Description: The Moral/Economies issue asks what is ownable, who owns, who owes, who makes, who takes, what is work, what is worth? What is a fair price, and who pays it? Is a given transaction a theft, a trade, a gift? If the arid abstraction of "economics" relentlessly flattens this complexity into two dimensions, the notion of "moral economy" demands, in the words of historian Nell Irvin Painter, "a fully loaded cost accounting" that considers the true price of any exchange--free, coerced, or somewhere in between.
Brief description: Marcie Cohen Ferris is professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a former president of the Southern Foodways Alliance.