DIALECTICAL ANTHROPOLOGY最新文献

This article addresses the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) between Mexico and Canada by examining the forms of disposability and job insecurity of Mexicans employed in Canadian agribusiness. We argue that the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has exacerbated the precarity and disposability of Mexican workers by restructuring family dynamics and care chains. This article represents a critique of the SAWP as a model of regulated labor migration, serving as a basis for analyzing the consequences of the proletarianization of the Mexican peasantry and its use as disposable labor for export.

The idea of whiteness has been used in the Anglo-American, middle-class, liberal settings to denote an essential group appurtenance on phenotypical and cultural terms and to code such appurtenance as a universal marker of privilege that cuts across any other differentiating axes that allocate societal advantages and disadvantages. The assumption that racialized skin colour and low social status are inferiorizing attributes of racialization, while white skin colour and high social class are privileged attributes of whiteness, has constructed the idea of whiteness as one that encompasses and supersedes the idea of class. Immigrants to Anglo-American multicultural societies have always been relegated to the margins of their host societies, and their economic exclusion, in particular, has been theorized as resulting from their racialization. This paper, however, compares and contrasts the marginalization of two migrant populations-namely, high-skilled immigrants to Canada, and Eastern European low-skilled immigrants to the UK-to problematize the assumption that whiteness has an essential sameness that universally cuts across other stratifying axes in society, and to show that an essentialist understanding of whiteness disregards class-based explanations for the economic exclusion of migrants, explanations which are often bound with the global circulation of capital and the dominant economic position of the rich nations from the Global North.

This paper compares the development of the tourism industry in two different Latin American locations: a municipality of Chile's Araucanía and Venezuela's Gran Sabana. In both locations, part of the indigenous population shows interest in the development of this industry, which presents potential as a source of locally generated income. This comparison focuses on examining how property rights and relations shape and are reshaped by the expansion of tourist activities in these locations, shedding light on two additional questions: first, the socioeconomic conditions that help explain the increasing participation of the indigenous population in the expansion of tourism in these regions; second, a cultural phenomenon that this expansion stimulates: the circulation of discursive representations of local environments as permanently inscribed with a particular form of collective labor. This paper will conceptualize this labor as "cultural labor" and, drawing from theorizations of the fetishism of commodities, will argue that the widespread appeals to this labor constitute a (paradoxical) form of discursive defetishization that is fostered by the logic of the tourist industry. This form of defetishization discursively subverts the principle of concealment that pervades commodity fetishism as theorized by Marx, but it is nonetheless a functional part of a social process that reinscribes and rearticulates capital as a social relation among the populations of these regions.

Drawing on ethnographic research with radical right-wing activists in Italy and Poland, my article reflects on the ways in which the Gramscian framework may enhance our understanding of the present-day political landscape. Gramsci's role in the article is threefold. First, since he was a keen observer of fascist developments, I relate his observations on fascism and inquire into their relevance for understanding the rise of the far right today. Second, I explore the agendas of the movements I studied through the Gramscian lens. Inspired by the special issue's editors, I examine the extent to which Gramsci's concept of "common sense" is helpful for analyzing contemporary far-right activism. Third, I relate my own ethnographic observation to analyses of a broader terrain of far-right politics to shed light on the phenomenon of "far-right Gramscianism." Bringing together all these observations on the radical right, "common sense" and Gramsci's legacy, I reflect on the complex interrelationship between the radical right and the radical left.

In this article, I take the principle underwriting Gramsci's philosophy of praxis that 'all men are philosophers', as a point of departure to interrogate the anti-cosmopolitan everyday conceptions of the world I encountered during my fieldwork in an Austrian Alpine village in the midst of the Corona pandemic. In an attempt to understand the social and political force of such vernacular reasonings, I map the contours of a critical phenomenology of common sense. Following Gramsci's lead, I reiterate that philosophical ideas uttered by the 'man and woman in the street' should be taken seriously by intellectuals. I argue that the moral and political judgements they contain do not just offer a unique basis for analysing the ways ideologies are rooted in the everyday, but also for tracing the intellectual currents underlying sedimented, exclusionary conceptions of belonging. In doing so, Gramsci's philosophy of praxis enables phenomenologically oriented anthropologists to move beyond de-historicised and romanticised depictions of the everyday whilst keeping their focus on everyday acts of meaning-making. By analysing the anti-cosmopolitan common sense ideas I came across through a Gramscian lens, I suggest that his work can form a key avenue for deciphering the social, historical and intellectual currents propelling societal change.