Back to the village. Lay cartographies of the economic expertise on the western coast of southern Italy
Abstract
The chapter offers a post-structuralist interpretation of economic expertise as a heterogeneous connection of professional, media, institutional and emotional elements capable of creating subjectivity and spatiality in line with contingent configurations of global divisions of labour. Through a snapshot analysis of economic discourses circulating in the rural peripheries of southern Italy, the chapter aims at dislocating the "economic expert" subject to reposition it in discursive-material nodes distributed in and between the structures of (re)productive life management.
Through this dislocation, it is possible to look at economic expertise without economists: a locally distributed semiotic device that grounds the contingent influence of economics in a global society.