Performing economy differently: exploring economic personhood and local economic diversity
Deirdre McKay, Australian National University
Much academic work tends to reinforce the idea that capitalist enterprises, market transactions and wage labour delimit what counts as the ‘real’ economy. It is far less common for academic accounts to consider how ideas of economy themselves bring this particular version of ‘economy’ into being as ‘real’ (Callon and Caliskan, 2005; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Latour, 1999; Mitchell, 2002). Drawing on Gibson-Graham’s (2006) performative reading of economy as a space of decision that demands active, ethical choices, this presentation explores the implications of performing economy differently. The paper is based on an action research project undertaken in the Philippines in partnership with academics, AusAID, local governments, NGOs and community members. The goal of the project was to create a different understanding of economy by building on the existing diversity of local economic practices. This approach led the research team to confront a disjuncture between local economic practices and self-conscious local attempts to engage with ‘business’ and ‘development’ as abstract and rarefied spheres. Much local economic activity expressed and reproduced intensely relational forms of personhood. As ‘relational economic persons’, community participants in the project were constrained in their attempts to act as the bounded, individual economic agents anticipated by the prevailing model of the ‘real’ economy. By recognizing relational economic personhood as an asset, rather than a liability, the project process opened up new opportunities for social enterprise, avoiding many of the problems inherent in other enterprise-based approaches to local development.
