Abstract
The two case studies in Part III of this book highlight the way in which informal life politics challenges conventional notions of “value” in two senses of the word. Living politics questions the domination of life by economic calculations of commercial value; and, through proposing alternative forms of exchange, it seeks to assert the importance of neglected ethical values. These interconnected processes of alternative value creation may appear on the surface to be a retreat into nostalgia, or an unrealistic attempt to return to the “good old days.” But Wei and Morris-Suzuki argue that the value creation in informal life politics involves innovation as much as the recovery of tradition and creates networked communities that go far beyond the mere restoration of “traditional society.”
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Notes
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Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 153–159.
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Kojin Karatani, translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, The structure of World History: from Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 18. The book was originally published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in 2010.
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Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, Verso, 2002), 193.
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Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). The book was originally published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944 and reprinted in 1957 and 2001 by Beacon Press.
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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 272.
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Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (Revised edition) (Ringwood and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 47.
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Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
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Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in George Simmel, ed. Donald N. Levine, On Individual and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 327. The chapter is a reprint from Social Sciences III Selections and Selected Readings, Vol. 2, 14th ed. (University of Chicago, 1948). Translated by Edward A. Shils. It was originally published as “Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben,” in Die Grosstadt. Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung 9 (1903).
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E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London: Vintage Books, 1993), 29.
- 10.
Robert Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), 9.
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Ghassan Hage, ‘Insiders and Outsiders’ in Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan (eds.), Sociology: Place, Time and Division (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2006), 342.
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James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Benedict J. Kerkvliet, Everyday Politics in the Philippines: Class and Status Relations in a Central Luzon Village (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1990).
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Huanyin Li, Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
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Wei, S., Morris-Suzuki, T. (2018). Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation. In: Cliff, T., Morris-Suzuki, T., Wei, S. (eds) The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6337-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6337-4_8
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