WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ECONOMIC NATIONALISMS*

Abstract

As rising numbers of national governments promote economic nationalist policies and the withdrawal from (or renegotiation of ) global political and economic relationships, the impossibility of disconnecting from global circulations is illustrated by the traveling discourse of economic nationalism itself, although conceptualized and implemented quite differently as refracted through specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on the possibilities of world anthropologies, the authors build connected analyses of the lived effects and contradictions of economic nationalist policies through their ethnographic examples from Brazil, India, Uganda, and the US. In comparatively analyzing these contexts, the authors emphasize the plural, transhistorical, transnational, gendered, and contested nature of economic nationalist policies and discourses worldwide, pointing to the need for further empirical investigations into diverse understandings and political deployments of economic nationalist projects.