Abstract
This article argues for a pragmatics of the relations between life and economy, exploring regions of contact between both concepts. Its focus is on the so-called “economic emergencies” where access to the “essentials of life”, if not the biological life of human beings themselves, are at stake. In emergencies, the relationship between life and economy becomes an object of public controversy, appears in the elaborations of experts, and in the daily lives of people who make a living by mobilizing dispositions incorporated in the long time of other crises. The text thematizes the monetary ways of calculating the value of life that underpin the concept of cost of living and ways of articulating the materiality of life with the morality of the person in the search for life and for a life worth living in situations of extreme poverty and precariousness. The ethnographic basis of the article and the research program it proposes rests in research conducted on the Brazilian and Argentine hyperinflations of the end of the last century, on economic dynamics in landscapes of extreme poverty, such as those of the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, especially following the earthquake of January 12, 2010, and on some traces of the atmospheres of emergency surrounding the crisis of the covid-19 pandemic.
Keywords:
life; economy; ethnography; emergencies; crisis