The hybrid economy and anthropological engagements with policy discourse
Jon Altman, CAEPR, Australian National University
For a long time after undertaking fieldwork in Arnhem Land 1979 to 1981 I used a model defined by the dominant economics paradigm focused on the market and the private and public sector duality to represent local economies. I supplemented this framework with the notion of non-market work and production and found comparable measures like time and ‘real’ and imputed dollars to represent the local and very distinct form of economy. Frustrated by the inability of social sciences and policy communities to recognize this distinct form of economy and conscious of the growing intolerance of dominant neo-liberal ideology to tolerate human activity beyond the market, from 2001 I have sought to develop the distinct and reframed notion of the hybrid economy that aims to demonstrated the inter-linkages and inter-dependencies between highly fluid market, state and customary sectors of local economies.
While the notion of the hybrid economy has gained some traction in academic and policy discourse, it remains part of a subordinate discourse that seeks to challenge the very dominant notion of ‘the real economy’ promulgated by Noel Pearson since 1999 that has uncritically become deeply embedded in mainstream policy discourse.
In my presentation I want to explore some of the hurdles that the discipline of anthropology, with its focus on the local and cultural lived reality and alternative economies, faces in challenging increasingly dominant western capitalist notions of the economy. I do this in part by focusing on the Howard government’s intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal affairs. Here a notion of economy that is naively divorced from the cultural is driving the reform agenda. Paradoxically, the aim of integrating Aboriginal people into the ‘real’ economy (never defined) is likely to jeopardize productive engagements in the hybrid economy. Equally paradoxically, empirical evidence suggests that the hybrid economy is very real in that it is productive and the principal avenue for Aboriginal people to gain a livelihood; and conversely, the neo-liberal state and its supporters are advocating for an economic transformation that is divorced from reality.
The current historical interventionist moment is seen by some as an opportunity for reform, a view that I do not share. However, it might provide an opportunity for anthropologists to re-engage with the economistic policy community in re-asserting the role of culture in economy.
