Welcome to the first CJA issue of 2023 and the first to be produced by the new editorial team of Liana Chua (Editor), Natalia Buitron (Editor from October 2023) and Timothy Cooper (Reviews Editor). We have learnt a lot while sliding into our new roles, and we are immensely grateful to Andrew Sanchez and Tom White for leaving the journal in such excellent shape, Claudia Luna for her editorial assistance, and Janine Latham, Sascha Berghahn and the rest of the Berghahn team for their cheerful support and patience.
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Liana Chua, Natalia Buitron, Timothy Cooper","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410101","url":null,"abstract":"Welcome to the first CJA issue of 2023 and the first to be produced by the new editorial team of Liana Chua (Editor), Natalia Buitron (Editor from October 2023) and Timothy Cooper (Reviews Editor). We have learnt a lot while sliding into our new roles, and we are immensely grateful to Andrew Sanchez and Tom White for leaving the journal in such excellent shape, Claudia Luna for her editorial assistance, and Janine Latham, Sascha Berghahn and the rest of the Berghahn team for their cheerful support and patience.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44675384","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 article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with managers, politicians and political activists in the English public healthcare system. Rather than a dominance of financial accountability, I found a mish-mash of accountabilities, in which the duty to ‘balance the books’ was a key driver but one that relied on other forms of coercion. Campaigners mobilised the concept of political accountability against cuts and privatisation. While bureaucrats were often sympathetic to activists’ point of view, they felt constrained by ‘the reality’ of limited funds. Their conceptualisations of what was possible were enclosed. Debate regarding those limits was foreclosed. I sketch these limits on bureaucrats’ ethical imagination, theorising them as ideological closure. But at times, managers did imagine alternative possibilities. Mostly, they kept quiet regarding alternatives due to a fear of losing their jobs. Thus, corporate accountability – to one's employer – enforced service retrenchment in the name of financial accountability.
{"title":"Accountabilities in the NHS","authors":"P. Pushkar","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410109","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with managers, politicians and political activists in the English public healthcare system. Rather than a dominance of financial accountability, I found a mish-mash of accountabilities, in which the duty to ‘balance the books’ was a key driver but one that relied on other forms of coercion. Campaigners mobilised the concept of political accountability against cuts and privatisation. While bureaucrats were often sympathetic to activists’ point of view, they felt constrained by ‘the reality’ of limited funds. Their conceptualisations of what was possible were enclosed. Debate regarding those limits was foreclosed. I sketch these limits on bureaucrats’ ethical imagination, theorising them as ideological closure. But at times, managers did imagine alternative possibilities. Mostly, they kept quiet regarding alternatives due to a fear of losing their jobs. Thus, corporate accountability – to one's employer – enforced service retrenchment in the name of financial accountability.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46714224","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 article aims to expand both the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies and anthropological interests in the field of transnational think tanks, advocacy and policy advice. Drawing on ethnographic data from three such organisations, it investigates secrecy practices, focussing on how such practices amount to discreet diplomatic efforts. In a variety of ways, secrecy is utilised as a resource in foreign relations and diplomacy; it is a means to leverage status and influence. Although outwardly striving for transparency, think tanks use secrecy practices in their effort to establish themselves as actors of consequence in foreign relations and diplomatic circles. The practices of secrecy are part and parcel of the power games such organisations play, in which all participants learn and master what to discuss and what to keep silent about. These practices, however, pose a clear challenge to matters of accountability and transparency.
{"title":"Discreet Diplomacy","authors":"C. Garsten, Adrienne Sörbom","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410108","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article aims to expand both the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies and anthropological interests in the field of transnational think tanks, advocacy and policy advice. Drawing on ethnographic data from three such organisations, it investigates secrecy practices, focussing on how such practices amount to discreet diplomatic efforts. In a variety of ways, secrecy is utilised as a resource in foreign relations and diplomacy; it is a means to leverage status and influence. Although outwardly striving for transparency, think tanks use secrecy practices in their effort to establish themselves as actors of consequence in foreign relations and diplomatic circles. The practices of secrecy are part and parcel of the power games such organisations play, in which all participants learn and master what to discuss and what to keep silent about. These practices, however, pose a clear challenge to matters of accountability and transparency.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46319697","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}
Syantani Chatterjee, Luciana Chamorro, Fernando Montero
Promises of incorporation, threats of punishment, and fragile, revocable entitlements mark the signature of a modality of governance dedicated to the production of subjects who are neither included nor excluded from political or economic orders, but who are provisionally appended to them as though hanging by a thread. A wide array of political regimes renders these subjects simultaneously indispensable and expendable. The authors examine promise, threat and revocability as modalities of governance appearing across liberal and illiberal registers as a means to displace the costs, risks and responsibilities of political and economic projects onto the indeterminate subjects they simultaneously produce. The authors ask what subjects do as they are held in suspense, by studying the collectivities, social orders, and forms of political organisation that emerge amongst subjects as they anticipate the authorisations and the censures, the arrival and the forfeiture of governance.
