Abstract

This chapter analyses different kinds of mobilisations, from open protest emerging in situations of conflict to less visible and more diffused forms of mobilisation or experimentation, using the tools of economic anthropology. Occupied factories, protests against mortgage foreclosures, the Slow Food movement and other cases of food activism: these phenomena, distant from one another both geographically and in terms of their immediate goals, express disagreement with the dominant system or one of its parts, attempting to resist, oppose or modify that system. The spaces of experimentation created by these forms of resistance or alternative economics are able to produce new social, political and economic imaginations, and new social configurations. Analysing forms of mobilisation, their scales of action and the networks they create, is an excellent way to interpret contemporary economic and political reconfigurations.