Europe’s so-called ‘peripheral’ countries are going through an unprecedented crisis. Economic stagnation and welfare retrenchment have hastened a process of impoverishment and dispossession among the working classes. However, what do we know about the ways in which people are adapting, in their everyday lives, to this new context? How are subaltern groups coping with and making sense of the fact that the promise of individual prosperity and privatized consumption is falling into pieces? This panel invites a group of anthropologists to analyze current transformations in livelihood practices and discourses in order to nuance generalizations about the broader shifts in the macrostructures of the economy and polity. Presenters will explore the current conjuncture from the following angles:

1)    In what ways do observable livelihood practices differ from expectations held in the past? What kinds of intimate contradictions do they entail and how do people make sense of them?

2)    How do such practices deviate from the neoliberal homo oeconomicus model and to what extent do they challenge general analyses of the crisis?

3)    Do all these changes carry intrinsic forms of political contestation?

Convenors: Jaume Franquesa, Jaime Palomera

Chair: Susana Narotzky

Participants: Mikel Aramburu, Jaume Franquesa, Jaime Palomera, Antónia Pedroso de Lima, Gavin Smith

Discussant: Don Kalb