Economy and ritual : studies of postsocialist transformations / edited by Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : ritual, economy and the institutions of the base / Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann -- Economy as ritual : the problems of paying in wine / Jennifer Cash -- Animals in the Kyrgyz ritual economy : symbolic and moral dimensions of economic embedding / Nathan Light -- From pig-sticking to festival : changes in pig-sticking practices in the Hungarian countryside / Bea Vidacs -- Kurban : shifting economy and the transformations of a ritual / Detelina Tocheva -- The trader's wedding : ritual inflation and money gifts in Transylvania / Monica Vasile -- "We don't have work, we just grow a little tobacco" : household economy and ritual effervescence in a Macedonian town / Miladina Monova.

According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people's economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.