Pub Date : 2023-10-26DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231207732
Patrícia Alves de Matos
Austerity policies in Portugal unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction which intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women, making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the crisis. This article addresses the critical role of working-class women’s various forms of paid and unpaid care work in responding to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. It is shown that women’s care-based responses and distributive struggles sought to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice and freedom, the article argues that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.
{"title":"Distributed agency: Care, human needs, and distributive struggles in Portugal","authors":"Patrícia Alves de Matos","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231207732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231207732","url":null,"abstract":"Austerity policies in Portugal unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction which intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women, making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the crisis. This article addresses the critical role of working-class women’s various forms of paid and unpaid care work in responding to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. It is shown that women’s care-based responses and distributive struggles sought to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice and freedom, the article argues that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136377147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231205961
Daniel Sosna, Barbora Stehlíková, Pavel Mašek
Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.
{"title":"Ecologies of quantification in waste management: Landfilling, e-waste recycling, and car breaking","authors":"Daniel Sosna, Barbora Stehlíková, Pavel Mašek","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231205961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231205961","url":null,"abstract":"Quantification has become a privileged form of knowing and vehicle of governance. Anthropological critique has demonstrated that a view of numbers as independent carriers of meaning is untenable; instead, numbers should be conceptualized as being part of relations and temporalities, opening space for shifts in understanding. Proposing the perspective of ‘ecologies of quantification’, we acknowledge the wider notion of ecology that accommodates materiality, cognition, and experience, and acknowledges that the constituents of the relations are always in a process of becoming. We put waste management at the centre of our interest to explore the ways quantification attempts to conquer arguably one of the unruliest domains of contemporary social life. Based on our collaborative ethnographic research on the management of municipal solid waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices, and junked cars in Czechia, we point to problems emerging when numbers become stripped of their relations. Our research sheds light on experience in the process of quantification and demonstrates that there are multiple ways to know quantity.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135592190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231202083
Leo Hopkinson
Anthropologists have often conceptualized competition by contrasting it with cooperation, even when collective ends are sought and achieved by competing. This approach tells us little about the qualities of the relationships and subjectivities that competition sustains. I explore the qualities of competitive relationships and subjectivities among Accra boxers, many of whom feel a constant, simmering sense of competition with one another. Boxers describe these competitive relationships using kinship idioms, and distinguish keenly between these kinship metaphors and non-metaphoric kin relations. A sustained comparison between competitive relations and kin relations in Accra reveals how competition intertwines subjectivities and futures, rather than producing hyper-individualistic and self-interested ‘neoliberal subjects’. I thus argue that boxers use kinship as a metaphoric resource to help them navigate the fraught intimacies that competition fosters. Their rendering of competition as kinship suggests how anthropologists might theorize the contradictory nature of competitive relationships with more nuance.
{"title":"Boxing family: Theorising competition with boxers in Accra, Ghana","authors":"Leo Hopkinson","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231202083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231202083","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropologists have often conceptualized competition by contrasting it with cooperation, even when collective ends are sought and achieved by competing. This approach tells us little about the qualities of the relationships and subjectivities that competition sustains. I explore the qualities of competitive relationships and subjectivities among Accra boxers, many of whom feel a constant, simmering sense of competition with one another. Boxers describe these competitive relationships using kinship idioms, and distinguish keenly between these kinship metaphors and non-metaphoric kin relations. A sustained comparison between competitive relations and kin relations in Accra reveals how competition intertwines subjectivities and futures, rather than producing hyper-individualistic and self-interested ‘neoliberal subjects’. I thus argue that boxers use kinship as a metaphoric resource to help them navigate the fraught intimacies that competition fosters. Their rendering of competition as kinship suggests how anthropologists might theorize the contradictory nature of competitive relationships with more nuance.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135982223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231194245
Yi Wu, Xiaofeng Cheng
Using the rotating credit association created by a Lisu village, called the “village bank,” this study explores the social forces that have shaped, limited, or activated the ethnic community’s local environmental agency in southwest China. We argue that while the inherited elements of the Lisu indigenous beliefs could help local communities meet the ecological needs of our time, offering different ethics and perspectives to challenge the pursuit of material abundance based on extractive economic modes, the Lisu’s social and economic behavior is not solely determined by their religious beliefs. In the post-Mao economic reform era, village banks have become a fresh way through which Lisu villages activated their environmental agency, trying to achieve a balance between environmental protection and poverty reduction. Lisu’s “ambivalent” stance on environmental protection reflects the interactions between state-orchestrated development, NGOs, and the tension between maintaining tradition and reducing poverty.
