In this essay, I challenge the ways in which global drug policy initiatives call for more humane drug policy and decriminalization. Although these initiatives promote human dignity and agency, they also encourage a particular approach to drug use and addiction. Embracing patientism in their liberating narratives of ‘treatment, not punishment,’ these voices take for granted the advantages of their proposed approach. Drawing on my experiences with Norwegian OST, I illustrate patients’ engagement and resistance towards the politically hyped social categories and ask how we can understand this socio-political desire for a narrative transformation.
{"title":"Patient Is the New Black","authors":"Aleksandra Bartoszko","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6722","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I challenge the ways in which global drug policy initiatives call for more humane drug policy and decriminalization. Although these initiatives promote human dignity and agency, they also encourage a particular approach to drug use and addiction. Embracing patientism in their liberating narratives of ‘treatment, not punishment,’ these voices take for granted the advantages of their proposed approach. Drawing on my experiences with Norwegian OST, I illustrate patients’ engagement and resistance towards the politically hyped social categories and ask how we can understand this socio-political desire for a narrative transformation.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130188247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Addicted to Christ, by Helena Hansen (2018)","authors":"J. Carroll","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6753","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"43 11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134400835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bourdieu’s anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu’s ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, ‘state = society = God.’ A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu’s lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state.
{"title":"The State as God: On Bourdieu's Political Theology","authors":"Victor L. Shammas","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6601","url":null,"abstract":"Bourdieu’s anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu’s ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, ‘state = society = God.’ A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu’s lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"2 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132285714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Our Freedom, the 52 min. documentary film explores everyday forms of individual freedom in contemporary rural Russia. Living remote and mostly beyond the reach of direct governmental intervention, the inhabitants of Pungino village live out their forms of sovereignty. In personal proximity to the protagonists, the film explores the possibilities and practices that emerge when money is scarce, time is abundant, and neither help nor control of the state seems present. While people garden, forage, hunt or reconstruct the local church, they address the philosophical question of what it means to have a good life: the connection with the natural environment and the protective role of community bonds surface as just as important as the capacity to act independently through self-sufficiency and craftsmanship.
{"title":"\"Our Freedom\": Sovereignty in Rural Russia","authors":"L. Kuen, Yu. A. Snigirev","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6542","url":null,"abstract":"Our Freedom, the 52 min. documentary film explores everyday forms of individual freedom in contemporary rural Russia. Living remote and mostly beyond the reach of direct governmental intervention, the inhabitants of Pungino village live out their forms of sovereignty. In personal proximity to the protagonists, the film explores the possibilities and practices that emerge when money is scarce, time is abundant, and neither help nor control of the state seems present. While people garden, forage, hunt or reconstruct the local church, they address the philosophical question of what it means to have a good life: the connection with the natural environment and the protective role of community bonds surface as just as important as the capacity to act independently through self-sufficiency and craftsmanship.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126942087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As a result of the pressures exerted by neoliberal economics and consumer capitalism, late-capitalist subjects are forced to compete in increasingly brutal circumstances in order to avoid the fate of symbolic and material annihilation. Economic and consumer engagement are not, however, solely based on coercion but are simultaneously facilitated by seductive ideals such as sovereignty. Conversations with those convicted for their involvement in investment fraud indicate the centrality of the notion of sovereignty to their subjective experience and, in turn, their motivation for fraud. The notion of economic sovereignty was key to their understanding of economic enterprise whereby they carved out spaces of extreme personal freedom in which they were free to engage in acts of serious and sustained economic predation. Similarly, perspectives on consumer sovereignty were characterised by a degree of excess whereby the individual who self-governs consumptive choices was replaced by the individual who is characterised by the absolute right to pursue pleasure in an unrestrained way. As a consequence, many personal barriers against harm and criminality were eroded. Thus, whilst acts of economic predation were driven by the deep-seated cultures of anxiety and insecurity produced within contemporary capitalism, they were also facilitated by the cultural profusion of notions of sovereignty in this context which ultimately served as a means of obfuscating the reality of the individual’s relationship with capital.
{"title":"Toxic Sovereignty:Understanding Fraud as the Expression of Special Liberty within Late-Capitalism","authors":"Kate Tudor","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6476","url":null,"abstract":"As a result of the pressures exerted by neoliberal economics and consumer capitalism, late-capitalist subjects are forced to compete in increasingly brutal circumstances in order to avoid the fate of symbolic and material annihilation. Economic and consumer engagement are not, however, solely based on coercion but are simultaneously facilitated by seductive ideals such as sovereignty. Conversations with those convicted for their involvement in investment fraud indicate the centrality of the notion of sovereignty to their subjective experience and, in turn, their motivation for fraud. The notion of economic sovereignty was key to their understanding of economic enterprise whereby they carved out spaces of extreme personal freedom in which they were free to engage in acts of serious and sustained economic predation. Similarly, perspectives on consumer sovereignty were characterised by a degree of excess whereby the individual who self-governs consumptive choices was replaced by the individual who is characterised by the absolute right to pursue pleasure in an unrestrained way. As a consequence, many personal barriers against harm and criminality were eroded. Thus, whilst acts of economic predation were driven by the deep-seated cultures of anxiety and insecurity produced within contemporary capitalism, they were also facilitated by the cultural profusion of notions of sovereignty in this context which ultimately served as a means of obfuscating the reality of the individual’s relationship with capital.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129356038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World by William Mitchell & Thomas Fazi, London: Pluto Press, 2017.
