The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism

Concepts such as “reciprocity,” “embeddedness,” and “social capital” have been the main tools for description and analysis of social relations sustaining economic activities in areas defined as regional economies or industrial districts, becoming models for successful development in Europe. Historicizing these concepts, stressing the concrete political agendas of the scholars who produced them, reveals them as paradoxical in that, though they are abstract, their main force lies in their social, cultural, historical, and spatial situatedness. This situation points to the awkwardness of “ethnographic realism” and the need for a kind of “reflexive historical realism” to enhance viable anthropological communication.