The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, 2 vols. (2018)

“Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies. By mapping the grey zones, blurred boundaries, types of ambivalence and contexts of complexity, this book creates the first Global Map of Informality. The accompanying database (www.in-formality.com) is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice.”

Edited by Alena Ledeneva, with Anna Bailey, Sheelagh Barron, Costanza Curro, and Elizabeth Teague
Fringe series
Publisher UCL Press, London, 2018
Creative Commons BY 4.0 License
ISBN 9781911307907 & 9781787351899
xxix+434 & xxix+538 pages

Publisher, Vol. 2
OAPEN, Vol. 2
WorldCat, Vol. 2

Volume 1: PDF, PDF (10 MB)
Volume 2: PDF (15 MB)
Online resource (wiki)

C. A. Gregory: Gifts and Commodities, 2nd ed. (1982/2015)

“C. A. Gregory’s Gifts and Commodities is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy in anthropology.

Gifts and Commodities is, at once, a critique of neoclassical economics and development theory, a critical history of colonial Papua New Guinea, and a comparative ethnography of exchange in Melanesian societies. This new edition includes a foreword by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and a new preface by the author that discusses the ongoing response to the book and the debates it has engendered, debates that have become more salient in our evermore neoliberal and globalized era.”

First edition published by Academic Press, London, 1982.

Second edition
Foreword by Marilyn Strathern
New Preface by the Author
Publisher HAU Books, Chicago, 2015
Open access
ISBN 0990505014, 9780990505013
lxiii+268 pages

Reviews: Ronald Waterbury (American Anthropology, 1985), C.J. Bliss (Contrib Pol Economy).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

Jimmie Durham: A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics (1993)

A collection of writings by the American Indian Movement activist, poet and contemporary artist.

“In 50 articles, reviews, polemics and poems, Durham attacks the bases of the US nation-state, its cowboys’n’indians foundation myths, its commercialisation of Indian wisdom, and the very impossibility of speaking about the Indian experience in English. For a people so massively colonised, victims of an ongoing genocide, art is no luxury. It is the necessarily tricky, duplicitous practice of the Coyote, revealing over and over again the ignorance of power and celebrating its own escapades and escapes.” (from a review by Sean Cubitt, Frieze, 1994)

Edited by Jean Fisher
Publisher Kala Press, London, 1993
ISBN 0947753044, 9780947753047
255 pages
via x

Review: Tony Godfrey (Art Book 1994).

WorldCat

PDF (15 MB, no OCR)
ARG