometimes
move from one type of narrative to the other, depending notably on the situation at stake
and the point they wished to make in a given conversation, thus making it difficult to link
in an unambiguous way their moral economic reasoning to their personal lives and con-
crete economic vicissitudes. In this sense, we could argue that these narratives were
largely co-present and still in the making among people who shared similar structural
conditions within Spanish society and its bleak economic scenario, so that none of them
seemed clearly to prevail at the time of my fieldwork. More detailed and continued
ethnography may of course also help clarify this picture.
2. Podemos is a Spanish political party founded in the aftermath of the 201112 protests
against inequality and corruption in this country. It is considered by some as a left-wing
populist force that seeks to address problems of inequality, unemployment and economic
malaise that followed in the wake of the European debt crisis (Wikipedia).
3. All direct quotes from the research participants have been translated into English by the
author. Personal names and certain details of their narratives have been changed to
protect their anonymity.
4. Palomera (2014) shows how such commodification eroded peoples sense of moral obli-
gation or ethnic solidarity (p. S109), and ended up encroaching on the values of mutual
support and reciprocity that held poor migrant communities together.
5. Thompsons clarification of his use of this notion should also be recalled here, when he
explains that [b]y demoralizing it is not suggested that Smith and his colleagues were
immoral or were unconcerned for the public good (1971: 89). What this author meant,
rather, was that the new political economy was disinfested of intrusive moral impera-
tives (1971: 90). In the new economic theory, he continues, questions as to the moral
polity of marketing do not enter, unless as preamble and peroration (p. 90). See also his
later reassessment of the notion of moral economy for a more thorough clarification of
his views on this question (Thompson, 1991: 26872), in which Thompson answers his
critics by acknowledging, for instance, Adam Smiths preoccupation with morals in his
Theory of Moral Sentiments, and pointing to the fact that preamble and peroration
had real significance in the intentions of the classical political economists, and were
something more that rhetorical devices (1991: 271).
6. Thompsons reflections on the work of Adam Smith and the tenants of the new political
economy in the 18th century provide an interesting parallel, when he considers the emer-
gence of the notion of economics as a non-normative object of study, with objective
mechanisms independent of moral imperatives (1991: 270).
7. See Kofti (433453) for an alternative proposal for such pluralization, one that retains a
stricter economic reading of the concept and has the advantage of avoiding overly dilut-
ing its focus.
8. This, for Fassin, does not mean abdicating political engagement in the fields we work.
On the contrary, the moral reflexivity (2008: 341) this author advocates is crucial both
epistemologically and politically. As Fassin aptly demonstrates, [t]he more we are con-
scious and critical of our own moral presuppositions or certainties instead of keeping
them in the black box of selfcontentment the more we are capable of respecting the
epistemological grounds and of preserving the political engagements of our scientific
work (2008: 338). Fassins arguments in favor of moral reflexivity in anthropological
practice resonate strongly with that of other authors working for an anthropology of
ethics and morality (see, for instance, Cassaniti and Hickman, 2014; Laidlaw, 2002;
Simoni 473

Robbins, 2007; Zigon, 2008, 2014) and finds a fitting parallel in Robbins recent critique
of what he calls suffering slot ethnography, which is secure in its knowledge of good
and evil and works toward achieving progress in the direction of its already widely
accepted models of the good (2013: 456).
9. Tellingly, the hostile worlds perspective separating the economic from the social, and the
ensuing idealization of intimate relationships that Saul expressed, activated a similar set of
liberal moral assumptions about human freedom and autonomy. We may draw on
Povinellis (2006) work here, which finds in love and the intimate event the hegemonic
home of liberal logics and aspirations (2006: 17), and the basis for constituting free and
self-governing subjects (Povinelli in Faier, 2007: 153). We may therefore argue that Sauls
moral reasoning on the economy was grounded in normative ideals of the liberal subject
that also found a place in his moral reasoning on intimacy and the social, showing the
deeper connections between realms that he was so adamant to divide, separate, and purify.

References
Appadurai A (1986) Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In: Appadurai A
(ed.) The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 363.
Berg ML (2011) Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics and Nation among Cubans in Spain.
New York: Berghahn Books.
Bohannan P (1955) Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv. American
Anthropologist 57: 6070.
Browne KE (2009) Economics and morality: Introduction. In: Browne K and Milgram BL (eds)
Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches. Lanham, MD: Altamira, pp. 140.
Burawoy M and Verdery K (1999) Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the
Postsocialist World. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Calis kan K and Callon M (2009) Economization, part 1: Shifting attention from the econ-
omy towards processes of economization. Economy and Society 38(3): 36998.
Calis kan K and Callon M (2010) Economization, part 2: A research programme for the
study of markets. Economy and Society 39(1): 132.
Callon M (1998) The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In: Callon M (ed.)
The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 157.
Callon M (2007) What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In: MacKenzie
D, Muniesa F and Siu L (eds) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of
Economics Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 311357.
Cassaniti JL and Hickman JR (2014) New directions in the anthropology of morality.
Anthropological Theory 14(3): 251262.
De LEstoile B (2014) Money is good, but a friend is better: Uncertainty, orientation to the
future, and the economy. Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 9): S62S73.
Eckstein S (2009) The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their
Homeland. New York: Routledge.
Edelman M (2005) Bringing the moral economy back in . . . to the study of 21st-century
transnational peasant movements. American Anthropologist 107: 331345.
Edelman M (2012) E.P. Thompson and moral economies. In: Fassin D (ed.) A Companion to
Moral Anthropology. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 4966.
Elyachar J (2005) Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in
Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Faier L (2007) Filipina migrants in rural Japan and their professions of love. American
Ethnologist 34(1): 14862.
474 Anthropological Theory 16(4)

