On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies

This chapter explores how analysing the formation of economic assemblages from a Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical perspective has allowed diverse economies researchers to account for power in its many forms, without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that a focus on power too often engenders. The goal of genealogy is to cast the taken-for-granted as contingent, contested, and often fraught with instability. This approach enables other ways of being in the world and a methodology for what Foucault called the ‘ethical cultivation of the self’. Applying these ideas to economic discourse and practice, the authors examine the ways in which a genealogical analytic runs through each of the phases of diverse and community economies research: the deconstruction of the hegemony of capitalism to open up a discursive space for non-capitalisms and facilitate an expanded, differentiated economic imaginary; the cultivation of non-capitalist subjectivities; and the construction of community economies.