{"title":"The village bank of a Lisu community: Indigenous belief, economic practices, and environmental conservation in Southwest China","authors":"Yi Wu, Xiaofeng Cheng","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231194245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231194245","url":null,"abstract":"Using the rotating credit association created by a Lisu village, called the “village bank,” this study explores the social forces that have shaped, limited, or activated the ethnic community’s local environmental agency in southwest China. We argue that while the inherited elements of the Lisu indigenous beliefs could help local communities meet the ecological needs of our time, offering different ethics and perspectives to challenge the pursuit of material abundance based on extractive economic modes, the Lisu’s social and economic behavior is not solely determined by their religious beliefs. In the post-Mao economic reform era, village banks have become a fresh way through which Lisu villages activated their environmental agency, trying to achieve a balance between environmental protection and poverty reduction. Lisu’s “ambivalent” stance on environmental protection reflects the interactions between state-orchestrated development, NGOs, and the tension between maintaining tradition and reducing poverty.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"252 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46433719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231194259
Petra Kuppinger
This article introduces Fairkauf, a charitable thrift store, in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes its work and participation in alternative economies of reuse, repair, repurposing, sharing, and care, and the store’s contributions to ecological and social sustainability. Thrift stores are contemporary responses to overproduction, hyper-consumption, social inequality, and ecological degradation. This article provides a nuanced ethnographic description of a thrift store. Such stores are often overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in individual and urban sustainability efforts. They are spaces of incidental sustainability that do not loudly advertise their work, but quietly help thrifters pursue more ecological lifestyles and help cities divert huge quantities of materials from landfills and incinerators. Thrift stores’ labor connects thrifters to activities and networks of often similarly hidden sustainability efforts by ordinary people across the world. Theoretically, I engage the role of thrift stores in alternative economies that contribute to more ecologically and socially sustainable lifeworlds and futures.
{"title":"Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany","authors":"Petra Kuppinger","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231194259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231194259","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces Fairkauf, a charitable thrift store, in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes its work and participation in alternative economies of reuse, repair, repurposing, sharing, and care, and the store’s contributions to ecological and social sustainability. Thrift stores are contemporary responses to overproduction, hyper-consumption, social inequality, and ecological degradation. This article provides a nuanced ethnographic description of a thrift store. Such stores are often overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in individual and urban sustainability efforts. They are spaces of incidental sustainability that do not loudly advertise their work, but quietly help thrifters pursue more ecological lifestyles and help cities divert huge quantities of materials from landfills and incinerators. Thrift stores’ labor connects thrifters to activities and networks of often similarly hidden sustainability efforts by ordinary people across the world. Theoretically, I engage the role of thrift stores in alternative economies that contribute to more ecologically and socially sustainable lifeworlds and futures.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"269 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48292798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231194253
Catherine M Tucker, Miriam Elizabeth Pérez Zelaya
Coffee has been a focal commodity for efforts to promote sustainability and social justice through alternative trade arrangements. Certifications such as Fairtrade have promised better prices, fair labor practices, environmental sustainability and improved livelihoods for small-scale coffee producers. A growing literature has examined alternative trade outcomes, but it remains an open question whether certifications help producers and their organizations improve livelihoods and conserve the environment. This study examines Café Orgánico de Marcala, SA (COMSA), which operates on principles of sustainability that emerged in conjunction with certifications. COMSA supports organic production through education and practices that integrate biodynamic principles, indigenous knowledge, and experimentation. COMSA has used fair trade premiums to build a multilingual school and start a recycling program, among other projects. Members and leaders acknowledge that problems exist yet point to progress. This ethnographic research uses grounded theory to examine COMSA’s approach to sustainability, its successes, and ongoing challenges.
