Economic moralities: value claims on the future

This special issue, ‘“Economic Moralities: Value claims on the future,” examines how social actors – who occupy vastly different positions in the global economy – draw on notions of morality in their efforts to orient the circulation of material resources. We use the term economic moralities to describe moral discourses regarding material circulation or the accumulation, consumption, and/or (re)distribution of wealth. Ethnographically grounded, articles in this special issue explore how economic moralities are achieved in unfolding interaction through language (spoken and written) and material practice. Taking inspiration from scholarship in linguistic and semiotic anthropology, this introduction asks how we might interrogate economic data differently if we imagined people to move between moral-economic logics as one might “code-switch” between languages (or value registers), alternating between moral priorities as one shifts in stance in unfolding conversation. We argue that economic moralities are partial and positioned discourses which set the semiotic grounds for processes of value creation. These moral discourses provide a foundation for processes of scale-making, directing participants’ (and analysts’) attention towards certain scales of relation and their attendant timescapes, while obscuring other moral and material relations from view.