Fassin D (2008) Beyond good and evil? Questioning the anthropological discomfort with
morals. Anthropological Theory 8(4): 333344.
Fassin D (2009) Les economies morales revisitees. Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 64:
12371266.
Fassin D (ed.) (2012) A Companion to Moral Anthropology. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Faubion JD (2011) An Anthropology of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garc a-Moreno C (2011) Mujeres migrantes cubanas: resolviendo e inventando tambien en
Espana. PhD thesis, Universitat Rovira y Virgili, Spain.
Gkintidis D (2016) European integration as a moral economy: Greek technocrats amidst
capitalism-in-crisis. Anthropological Theory 16(4): 476495.
Guyer JI (2004) Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hart K and Hann C (2011) Introduction: Learning from Polanyi. In: Hann C and Hart K
(eds) Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 116.
Humphrey C (2002) The Unmaking of Soviet life: Everyday Economies after Socialism.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Keane W (2016) Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Kofti D (2016) Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the
conveyor belt and the household. Anthropological Theory 16(4): 433453.
Jansen S (2014) On not moving well enough: Temporal reasoning in Sarajevo yearnings for
normal lives. Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 9): S74S84.
Laidlaw J (2002) For an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311332.
Laidlaw J (2013) The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lambek M (ed.) (2010) Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Mandel R and Humphrey C (eds) (2002) Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of
Postsocialism. Oxford: Berg.
Mattingly C (2014) Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Maurer B (2006) The anthropology of money. Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 1536.
Mauss M (1969 [1925]) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
London: Cohen and West.
Mitchell T (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Narotzky S (2012) Europe in crisis: Grassroots economies and the anthropological turn.
Etnografica 16(3): 627638.
Narotzky S and Besnier N (2014) Crisis, value, and hope: Rethinking the economy: An
introduction to supplement 9. Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 9): S4S16.
Palomera J (2014) Reciprocity, commodification, and poverty in the era of financialization.
Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 9): S105S115.
Palomera J and Vetta T (2016) Moral economy: Rethinking a radical concept.
Anthropological Theory 16(4): 413432.
Pine F (2014) Migration as hope: Space, time, and imagining the future. Current
Anthropology 55(suppl. 9): S95S104.
Simoni 475

Polanyi K (1971 [1944]) The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Povinelli EA (2006) The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and
Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Robbins J (2004) Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea
Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Robbins J (2007) Between reproduction and freedom: Morality, value, and radical cultural
change. Ethnos 72(3): 293314.
Robbins J (2009) Value, structure, and the range of possibilities: A response to Zigon.
Ethnos 74(2): 277285.
Robbins J (2013) Beyond the suffering subject: Toward an anthropology of the good.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447462.
Roitman JL (2005) Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central
Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Simoni V (2015) Intimacy and belonging in Cuban tourism and migration. The Cambridge
Journal of Anthropology 33(2): 2641.
Simoni V (2016a) Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Simoni V (2016b) Ethnography, mutuality, and the utopia of love and friendship in touristic
Cuba. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 8(1): 143167.
Strathern M (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society
in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Sykes K (ed.) (2009a) Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sykes K (2009b) Residence: Moral reasoning in a common place paradoxes of a global
age. In: Sykes K (ed.) Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global
Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 340.
Thomas N (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thompson EP (1971) The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century.
Past and Present 50: 76136.
Thompson EP (1991) The moral economy reviewed. In: Thompson EP, Customs in
Common. Pontypool: Merlin, 259351.
Verdery K (1996) What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Zelizer VA (2005) The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zigon J (2007) Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: A theoretical framework for an
anthropology of moralities. Anthropological Theory 7(2): 131150.
Zigon J (2008) Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg.
Zigon J (2014) An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: A critical response to
ordinary ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 20: 746764.

Valerio Simoni is Research Fellow in the Anthropology and Sociology of

Development Department at The Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies, Geneva. His work draws on ethnographic research in
Cuba and Spain and focuses on the transformations of intimacy, morality, and
economic practice in international tourism and migration. He is the author of
Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba (Berghahn, 2016).