{"title":"Held in Suspense","authors":"Syantani Chatterjee, Luciana Chamorro, Fernando Montero","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410102","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Promises of incorporation, threats of punishment, and fragile, revocable entitlements mark the signature of a modality of governance dedicated to the production of subjects who are neither included nor excluded from political or economic orders, but who are provisionally appended to them as though hanging by a thread. A wide array of political regimes renders these subjects simultaneously indispensable and expendable. The authors examine promise, threat and revocability as modalities of governance appearing across liberal and illiberal registers as a means to displace the costs, risks and responsibilities of political and economic projects onto the indeterminate subjects they simultaneously produce. The authors ask what subjects do as they are held in suspense, by studying the collectivities, social orders, and forms of political organisation that emerge amongst subjects as they anticipate the authorisations and the censures, the arrival and the forfeiture of governance.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49032998","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}
In this article, I track a housing scheme introduced in Hyderabad, India, to redevelop slums (in situ) into two-bedroom apartments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that existing forms of governance cyclically enact a suspension of poor people's lives and often dispossess the poor of one set of rights in the process of delivering another set. In their own descriptions of these schemes, displaced communities emphatically account for the forms of suffering they repeatedly incur, which are unaccounted for in the records of the state. In their experience, governance is not only arbitrary and labyrinthine, but it also entails necessary experiences of dispossession that ironically accompany schemes for their development. This regime of dispossession that chronically underlies schemes for poverty alleviation is what I call ‘cruel governance’. Over time, this mode of development accompanied by dispossession has resulted in cynical realignments of subaltern politics towards the state and its projects.
{"title":"Waiting for Dignity Housing","authors":"Indivar Jonnalagadda","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410106","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this article, I track a housing scheme introduced in Hyderabad, India, to redevelop slums (in situ) into two-bedroom apartments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that existing forms of governance cyclically enact a suspension of poor people's lives and often dispossess the poor of one set of rights in the process of delivering another set. In their own descriptions of these schemes, displaced communities emphatically account for the forms of suffering they repeatedly incur, which are unaccounted for in the records of the state. In their experience, governance is not only arbitrary and labyrinthine, but it also entails necessary experiences of dispossession that ironically accompany schemes for their development. This regime of dispossession that chronically underlies schemes for poverty alleviation is what I call ‘cruel governance’. Over time, this mode of development accompanied by dispossession has resulted in cynical realignments of subaltern politics towards the state and its projects.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44675886","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}
Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare bureaucracies, this article explores the place of emotions in the administrative treatment of cases—particularly those involving migrants, whose welfare rights are increasingly limited. Welfare offices are responsible for granting social assistance—in the form of medical treatment, material help, or financial benefits—in order to guarantee that those residing in Belgium live in dignified conditions. This article delves into civil servants’ emotional engagement, discourses, and relationship to ‘the state’ and into the way they decide on specific cases based on feelings, administrative guidelines, and instructions from above. It challenges the assumption that street-level bureaucrats’ discretion and daily practices often effectively restrict citizens’ access to public services and shows instead how emotions, professional ethics and values contribute to assessing deservingness, and to the way civil servants ‘do the state’ on a daily basis.
{"title":"Granting ‘Human Dignity’","authors":"Sophie Andreetta","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400204","url":null,"abstract":"Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare bureaucracies, this article explores the place of emotions in the administrative treatment of cases—particularly those involving migrants, whose welfare rights are increasingly limited. Welfare offices are responsible for granting social assistance—in the form of medical treatment, material help, or financial benefits—in order to guarantee that those residing in Belgium live in dignified conditions. This article delves into civil servants’ emotional engagement, discourses, and relationship to ‘the state’ and into the way they decide on specific cases based on feelings, administrative guidelines, and instructions from above. It challenges the assumption that street-level bureaucrats’ discretion and daily practices often effectively restrict citizens’ access to public services and shows instead how emotions, professional ethics and values contribute to assessing deservingness, and to the way civil servants ‘do the state’ on a daily basis.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46494597","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}
Sophie Andreetta, L. Enria, Pauline Jarroux, S. Verheul
With the affective turn, scholars pay increased attention to the emotional dimensions of everyday life. This special issue builds on this work through an explicit focus on bureaucracies to show what a more sustained attention to affects and emotions can bring to the study of the state, both as an apparatus and as an image. Contributions highlight the importance of ethnographically studying the affective relations and emotional engagements of public servants to understand how representations and practices of the state are brought together in often intangible, sometimes unspoken, but nonetheless powerful ways. In this Introduction we situate our wider contribution and the individual articles in debates about the social lives of the state and the daily practices of public servants. We postulate how affective intensities give rise to particular political imaginations and subjectivities, and we reflect on ethnography’s unique position within the study of emotions and affects in political anthropology.
