In this episode, Ipshita talks with Dr Courtney Lewis about the ways in which entrepreneurship is conceived and practiced in the Native Nations. Drawing on her ethnographic work with Cherokee small business owners and a recent project with indigenous food entrepreneurs, Courtney discusses the challenges that indigenous entrepreneurs face as well as the ways in which their entrepreneurial labor intersects with ideas of community, economic development, and sovereignty. We also discuss the complexities inherent in working as an ethnographer and particularly, an anthropologist amongst native communities and what are some steps anthropologists can take to establish trust, transparency, and an ethical commitment.
Dr Courtney Lewis is currently an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina – Columbia. A citizen of the Cherokee nation, Dr Lewis’ overall work is in economic development for Native Nations in the United States and, consequently, issues of sovereignty related to economic sustainability and stability. Her research areas include economic anthropology, Indigenous rights, economic justice, political economy, economic sovereignty, public anthropology, food and agricultural sovereignty, Native Nation economic development, American Indian studies, race and entrepreneurship, and economic colonialism. Dr Lewis is the author of ‘Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty’, published in 2019, which is based on her ethnographic work with indigenous small businesses. In Fall 2022, Dr Lewis is joining the Anthropology faculty at Duke University.
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Walter E. Little is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany, with a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies the social and political economies of Latin American indigenous peoples, particularly in Guatemala, Mexico, and in the Albany, NY region. His multi-sited ethnographic research combines political economy and interpretive perspectives in order to better understand the politics of identity, economic development, cultural heritage and tourism in urban places, and the everyday practices of handicrafts production and marketplace interactions. He is the author of numerous articles, books, and reviews, including Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity (2004), which won Best Book of 2005 from the New England Council for Latin American Studies, and Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013), coedited with Karen Tranberg Hansen and B. Lynne Milgram, which won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize. Walt is also the author of Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics, co-edited with Cristina Panella (2021).
B. Lynne Milgram is Professor of Anthropology at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Her research on gender and development in the northern Philippines has analyzed the cultural politics of social change with regard to women’s work in microfinance, handicrafts, and in the Philippine-Hong Kong secondhand clothing trade. Milgram’s current SSHRC funded Philippine research investigates transformations of urban public space and issues of informality, extralegality, and social entrepreneurship with regard to street vending, public markets, and food provisioning systems. Additionally drawing on transnational trade network scholarship, recent projects also analyze the northern Philippines’ emergent specialty Arabica coffee industry and artisans’ use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to market their crafts. Milgram has published this research in refereed journal articles and book chapters and in five co-edited volumes, including Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches (2009, with Katherine E. Browne), and Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013, with Karen Tranberg Hansen and Walter E. Little).
In the inaugural episode of the series, Ipshita talks to Dr Stefanie Mauksch about the ways in which economic anthropology and ethnographic research can help us understand the diverse experiences of entrepreneurship. Stefanie discusses her own professional path to studying entrepreneurship and her experiences doing ethnographic work at entrepreneurship events in different geographical and cultural contexts. One of the themes of this conversation is the friction between globally standardized discourses and localized, experiential life-worlds of entrepreneurship that create dynamic, shifting subjectivities among entrepreneurial actors.