Dualidades perigosas

Abstract

Students of social life have often split the world into separate and mutually contaminating spheres of rational market transactions and personalized social relations. Such dichotomies not only fail to describe and explain how economic activity actually operates but serve to devalue activities such as household production, caring labor, microcredits, and women's work in general. Focusing on the cases of local currencies and paid personal care the paper argues that economic activity and interpersonal ties regularly mingle and in fact often mutually reinforce each other. It also contends that such allegedly peripheral economic activties are collectively as significant as the supposedly more "real" economic phenomena of firms and corporations.