Generations in Crisis? Resources, Reciprocity and Exchange

Request for Fast-track status (Susana Narotzky). We propose to organise a roundtable discussion among a group of anthropologists/ social scientists, working in different regions of Europe and beyond, around the question of the breakdown of social reproduction and its relation with economic crises. All participants have been focussing on kinship and economy in times of rupture, crisis or more long term political and economic uncertainty. In this roundtable, we will discuss our ethnographic work on inter-generational dependencies, paying attention both to global connections and to scale. We will focus also on the impact of regulatory institutions (the state and other international bodies) on the configuration of opportunities available to generations. We all start from the premise that in times of severe cutbacks and economic re-structuring, high unemployment and extreme pressure on limited resources, questions of reproduction between generations take on the utmost importance. How are skills, jobs, resources and emotional and material bonds and responsibilities passed between generations? What happens when aspects of reproduction become difficult, or impossible, to fulfill? How are resources allocated and shared? How is debt understood and managed? What are the processes which give rise to new and alternative economic structures in the wider context of kinship, gender and generations? The participants will draw on extensive experience of long term fieldwork (including Spain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Italy, Argentina) and theoretical engagement with these questions, to generate a critical and innovative discussion of continuity and rupture.