{"title":"Fostering sustainability through environmentally friendly coffee production and alternative trade: The case of Café Orgánico de Marcala (COMSA), Honduras","authors":"Catherine M Tucker, Miriam Elizabeth Pérez Zelaya","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231194253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231194253","url":null,"abstract":"Coffee has been a focal commodity for efforts to promote sustainability and social justice through alternative trade arrangements. Certifications such as Fairtrade have promised better prices, fair labor practices, environmental sustainability and improved livelihoods for small-scale coffee producers. A growing literature has examined alternative trade outcomes, but it remains an open question whether certifications help producers and their organizations improve livelihoods and conserve the environment. This study examines Café Orgánico de Marcala, SA (COMSA), which operates on principles of sustainability that emerged in conjunction with certifications. COMSA supports organic production through education and practices that integrate biodynamic principles, indigenous knowledge, and experimentation. COMSA has used fair trade premiums to build a multilingual school and start a recycling program, among other projects. Members and leaders acknowledge that problems exist yet point to progress. This ethnographic research uses grounded theory to examine COMSA’s approach to sustainability, its successes, and ongoing challenges.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"231 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45420056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231195420
Petra Kuppinger
Sustainability is a much used and abused term. Sustainability is cool, and sustainability sells. Real estate developers advertise sustainable apartments and neighborhoods, travel agents offer sustainable tours, and retailers offer numerous sustainable products. Beyond this lucrative market for sustainable products and services (including some greenwashing), there exists a vast and growing but less visible landscape of small-scale sustainable practices and efforts where ordinary people address concrete ecological and social issues in their everyday practices, local initiatives, and projects. They act because they care for people and the environment and always did. They develop creative new practices and initiatives to address climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Many small efforts do not focus on the provision of singular sustainable products or outcomes, but seek to transform communities, empower local constituencies, and address multi-layered social and ecological issues. Across the world, people reuse things, mend clothes and appliances, upcycle and repurpose things, experiment with organic farming and urban agriculture, or organize fair cooperatives. Every day, ordinary people are seeding change, tending to their projects, and caring for people and nature around them. Some of their practices and initiatives catch the attention of others and can seed more change beyond their initial realm. Others stay small and local. Yet others might fail. This special issue presents ethnographic accounts of small-scale sustainable and social justice practices, activities, and projects on three continents. In their unique contexts and
{"title":"Introduction: Seeding change – the importance of small sustainable projects and activities","authors":"Petra Kuppinger","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231195420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231195420","url":null,"abstract":"Sustainability is a much used and abused term. Sustainability is cool, and sustainability sells. Real estate developers advertise sustainable apartments and neighborhoods, travel agents offer sustainable tours, and retailers offer numerous sustainable products. Beyond this lucrative market for sustainable products and services (including some greenwashing), there exists a vast and growing but less visible landscape of small-scale sustainable practices and efforts where ordinary people address concrete ecological and social issues in their everyday practices, local initiatives, and projects. They act because they care for people and the environment and always did. They develop creative new practices and initiatives to address climate change, environmental degradation, and social inequality. Many small efforts do not focus on the provision of singular sustainable products or outcomes, but seek to transform communities, empower local constituencies, and address multi-layered social and ecological issues. Across the world, people reuse things, mend clothes and appliances, upcycle and repurpose things, experiment with organic farming and urban agriculture, or organize fair cooperatives. Every day, ordinary people are seeding change, tending to their projects, and caring for people and nature around them. Some of their practices and initiatives catch the attention of others and can seed more change beyond their initial realm. Others stay small and local. Yet others might fail. This special issue presents ethnographic accounts of small-scale sustainable and social justice practices, activities, and projects on three continents. In their unique contexts and","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"225 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41873286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231192305
Eeva Kesküla
This paper critiques the centrality of work in capitalist societies and looks at people who have abandoned their location-bound jobs for the lifestyle of a digital nomad. Five months of fieldwork in Thailand during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that digital nomads aspired to have autonomy over their work, including reducing their work time. However, pursuing their ideal meant negotiating the desire to minimise labour hours on the one hand and guilt about not fitting the hegemonic values of hard work on the other. Digital nomads try to overcome the dominant work ethic in their talk about working productively. While these digital nomads generally spoke of ‘productivity’ in terms of autonomy and efficiency, concerns over ‘appearing lazy’ shifted the register to mainstream concepts of productivity, such as ‘hard work’. Drawing on philosophers of work and the need to take utopias seriously, this article proposes that even if small-scale and individualised, digital nomads’ attempts to reorganise their working lives are an important critique of work, especially in post-COVID trends toward more remote working.