{"title":"Making the Left Great Again","authors":"G. Ramsey","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6504","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World by William Mitchell & Thomas Fazi, London: Pluto Press, 2017.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122137077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of Erik Swyngedouw’s Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Political Environment. 2018. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 222 pp. ISBN: 978-0-262-03822.
{"title":"Imagining the Political in a Post-Political Environment","authors":"Mathew A. Varghese","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6394","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Erik Swyngedouw’s Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Political Environment. 2018. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 222 pp. ISBN: 978-0-262-03822.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133570331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anthony Ellis, S. Winlow, D. Briggs, A. Esquinas, Rebeca Cordero Verdugo, Jorge Ramiro Pérez Suárez
Much of the academic literature on alcohol-based leisure focuses on the pleasures of hedonism and youthful cultural exploration in environments free from the prescriptions, pressures and routines of everyday life. In this article – in which we present data from our ongoing ethnographic research exploring the experiences and attitudes of young British tourists in the Spanish resort of Magaluf on the island of Majorca – we argue that the standard liberal social-scientific image of youth leisure is naive and misrepresents its variegated reality. Our research indicates that many young British tourists gain little contentment from their holiday in the sun. Rather than embarking on a leisure experience composed of boundless freedom, choice, indulgence, excess and that is indicative of personal consumer sovereignty, many of our interviewees could identify the regimented and commodified nature of alcohol-based tourism. Rather than satisfaction, they felt an imprecise dissatisfaction. Drawing upon elements of psychoanalytic theory, we argue that underneath our interviewees’ accounts of drunkenness and promiscuity lies an obdurate but imprecise sense of lack. Yet, it is precisely this absence which only recharges their motivation to do more of the same the year after in similar destinations, thus confirming the presence, power and domination of consumer sovereignty.
{"title":"Liberalism, Lack and 'Living the Dream': Reconsidering the attractions of alcohol-based leisure for young tourists in Magaluf, Majorca","authors":"Anthony Ellis, S. Winlow, D. Briggs, A. Esquinas, Rebeca Cordero Verdugo, Jorge Ramiro Pérez Suárez","doi":"10.5617/jea.6446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/jea.6446","url":null,"abstract":"Much of the academic literature on alcohol-based leisure focuses on the pleasures of hedonism and youthful cultural exploration in environments free from the prescriptions, pressures and routines of everyday life. In this article – in which we present data from our ongoing ethnographic research exploring the experiences and attitudes of young British tourists in the Spanish resort of Magaluf on the island of Majorca – we argue that the standard liberal social-scientific image of youth leisure is naive and misrepresents its variegated reality. Our research indicates that many young British tourists gain little contentment from their holiday in the sun. Rather than embarking on a leisure experience composed of boundless freedom, choice, indulgence, excess and that is indicative of personal consumer sovereignty, many of our interviewees could identify the regimented and commodified nature of alcohol-based tourism. Rather than satisfaction, they felt an imprecise dissatisfaction. Drawing upon elements of psychoanalytic theory, we argue that underneath our interviewees’ accounts of drunkenness and promiscuity lies an obdurate but imprecise sense of lack. Yet, it is precisely this absence which only recharges their motivation to do more of the same the year after in similar destinations, thus confirming the presence, power and domination of consumer sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"38 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114059055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper is based on an ongoing ethnographic research project conducted in the borderlands between Colombia and Venezuela, in particular the Colombian city of Cúcuta. There is a thriving smuggling trade between the two countries caused by Venezuela’s economic crisis and the extreme devaluation of goods. The area has become one of Colombia’s ‘hottest’ regions due to the proliferation of armed gangs that make money by smuggling of contraband, especially petrol. The article aims to describe how petrol vendors, transporters and smugglers conceptualise the state and how they negotiate and interact with state actors present in the borderlands. It engages in an anthropology of the state through the ethnographic lens of organised informal workers. Starting with a theoretical framework, it criticizes attempts to do anthropology in the margins of the state for its uncomfortably Hobbesian vision of the world, and settles instead on a ‘critical phenomenology of power’ (Krupa and Nugent 2015) as a methodology. It goes on to introduce two pimpinero trade unionists and the struggles of running petrol from the border as well as of political organising. The final section analyses this struggle as ‘insurgent citizenship’, a citizenry’s bottom up attempt to claim full access to their rights as citizens (Holston 2013), as well as ethnographically justifying the need for a conceptual borderland region. All informants’ names are anonymized apart from two trade union leaders who requested not to be anonymous.
