Abstract

It is now well established that people’s social relationships are crucial to their wellbeing, livelihood, and life prospects. We may therefore expect to see a broadly positive association between the social support and social position that a person or household has--what we could term their "relational wealth"--and their material wealth. Or, to use a different set of closely related terms, if social capital is productive of economic capital (and vice versa) then we should expect the two to co-vary. As yet, however, we have a limited understanding of how different kinds of "wealth" are associated, nor do we know how such associations may vary across different communities and societies.

To explore this, I present data gathered as part of the "ENDOW" project (Economic Networks and the Dynamics of Wealth inequality, a large NSF-funded collaboration) from over fifty communities around the world. These communities show immense diversity in their institutional, cultural, and economic arrangements, ranging from farming villages in India to fishing settlements in Ecuador to pastoral groups in Namibia. Anthropologists working with each community have gathered extensive demographic, economic, and social support network data that form the basis of our analyses. I will present our current findings looking cross-sectionally at the associations between these different forms of wealth, both within and between sites. I will also hint at what is on the horizon for the ENDOW project: longitudinal data that will let us speak more definitively about the social drivers of wealth inequality around the world.

About the Speaker

Eleanor Power is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. An anthropologist by training, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two villages in South India for over a decade, exploring questions on religious practice, social support, reputation, and gossip. She is the co-director of the ENDOW project (a collaboration of anthropologists and economists gathering economic, demographic, and social network data in communities around the world) and the leader of the Rep2SI project (an interdisciplinary and comparative study of the dynamics of social inequality).

Time

25 Sep 2024    10: 00 am U.S. Estern Time

25 Sep 2024    10: 00 pm Beijing Time

Registration link

https://iu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_02hY7XPrReyAr52wGHmb6w