Materiality and the making of moral economies

Abstract

Drawing upon three research projects in the Dominican Republic and Haiti over the past eight years, this paper examines the utility of a materialist approach to understanding how social relations are negotiated and interpreted among different strata and institutions. Throughout my fieldwork in multiple sites on the island of Hispaniola, materiality repeatedly emerged as a means through which research participants' socio-economic lives are shaped. I demonstrate how factors such as race, class, gender, and nationality intersect with social-material life to create stratifying effects. At the same time, people use material forms in positive ways to develop meanings and values, practice social relations, mitigate the effects of alienation, and obtain socio-economic mobility. I move away from the concept of stratification in favour of the more encompassing term “moral economy,” which has two advantages : a) in referring to processes of social formation, it acknowledges power relations without denying agency to less powerful social groups; b) it treats society and economy as intimately tied together, rather than as two separate social spheres, thus allowing discussion of how economic and social values combine in the production of social structure. This intertwining of different kinds of values in the term moral economy complements a material culture approach that examines things as both resources and objects replete with social meanings.