Emergent Conversation 20

Moderated and Edited by Charles Dolph

President Joe Biden signs H.R. 5376, the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”, Tuesday, August 16, 2022, in the State Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith). The White House – P20220816CS-0389. Public domain.

Inflation is back. Its reemergence in the United States and Europe for the first time in four decades recalls the oil shocks and food crises that characterized prior inflation spikes, when monetarist orthodoxy coalesced around price stability as the overriding imperative of central banks. At the same time, the relative novelty of inflation in these core capitalist regions belies inflation’s history as a recurrent feature of collective life in many parts of the world. Renewed inflation thus poses a host of interesting questions to anthropologists—about inflation as an economic phenomenon, a topic of political debate and an object of policy action, as well as a collective experience (albeit unevenly felt).

In thinking about the current dynamics of inflation, I facilitated a virtual discussion with Federico Neiburg and Myriam Amri, edited and compiled here in three parts. We began by revisiting what we have in the existing corpus of anthropological literature that, directly and indirectly, addresses the topic in order to think anew about an anthropology of inflation. Next, we drew on different cultural and regional perspectives to parse out the variability and unevenness of inflationary phenomena with respect to issues of geopolitics and the materialities of climate change. In the final installment, we turned more directly to questions of reality and authority—political, social, interpretive—which inflations seem to provoke with particular intensity.