A Political Economy of Intimate Life

Social Reproductive Theory (SRT) itself has now long been a key theoretical framework to analyze the inseparable relationships between the private and the public, production and reproduction, production and consumption, exchange value and other forms of value, labor power and social power, class position and social identity, First and Third World struggles, and various other often dichotomized mechanisms under the conditions of capitalism. Far from a “woman’s question,” SRT is a framework to understand as well as to develop praxes for struggle for today’s most urgent global problems: climate change, forced displacement, populist right-wing movements, global inequality, and unprecedented precarity. This volume contributes both to economic anthropology as we as wider literatures on social reproduction to think about how intimacy – and corollary topics, like feelings of crisis, emotional relation, and sexuality – are critical to our understanding of the “economic” and how each of these literatures can benefit from fully integrated analysis. In other words, while bringing the framework of social reproduction into economic anthropology, this volume also aims to bring the anthropological investigation of intimacy – in phenomena like religious practice, refugee displacement, postsocialist transformations, polyamorous family-making, and minority charity trusts – to social reproduction theory that has, for the most part, largely maintained its focus on household labor, subsistence, consumption, and more recently education. Research in Economic Anthropology (REAN) is a prestigious book series sponsored by the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA), a division of the American Anthropological Association. With a proud history and a strong focus on the comparative study of economic systems, REAN delves into human economic behavior within its broader sociocultural context. This series offers valuable insights into both contemporary and historical economic practices across diverse societies.