Abstract

The introduction provides a conceptual framework for this edited collection by locating it in the interfaces between three distinctive bodies of scholarship: on marketization and the social ‘disembedding’, in Karl Polanyi’s seminal terminology, of the economy; on the commodification of ever-widening terrains of life and the (re)construction and (re)assertion of various ‘communities’ in response to such far-reaching social dislocations; and on the various roles played by different forms of nostalgia in moments and periods of social crises. This introduction thus develops a theoretical synthesis to provide the conceptual spine and necessary coherence for the volume in its entirety.