A whispered word: the importance of affective economy

This paper analyzes a brief interaction in a grocery store in a small Italian town to propose the concept of an "affective economy." Moving beyond classical economic, Marxist, or ANT perspectives, the analysis focuses on a shopkeeper's sad, monosyllabic response to a comment about his declining number of regular customers. This single utterance is interpreted as more than a simple transaction; it is an exchange that conveys and constitutes a shared affective reality—the melancholy of rural depopulation and marginalization. The paper argues that attending to this affective dimension reveals a deeper layer of the economy's embeddedness in society and adds a valuable concept to the anthropological toolbox.