Abstract
The 2008 crisis drives towards a new conceptualisation of the notion of wealth: this chapter exposes the principles of a new anthropology of wealth. This latter is the base on which humanity’s economic activities (always marked by excess—excess accumulation and excess in waste) can be understood. This anthropology examines the reasons that drive people to consider a particular object as precious, dear, attractive, worth being owned and collected. The basic question is: what is ‘wealth’ for human being?
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Notes
- 1.
I am simply touching on an issue here that would be worth examining more closely. The word ‘relationship’ is now very fashionable, but it is not a magic word. It is not enough to say ‘relationship’, with its sentimental/humanistic overtones, to solve all our problems, especially economic ones. It is not hard to noticehow relationships are often turned into ‘things’ when people get their hands on them, into a kind of sophisticated property that ends up justifying, at a higher level, the very logic of possession and power that governs the most arrogant form of egotism.
- 2.
Lévinas uses this apt phrase to assert, ‘This Desire [the capital letter indicates the specifically human dimension] is a desire in a being already happy: desire is the misfortune of the happy, a luxurious need’. (Lévinas 2011, 62). Similarly, Baudrillard states that ‘the essential is always beyond the indispensable’ (Baudrillard 1974, 51).
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Petrosino, S. (2017). The Need for an Anthropology of Wealth. In: Magatti, M. (eds) The Crisis Conundrum. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47864-7_10
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