{"title":"Frontera Combustible: Conceptualising the State Through the Experiences of Petrol Smugglers in the Colombian/Venezuelan Borderlands of Norte de Santander/Táchira","authors":"C. Beach","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6257","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is based on an ongoing ethnographic research project conducted in the borderlands between Colombia and Venezuela, in particular the Colombian city of Cúcuta. There is a thriving smuggling trade between the two countries caused by Venezuela’s economic crisis and the extreme devaluation of goods. The area has become one of Colombia’s ‘hottest’ regions due to the proliferation of armed gangs that make money by smuggling of contraband, especially petrol. The article aims to describe how petrol vendors, transporters and smugglers conceptualise the state and how they negotiate and interact with state actors present in the borderlands. It engages in an anthropology of the state through the ethnographic lens of organised informal workers. Starting with a theoretical framework, it criticizes attempts to do anthropology in the margins of the state for its uncomfortably Hobbesian vision of the world, and settles instead on a ‘critical phenomenology of power’ (Krupa and Nugent 2015) as a methodology. It goes on to introduce two pimpinero trade unionists and the struggles of running petrol from the border as well as of political organising. The final section analyses this struggle as ‘insurgent citizenship’, a citizenry’s bottom up attempt to claim full access to their rights as citizens (Holston 2013), as well as ethnographically justifying the need for a conceptual borderland region. All informants’ names are anonymized apart from two trade union leaders who requested not to be anonymous.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121861543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sovereignty continues to be an issue for political theorisation of its adherence to and resistance against specific ideological forms and interventions. Many of these political deliberations have assumed the constitution and contours of sovereignty to be a sovereign moment wherein in retrospect, there appears to be an act of sovereignty by the subject as part of a wider collective movement. Although Agamben and Santner seek ways to escape sovereignty framed as necessarily oppressive, nevertheless there are moments in which sovereignty still appears a desirable exception. This conundrum is considered in two scenarios: Pfaller’s exposition of the smoker as mundane, independent sovereign pleasure, and the recent #metoo movement as collective sovereign suffering. It is argued that in order to situate a discussion of sovereignty which departs from complete resistance to or escape from it, a recourse to Lacan’s concept of extimacy informed by Schmitt’s public interest as rule of law, is vital. Here we find that sovereignty is a concept and practice very much caught up with jouissance of the foreignness of extimacy which itself relies on the invisible other for cogency. It is both upon recognition of this sovereignty and in anticipation of it that jouissance and anxiety are harnessed in a process which, crucially, demands acting against the law. It appears that sovereignty is necessarily grounded in extimacy, a principle which although separating the subject from its context also apprehends it as obedient to the law. In staging the sovereign moment as one of anxiety and joussiance this paper claims that although the concept of sovereignty may today be little more than an illusion, we nevertheless continue to pursue it.
{"title":"The Conjecture of Sovereignty: New Anxieties for the Subject","authors":"Cindy Zeiher","doi":"10.5617/JEA.6247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5617/JEA.6247","url":null,"abstract":"Sovereignty continues to be an issue for political theorisation of its adherence to and resistance against specific ideological forms and interventions. Many of these political deliberations have assumed the constitution and contours of sovereignty to be a sovereign moment wherein in retrospect, there appears to be an act of sovereignty by the subject as part of a wider collective movement. Although Agamben and Santner seek ways to escape sovereignty framed as necessarily oppressive, nevertheless there are moments in which sovereignty still appears a desirable exception. This conundrum is considered in two scenarios: Pfaller’s exposition of the smoker as mundane, independent sovereign pleasure, and the recent #metoo movement as collective sovereign suffering. It is argued that in order to situate a discussion of sovereignty which departs from complete resistance to or escape from it, a recourse to Lacan’s concept of extimacy informed by Schmitt’s public interest as rule of law, is vital. Here we find that sovereignty is a concept and practice very much caught up with jouissance of the foreignness of extimacy which itself relies on the invisible other for cogency. It is both upon recognition of this sovereignty and in anticipation of it that jouissance and anxiety are harnessed in a process which, crucially, demands acting against the law. It appears that sovereignty is necessarily grounded in extimacy, a principle which although separating the subject from its context also apprehends it as obedient to the law. In staging the sovereign moment as one of anxiety and joussiance this paper claims that although the concept of sovereignty may today be little more than an illusion, we nevertheless continue to pursue it.","PeriodicalId":190492,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Extreme Anthropology","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115039766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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