Foreword: Ethnographies of economy/ics: making and reading

Abstract

In Latin languages, the words economy and economics are one and the same, as in the Portuguese economia. The composite economy/ics reflects an approach that takes economic practices, institutions and social spaces (the economy) and theoretical ideas about the economy (economics) to be interrelated and mutually constitutive spheres, rather than discrete epistemo-logical or ontological entities. One of the objectives of this issue of Vibrant is to propose anthropological research into the multiple forms produced by the entanglement of these two terms. In this approach, academic economic ideas-those produced by professionals of the economy, such as academic economists, economic journalists, market consultants and marketers-shape and are shaped by ordinary economic ideas and practices, or in other words, by the economic cultures of non-specialists. Economics thus indicates a field that extends beyond the economic sciences: indeed when we focus on the latter, it is in order to observe how they function as dispositifs (of knowledge and control, we could say, following Foucault). Dispositifs that, at one and the same time, shape and are embedded in what the sciences and economic experts treat as external to themselves: the economy. 1