Solidarity, reciprocity, and economy in times of downturn: Understanding and articulating the logics of old and new values in late capitalism.

The network held its first workshop at U. Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain in February 2014, organized by Hugo Valenzuela and Peter Simonič with the assistance of Marta Lobato. The theme of the workshop was ‘Solidarity, reciprocity, and economy in times of downturn: Understanding and articulating the logics of old and new values in late capitalism’. There were 15 participants, many of them PhD students, and 8 papers were presented on a variety of topics: microcredit and solidarity finance in Brazil; social entrepreneurship; ‘low-budget urbanity’; mortgage over-indebtedness; food cooperatives in Catalonia; Swiss dairy farming in the face of neoliberalization; and Slovenian squats as sites of emerging commons. Several of the papers from the workshop were subsequently published as part of a special issue in the journal Ars & Humanitas, under the guest editorship of Peter Simonič ( http://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/arshumanitas/issue/view/237 ). Writes Simonič in his introduction, “the number of doctoral students in anthropology present at the seminar gave the impression that the theme speaks to the generational turn in a time of crisis in the social welfare state, and that anthropological theory of economy pragmatically is shifting into activism among young and unemployed anthropologists”.