ABSTRACT

This chapter builds on insights from economic anthropology to explore values people pursue as ethical consumers. Anthropology has long insisted that the economic sphere includes not just the activities we get paid or pay for, but all the ways people produce, exchange, and consume things, services, and knowledge (see Chapter 3 for an economic perspective of ethical consumption in this volume). This means anthropologists must consider both non-monetary values, as well as what happens when social relations are monetarised. The morality of different kinds of economic relations, and how monetary value and other kinds of value coexist and interact, is foundational to economic anthropology and informs the way economic anthropologists think about ethical consumption.