Nicolette Makovicky

In this article, I examine the demand for spatial justice among shepherds in Highland Poland, focusing on the ‘misfit’ between the mobile, communal nature of traditional pastoralism and the static perceptions of landscape and property underpinning Polish and European agricultural policy. The movement of animals and people through a mountain environment increasingly dominated by infrastructure, private property and commercial activity, creates considerable social and spatial friction in Highland communities. Drawing on the work of legal scholar Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, I show how shepherds seek to address these frictions by lobbying for greater political and legal recognition of their right to move through the landscape. In this way, I argue, they propose an alternative vision of spatial justice as based in and enacted through custodianship and mobility, challenging dominant ideas of spatial justice based on property rights and resource redistribution.

This article explores the political economy of craft in the context of post-socialist liberalization, with a specific focus on the production of handmade, crochet lace in the village of Koniaków, Southwest Poland. The community, known for producing delicate, floral handmade lace items such as doilies and tablecloths, caused a stir when they introduced a new product: handmade, crocheted thongs ( stringi ). The provocative nature of this new product attracted attention from the Polish and international media, and provoked vigorous debates about authenticity, tradition, and the commercialization of vernacular crafts amongst local lace makers. Focusing on the “boundary work” done by these debates, this article surveys the various ways in which members of Koniaków’s craft community negotiate labor relations, commercial contacts, and institutional support. Emphasizing craft knowledge as a shared resource with social and economic benefits, I approach the production and sale of lace in Koniaków as a process of “commoning,” which involves all manner of collaborative and commercial practices that sustain the professional community. Moreover, I explore the strategies local actors use to navigate tensions between productive and reproductive labor, and examine the role skilled knowledge and capital play out in shaping craft practice in Koniaków. By combining classic feminist work on textile crafts with newer feminist economics, I argue that practices of commoning are vital for the creativity and survival of crafts in a post-socialist context.

This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist central and eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of proper economy and practice amongst a broad range of actors—from landfill workers to business managers and the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyse the capitalist moral transformation and order in the region and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to (as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders—a topic sidelined in much of the existing moral economy scholarship. Exploring a broad range of moral economic phenomena, the contributors move beyond the conventional definition of morals as prosocial norms and action, approaching morals as a broader empirical phenomenon of economy and politics. They examine the actions, practices, and reasoning of different actors in relation to shifting notions of acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and praiseworthy and blameworthy behaviour. As such, this collection makes the case for widening the empirical object and analytical purchase of moral economy to include the study of not only moral critiques and resistance to capitalism but also the diverse moral agencies, milieus and orders of capitalism, and the ways in which the advancement and embedding of the capitalist moral order has shaped economic life in the region.

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This special issue decenters tax as an analytic device for understanding the relationship between state and citizen while examining the limits of social contract thinking. Focusing on how citizens interpret and react to state efforts to promote fiscal citizenship, it sheds light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems. The contributors use tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. They also highlight how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state in the form of alternative religious and economic communities.

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Drawing on fieldwork amongst lacemakers in Slovakia, this article examines the relationship between practices of making and the production of value in artisanal labour. The author shows that the processes of making challenged artisans’ perceptions of the natural distribution of agency between humans and objects, resulting in feelings of ontological insecurity. Arguing that they perceived this insecurity as a problem of ethics, as well as a problem of agency, she demonstrates how the intellectual and sensual experience of manufacture was constitutive of the ways in which artisans perceived the value of their craftwork. Taking this approach, the article seeks to disrupt the anthropological habit of framing questions about value in terms of domestic economies, global markets and aesthetic regimes, and making in terms of skilled practice, embodied knowledge and knowledge transmission. The author also suggests that scholars ought to pay more attention to the ways in which ethical considerations are grounded in our ontological disposition towards the material world.

This chapter examines the production and use of political slogans in various locales across the globe, seeking to throw light on how words are employed to persuade and affect publics in an age of global capitalism. It considers how the slogan as a particular cultural form operates in settings where political performance is shaped by the neoliberal logic of governance. The chapter indicates two main aspects of the relationship between slogans and neoliberalism. It introduces the various contributions, describing how neoliberal stretches of discourse are made into slogans, and suggests some of the mechanisms that account for their effective circulation. The chapter illustrates how slogans seek to generate public support and promote political unity by collapsing frames of interaction and reference. It suggests that slogans relate to language as a mode of action and social practice and should therefore be approached as performative discourse rather than simply as a form of directive speech.