Immoral Economy: Negative Ethics and Everyday Economic Life in the Southern Peruvian Andes
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation explores the perverse vitality of negative ethics—that is, how concerns about immorality animate everyday economic life in rural Andean Peru. Through a consideration of issues such as land inheritance, borrowing money, gift exchange, wealth inequality, and cash cropping, I argue that routine evaluative judgements about bad actions and characteristics of others are deeply implicated in attempts to make a good living and to live well. The dissertation is based on 18-months of ethnographic research in the small Aymara-speaking community of Suma Marka and sits at the intersection of the anthropology of ethics, economics, and materiality. Where immorality has often been considered analytically as a straightforward inversion of the good and subsumed within people’s attempts to achieve the good, I argue that negative ethics comprises a richly textured field of actions, beliefs, concerns, and logics that significantly incorporates, but also extends beyond this dialectic. Consequently, each chapter explores less-than-straightforward relationships between the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’, moving from an examination of interpersonal settings to collective economic endeavours over the course of the dissertation. Chapter Two begins in the setting of intimate kinship. I consider the nature of obligation when relations break down following a tragic death and ongoing disputes over land, demonstrating how people continue to tolerate bad kin in order to maintain their ideals and practices of good kinship. Chapter Three extends the consideration of debt obligations in particular, juxtaposing interpersonal moneylending with apxata (beer crate) exchange at fiestas to consider reciprocity’s discontents, and to explain the emergence of shame as interpersonal debt relations become hierarchical. Here, good attempts to extend credit inadvertently produce bad borrowers. The theme of inequality is again taken up in Chapter Four, which examines envy ascription and envy avoidance. I de…
abstract: This dissertation explores the perverse vitality of negative ethics—that is, how concerns about immorality animate everyday economic life in rural Andean Peru. Through a consideration of issues such as land inheritance, borrowing money, gift exchange, wealth inequality, and cash cropping, I argue that routine evaluative judgements about bad actions and characteristics of others are deeply implicated in attempts to make a good living and to live well. The dissertation is based on 18-months of ethnographic research in the small Aymara-speaking community of Suma Marka and sits at the intersection of the anthropology of ethics, economics, and materiality. Where immorality has often been considered analytically as a straightforward inversion of the good and subsumed within people’s attempts to achieve the good, I argue that negative ethics comprises a richly textured field of actions, beliefs, concerns, and logics that significantly incorporates, but also extends beyond this dialectic. Consequently, each chapter explores less-than-straightforward relationships between the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’, moving from an examination of interpersonal settings to collective economic endeavours over the course of the dissertation. Chapter Two begins in the setting of intimate kinship. I consider the nature of obligation when relations break down following a tragic death and ongoing disputes over land, demonstrating how people continue to tolerate bad kin in order to maintain their ideals and practices of good kinship. Chapter Three extends the consideration of debt obligations in particular, juxtaposing interpersonal moneylending with apxata (beer crate) exchange at fiestas to consider reciprocity’s discontents, and to explain the emergence of shame as interpersonal debt relations become hierarchical. Here, good attempts to extend credit inadvertently produce bad borrowers. The theme of inequality is again taken up in Chapter Four, which examines envy ascription and envy avoidance. I de…
author: Howland, Corinna
language: eng
keywords: Andes, Peru, Economy, Ethics, Negative Ethics
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5f706c8d-e163-4135-8368-aa8157e14c4e/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-09-03
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:10Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.63821