The Payoff of Love and the Traffic of Favours: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Blurring of Value Realms in Flexible Capitalism

Abstract

This chapter is based on two ethnographic experiences in Spain, the first in a farming area of rural Catalonia (where I undertook research from 1986 to 1988), the second one in a regional economy in the south of the autonomous community of Valencia (where I carried out research in 1995/6 with Gavin Smith). A historical perspective, central to both analyses, has enabled a better understanding of historical transformation, particularly in relation to changes in production relations and to related emergent conflicts. By comparing these two instances, I wish to underscore the productive tension between two apparently distinct domains of social and moral obligation: that of personal and intimate relations (in the home, among friends and kin), and that of production relations (clearly linked to a market logic). Although in both cases a similar entanglement of values pertaining to different realms occurs, the degree and manner in which this situation seems to become structural to capital accumulation differs. I will propose that we need different categories from those that have characterized the social sciences since the rise of modernity. Instead of discrete, differentiated abstractions often opposed in pairs, we need methodological instruments that allow for pervasive ambiguity in order to understand present-day processes of value production, circulation and accumulation. Instead of an evolutionary understanding of temporality, we need historical complexity devoid of any form of teleology.