Frontlines of Value: Class and Social Transformation in 21st Century Capitalism
The ‘Frontlines’ project seeks to occupy the space for innovative and ethnographic-historical class driven research on global capitalism and inequality, a space left vacated in between such recent landmark studies of inequality as Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ (2013) and David Graeber’s ‘Debt’ (2011). It does so from a well-developed starting point in Anthropological Political Economy. The team, working in several world-regional locations, will elaborate a multi-scalar methodological impulse in social anthropology, which strives to simultaneously universalize, compare, and specify among cases, and theorize beyond the usual boundaries of the local fieldsite. We will look at key regional and relational properties of capitalist transformation through the particular ethnographic prism of the ‘frontlines of value’ notion.