Richard Pfeilstetter is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Seville. His research explores moral, political and economic dimensions of entrepreneurship, such as self-marketing, freelancing or project labor. Ethnographic insights from non-profits and start-ups in Spain, the UK and Germany inform his writing.

His latest publication, The anthropology of entrepreneurship, aims to answer the following questions: is enterprising a universal human capability or is it a personality, time, or culture-contingent behavior? Can we design and measure development or is it a human fantasy? How can academia study the market in an unbiased way, when competition, inventiveness, and rationality are at the very heart of its own workings?

In his talk, professor Pfeilstetter will present the anthropology of entrepreneurship, including historical-colonial scholarship of non-western economic systems, cross-cultural notions of social impact, and the politics of reflexive collaborations with ordinary enterprises across the globe.

Alessandro Narduzzo, professor at the Faculty of Economics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, will be the discussant for this seminar.