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With a team of anthropologists and geographers, Insidious Capital explores “value and values” in what may well be the last phase of capitalist globalization. In a global perspective of fast-transforming social spaces that move from East to West, the book explores the struggles around the exploitation and valuation of labor, environmental politics, expansion of the ground rent, new hierarchies, the contradictions of higher education, the offshoring of “immaterial” labor, the illiberal right, and the mobilizations against it. This is a book about the variegated frontlines of value within an uneven, but not random, geography of capitalist expansion.
“Insidious Capital is a stunning work that takes us to the frontlines of global capitalism’s new regimes of value. With sharp-eyed ethnographies, its deep genius shows us that while capital’s singular form of value has gone global, it has insinuated itself into variable new local “hidden abodes” of commodification and dispossession, and has both shaped and usurped the specific cultural values that make life meaningful for the vast and vastly different populations it has “put to work” -- and then often made redundant.” • Don Nonini, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“This is a very interesting book that explores ‘the frontlines of value’ and globalization through several carefully constructed case studies from different parts of the world.” • Lesley Gill, Vanderbilt University
“This is a shining example of the sensitive, nuanced, and path-breaking work going on in Marxist scholarship today, opening new pathways for theoretically informed ethnographic work on global capitalism, anywhere and everywhere. Insidious Capital is exactly the book we need right now.” • Christopher Krupa, University of Toronto
Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he directed the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project. Currently he is Academic Director of GRIP, a research program on global social inequality of the University of Bergen with the International Science Council, Paris. He is Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Focaalblog, and the Dislocations series (all by Berghahn Books).
Foreword
Don Kalb
Introduction: Value: Regimes and Frontlines at the End of the Cycle
Don Kalb
Chapter 1. Special Economic Zones: The Global Frontlines of Neoliberalism’s Value Regime
Patrick Neveling
Chapter 2. On Difference and Devaluation: Notes on Exploitation in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement
Stephen Campbell
Chapter 3. Carbon as Value: Four Short Stories of Ecological Civilization in China
Charlotte Bruckermann
Chapter 4. Enclosing Gurugram: Vernacular Valorization as India’s Urban Frontline
Tom Cowan
Chapter 5. Construction, Labor, and Luxury in Kathmandu’s Post-Conflict Tourism Economy
Dan Hirslund
Chapter 6. Dispossession as a Manifold: The Value Frontlines of Authoritarian Populist Politics in Turkey
Katharina Bodirsky
Chapter 7. “Scraps from the Bourgeois Kitchen”: on the Romanian Frontline of Outsourced Creativity
Oana Mateescu and Don Kalb
Chapter 8. "As Much Value as Possible”: Construction, Universities, Finance, and the “Greater Good” in the Northeast of England
Sarah Winkler-Reid
Chapter 9. Labor, Value, and Frontlines in Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States, the Year 2020
Sharryn Kasmir
Afterword: Reflections on Value, Objectivity, and Death
Christopher Krupa