{"title":"Challenging the dominant work ethic: Work, naps, and productivity of location-independent workers","authors":"Eeva Kesküla","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231192305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231192305","url":null,"abstract":"This paper critiques the centrality of work in capitalist societies and looks at people who have abandoned their location-bound jobs for the lifestyle of a digital nomad. Five months of fieldwork in Thailand during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that digital nomads aspired to have autonomy over their work, including reducing their work time. However, pursuing their ideal meant negotiating the desire to minimise labour hours on the one hand and guilt about not fitting the hegemonic values of hard work on the other. Digital nomads try to overcome the dominant work ethic in their talk about working productively. While these digital nomads generally spoke of ‘productivity’ in terms of autonomy and efficiency, concerns over ‘appearing lazy’ shifted the register to mainstream concepts of productivity, such as ‘hard work’. Drawing on philosophers of work and the need to take utopias seriously, this article proposes that even if small-scale and individualised, digital nomads’ attempts to reorganise their working lives are an important critique of work, especially in post-COVID trends toward more remote working.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"311 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43016410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231192308
E. Bähre
This article examines court cases brought by clients against private health insurance companies and against Brazil’s public health system. When clients take private health insurers to court, they successfully claim that the insurer violated their dignity, which entitles them to a moral damage payment. Similar cases against the state did not include moral damage claims. In relation to public healthcare, it is somehow not possible to equate dignity with economic value. One might conclude that the dignity of consumers in the market is worth more than that of citizens vis-à-vis the state. Instead, I argue for a more subtle approach by concentrating on the ethics of incommensurability. What legal and ethical considerations lead to such a fundamental incommensurability between personhood and economic value? How do the actors involved in court proceedings (claimants, prosecutors, judges, and insurers) perceive the differences between cases against insurance companies and against public health authorities? What can we make of the differences between the legal and everyday understandings of dignity and morality?
{"title":"The value of dignity: Health insurance, ethics and court cases in Brazil","authors":"E. Bähre","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231192308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231192308","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines court cases brought by clients against private health insurance companies and against Brazil’s public health system. When clients take private health insurers to court, they successfully claim that the insurer violated their dignity, which entitles them to a moral damage payment. Similar cases against the state did not include moral damage claims. In relation to public healthcare, it is somehow not possible to equate dignity with economic value. One might conclude that the dignity of consumers in the market is worth more than that of citizens vis-à-vis the state. Instead, I argue for a more subtle approach by concentrating on the ethics of incommensurability. What legal and ethical considerations lead to such a fundamental incommensurability between personhood and economic value? How do the actors involved in court proceedings (claimants, prosecutors, judges, and insurers) perceive the differences between cases against insurance companies and against public health authorities? What can we make of the differences between the legal and everyday understandings of dignity and morality?","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"289 - 310"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42249930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175973
Ben Eyre
The promotion of smallholder dairy farming in Rungwe District, Tanzania has been enormously successful, with the vast majority of households now in possession of productive dairy cows. This article compares supposedly traditional loans with self-help groups directly established by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that both reveal ‘big’ recipients rather than distributors of resources, and that those carrying out development activities often benefit most from them. Rather than advocating a moral judgement, the article suggests the value of thinking with and against the concept of distributive labour to explain the pragmatics of interdependent relations that are key to doing development. Detachment between beneficiary and donor is essential, and mediates salutary claims that distributive labour is a means to advocate for shared values about the distribution of wealth across the globe.
{"title":"Concerning distributive labour: Exploring the pragmatics of globalised interdependence","authors":"Ben Eyre","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175973","url":null,"abstract":"The promotion of smallholder dairy farming in Rungwe District, Tanzania has been enormously successful, with the vast majority of households now in possession of productive dairy cows. This article compares supposedly traditional loans with self-help groups directly established by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that both reveal ‘big’ recipients rather than distributors of resources, and that those carrying out development activities often benefit most from them. Rather than advocating a moral judgement, the article suggests the value of thinking with and against the concept of distributive labour to explain the pragmatics of interdependent relations that are key to doing development. Detachment between beneficiary and donor is essential, and mediates salutary claims that distributive labour is a means to advocate for shared values about the distribution of wealth across the globe.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"205 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44121662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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