{"title":"States of Feeling","authors":"Sophie Andreetta, L. Enria, Pauline Jarroux, S. Verheul","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400202","url":null,"abstract":"With the affective turn, scholars pay increased attention to the emotional dimensions of everyday life. This special issue builds on this work through an explicit focus on bureaucracies to show what a more sustained attention to affects and emotions can bring to the study of the state, both as an apparatus and as an image. Contributions highlight the importance of ethnographically studying the affective relations and emotional engagements of public servants to understand how representations and practices of the state are brought together in often intangible, sometimes unspoken, but nonetheless powerful ways. In this Introduction we situate our wider contribution and the individual articles in debates about the social lives of the state and the daily practices of public servants. We postulate how affective intensities give rise to particular political imaginations and subjectivities, and we reflect on ethnography’s unique position within the study of emotions and affects in political anthropology.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43237318","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 article aims at investigating how fear shapes everyday interactions between teachers and their ‘chiefs’ (primary school inspectors and pedagogical advisers) in Benin. Drawing on a fifteen-month ethnography in two school districts of the country, the article largely focuses on class visits and inspections, considered as critical events for the study of ‘fear at work’. These moments constitute contexts for immediate encounters between hierarchical authority and teachers and have been the subject of multiple transformations and normative recodifications partly led by international actors, particularly requiring important emotional work from the chiefs. Through a look back at the history of relations between teachers and their chiefs since independence, I suggest that fear works as an operating tool, enabling us to investigate notions of legitimacy and authority through which the state is spoken and performed.
{"title":"Fear at Work","authors":"Pauline Jarroux","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400206","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims at investigating how fear shapes everyday interactions between teachers and their ‘chiefs’ (primary school inspectors and pedagogical advisers) in Benin. Drawing on a fifteen-month ethnography in two school districts of the country, the article largely focuses on class visits and inspections, considered as critical events for the study of ‘fear at work’. These moments constitute contexts for immediate encounters between hierarchical authority and teachers and have been the subject of multiple transformations and normative recodifications partly led by international actors, particularly requiring important emotional work from the chiefs. Through a look back at the history of relations between teachers and their chiefs since independence, I suggest that fear works as an operating tool, enabling us to investigate notions of legitimacy and authority through which the state is spoken and performed.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49319103","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}
Studies of bureaucrats and bureaucracy have contributed to our understanding of the social production of indifference (Herzfeld 1992). However, in this article, I argue that this focus obscures the centrality of feelings, affect and emotions in their everyday functioning. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi with civil servants of the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, I show empirically how they did not—nor did they strive to—appear indifferent. Rather, feelings, affect and emotions shaped the ways in which they allocated assistance and instantiated the state in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai. Despite its general material constraints, these relief interventions enabled the Malawi state to be present and provide resources to some of its citizens, constituting (it as) a state of relief.
{"title":"A State of Relief","authors":"T. Hendriks","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400203","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of bureaucrats and bureaucracy have contributed to our understanding of the social production of indifference (Herzfeld 1992). However, in this article, I argue that this focus obscures the centrality of feelings, affect and emotions in their everyday functioning. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi with civil servants of the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, I show empirically how they did not—nor did they strive to—appear indifferent. Rather, feelings, affect and emotions shaped the ways in which they allocated assistance and instantiated the state in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai. Despite its general material constraints, these relief interventions enabled the Malawi state to be present and provide resources to some of its citizens, constituting (it as) a state of relief.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47157037","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 article considers how the image of a caring state is both performed and contested by the actual workings of Zimbabwe’s volunteer community case workers (CCWs). According to their policy mandate, the volunteers’ commitment to registering ‘the vulnerable’ and mobilising them for different welfare project purposes is based on an assumed affective closeness to their communities. Ethnographic investigation also identifies community-level care work as an affectively and economically charged field, where the CCWs navigate conflicting expectations and utilise their connectedness to other welfare providers to sustain life. As diversely situated, community-level, caring bureaucrats, they also assist their ‘cases’ to construct claims of vulnerability that fit the narrow categories of welfare organisations, recognising and addressing forms of vulnerability that go beyond such definitions from the outside. In such processes, the credibility of both welfare institutions and CCWs is challenged and reproduced.
{"title":"Reaching ‘the Vulnerable’ by Working from the Heart?","authors":"S. Hansen","doi":"10.3167/cja.2022.400205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400205","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how the image of a caring state is both performed and contested by the actual workings of Zimbabwe’s volunteer community case workers (CCWs). According to their policy mandate, the volunteers’ commitment to registering ‘the vulnerable’ and mobilising them for different welfare project purposes is based on an assumed affective closeness to their communities. Ethnographic investigation also identifies community-level care work as an affectively and economically charged field, where the CCWs navigate conflicting expectations and utilise their connectedness to other welfare providers to sustain life. As diversely situated, community-level, caring bureaucrats, they also assist their ‘cases’ to construct claims of vulnerability that fit the narrow categories of welfare organisations, recognising and addressing forms of vulnerability that go beyond such definitions from the outside. In such processes, the credibility of both welfare institutions and CCWs is challenged and reproduced.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47842371","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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