Insidious Capital

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he directed the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project. Currently he is Academic Director of GRIP, a research program on global social inequality of the University of Bergen with the International Science Council, Paris. He is Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Focaalblog, and the Dislocations series (all by Berghahn Books).

“Insidious Capital is a stunning work that takes us to the frontlines of global capitalism’s new regimes of value. With sharp-eyed ethnographies, its deep genius shows us that while capital’s singular form of value has gone global, it has insinuated itself into variable new local “hidden abodes” of commodification and dispossession, and has both shaped and usurped the specific cultural values that make life meaningful for the vast and vastly different populations it has “put to work” -- and then often made redundant.” • Don Nonini, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“This is a very interesting book that explores ‘the frontlines of value’ and globalization through several carefully constructed case studies from different parts of the world.” • Lesley Gill, Vanderbilt University“This is a shining example of the sensitive, nuanced, and path-breaking work going on in Marxist scholarship today, opening new pathways for theoretically informed ethnographic work on global capitalism, anywhere and everywhere. Insidious Capital is exactly the book we need right now.” • Christopher Krupa, University of Toronto

• ForewordDon Kalb Introduction: Value: Regimes and Frontlines at the End of the CycleDon KalbChapter 1. Special Economic Zones: The Global Frontlines of Neoliberalism’s Value RegimePatrick NevelingChapter 2. On Difference and Devaluation: Notes on Exploitation in a Myanmar Squatter SettlementStephen CampbellChapter 3. Carbon as Value: Four Short Stories of Ecological Civilization in ChinaCharlotte BruckermannChapter 4. Enclosing Gurugram: Vernacular Valorization as India’s Urban FrontlineTom CowanChapter 5. Construction, Labor, and Luxury in Kathmandu’s Post-Conflict Tourism EconomyDan HirslundChapter 6. Dispossession as a Manifold: The Value Frontlines of Authoritarian Populist Politics in TurkeyKatharina BodirskyChapter 7. “Scraps from the Bourgeois Kitchen”: on the Romanian Frontline of Outsourced CreativityOana Mateescu and Don KalbChapter 8. "As Much Value as Possible”: Construction, Universities, Finance, and the “Greater Good” in the Northeast of EnglandSarah Winkler-ReidChapter 9. Labor, Value, and Frontlines in Reading and Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States, the Year 2020Sharryn Kasmir Afterword: Reflections on Value, Objectivity, and DeathChristopher Krupa