Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231216255
Henrike Donner
This article addresses the complex ways in which poor urban women’s educational and training needs are embedded in official discourses of capacity creation and are constructed in opposition to their community and kinship networks, an aspect that is very often overlooked when such programmes are designed. It argues that this oversight is not a coincidence, as neoliberal policies and discourses of empowerment construct young women as ‘subjects of capacity’. Where they are addressed directly, young women are framed as the single, autonomous subjects of liberalism who, once enabled, overcome ‘traditional’ kin and community attachments. Based on the ethnographic study of vocational training for beauticians provided by an Indian NGO, the article argues that such interventions are geared towards ‘community development’ and therefore reference broader social landscapes, but that the participants in training see themselves and the process as part of, rather than as opposed to, kin and community obligations. While education and training are more often than not conceived as stand-alone projects offering young women a way into employment and the labour market, the article foregrounds the class-based limits of such workist approaches and the entanglements between body work, caste/class, and histories of feminized poverty. It demonstrates how young women from lower-caste and lower-class backgrounds see opportunities in the beauty industry mainly as supporting their roles as responsible daughters, future wives and daughters-in-law realized within the complex economies of marginal urban communities. They are also acutely aware that while the actual work of the beautician allows some access to the world of ‘professional’ modern and classed notions of femininity and, arguably, a more dignified workplace than in domestic service, the pitfalls of an industry built on gendered, racialized and classist inclusions and hierarchies are noted too. Critiquing the mainstream feminist focus on access to the labour market, the article argues that young women are fully aware of their own precarious relationship with ideals of neoliberal constructs of autonomous subjectivities promoted by the state and its agents.
{"title":"‘The Girls are Alright’: Beauty work and neoliberal regimes of responsibility among young women in Urban India","authors":"Henrike Donner","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231216255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231216255","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the complex ways in which poor urban women’s educational and training needs are embedded in official discourses of capacity creation and are constructed in opposition to their community and kinship networks, an aspect that is very often overlooked when such programmes are designed. It argues that this oversight is not a coincidence, as neoliberal policies and discourses of empowerment construct young women as ‘subjects of capacity’. Where they are addressed directly, young women are framed as the single, autonomous subjects of liberalism who, once enabled, overcome ‘traditional’ kin and community attachments. Based on the ethnographic study of vocational training for beauticians provided by an Indian NGO, the article argues that such interventions are geared towards ‘community development’ and therefore reference broader social landscapes, but that the participants in training see themselves and the process as part of, rather than as opposed to, kin and community obligations. While education and training are more often than not conceived as stand-alone projects offering young women a way into employment and the labour market, the article foregrounds the class-based limits of such workist approaches and the entanglements between body work, caste/class, and histories of feminized poverty. It demonstrates how young women from lower-caste and lower-class backgrounds see opportunities in the beauty industry mainly as supporting their roles as responsible daughters, future wives and daughters-in-law realized within the complex economies of marginal urban communities. They are also acutely aware that while the actual work of the beautician allows some access to the world of ‘professional’ modern and classed notions of femininity and, arguably, a more dignified workplace than in domestic service, the pitfalls of an industry built on gendered, racialized and classist inclusions and hierarchies are noted too. Critiquing the mainstream feminist focus on access to the labour market, the article argues that young women are fully aware of their own precarious relationship with ideals of neoliberal constructs of autonomous subjectivities promoted by the state and its agents.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":" 46","pages":"399 - 421"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138616801","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 : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231217928
Henrike Donner, Victoria Goddard
This special issue presents a range of case studies that exemplify the potential of kinship for thinking about and acting in relation to various kin and non-kin others in ways that invite us to reconsider the boundaries of politics and the political. The introduction examines ethnographic research that informs the articles in the special issue and shows the ways in which tensions and continuities across relations of intimacy, family and kinship, play out in response to contemporary capitalism. The articles in the special issue demonstrate the usefulness of exploring the interface and overlaps between the political and other fields that are all too often positioned – within scholarship and public discourses – as the antithesis of the political, variously understood in terms of the private, the familial, the domestic and the sphere of kinship.
{"title":"Kinship and the politics of responsibility: An introduction","authors":"Henrike Donner, Victoria Goddard","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231217928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231217928","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue presents a range of case studies that exemplify the potential of kinship for thinking about and acting in relation to various kin and non-kin others in ways that invite us to reconsider the boundaries of politics and the political. The introduction examines ethnographic research that informs the articles in the special issue and shows the ways in which tensions and continuities across relations of intimacy, family and kinship, play out in response to contemporary capitalism. The articles in the special issue demonstrate the usefulness of exploring the interface and overlaps between the political and other fields that are all too often positioned – within scholarship and public discourses – as the antithesis of the political, variously understood in terms of the private, the familial, the domestic and the sphere of kinship.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":" 8","pages":"331 - 364"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138619022","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 : 2023-10-26DOI: 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: 10.1177/0308275X231194259
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: 10.1177/0308275X231194245
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: 10.1177/0308275X231194253
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: 10.1177/0308275X231192305
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 : 2023-09-01DOI: 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}
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