Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156713
Pauline Destrée
In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism.
{"title":"‘We work for the Devil’: Oil extraction, kinship and the fantasy of time on the offshore frontier","authors":"Pauline Destrée","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231156713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231156713","url":null,"abstract":"In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"24 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47093460","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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139163
Maxim Bolt
South Africa’s Master of the High Court administers property inheritance. Described as a ‘creature of statute’, and staffed by legally trained officials, the law takes centre-stage. Focusing on Johannesburg, the Master’s biggest and busiest branch, this article examines how law is performed in bureaucratic encounters, and how this shapes the everyday relations that make legal bureaucrats as middle-class professionals. Middle-class status is performed in the very enactment of a professional system, inflected by the racialised positioning of a new post-apartheid generation of largely black officials. Formal qualifications facilitate forms of distinction that maintain both prestige and everyday roles. Yet this is fraught. The Master and its administrators are positioned between post-apartheid potential and apartheid legal legacies; between transformation and a still racialised society; between professional ideal as legal bureaucrats and the career possibilities of a more lawyerly legal world.
{"title":"‘Creature of statute’: Legal bureaucracy and the performance of professionalism in Johannesburg","authors":"Maxim Bolt","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139163","url":null,"abstract":"South Africa’s Master of the High Court administers property inheritance. Described as a ‘creature of statute’, and staffed by legally trained officials, the law takes centre-stage. Focusing on Johannesburg, the Master’s biggest and busiest branch, this article examines how law is performed in bureaucratic encounters, and how this shapes the everyday relations that make legal bureaucrats as middle-class professionals. Middle-class status is performed in the very enactment of a professional system, inflected by the racialised positioning of a new post-apartheid generation of largely black officials. Formal qualifications facilitate forms of distinction that maintain both prestige and everyday roles. Yet this is fraught. The Master and its administrators are positioned between post-apartheid potential and apartheid legal legacies; between transformation and a still racialised society; between professional ideal as legal bureaucrats and the career possibilities of a more lawyerly legal world.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"419 - 438"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44674064","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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139159
Marek Mikuš
Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their ‘new’ counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects.
{"title":"‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia","authors":"Marek Mikuš","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139159","url":null,"abstract":"Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their ‘new’ counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"439 - 456"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42397480","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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139154
Miranda Sheild Johansson
The recently re-branded and highly digitalised Bolivian Tax Office, Servicio de Impuestos Nacionales (SIN), works to consolidate various socio-economic groups, such as the Aymara bourgeoisie (wealthy traders who identify as all or part indigenous), into a new middle class. SIN’s motivations to do so are bound up in broader international financial logics where the development of an archetypal European middle class – the so-called backbone of society – is considered key to a healthy tax profile. The efforts to forge a new middle class involves the deliberate projection of SIN as an accountable, effective, and ‘modern’ organisation, with the aim of promoting a broader fiscal culture that embodies these same characteristics; targeted education of the populace about taxpaying as an ethical act in line with highland indigenous values; and, policy-making that encourages income tax over VAT (value-added tax). However, these new middle classes experience the temporality and individualising effects of SIN’s system as incompatible with the money flows and values of their own economic lives. Specific areas of contention include the rhythms of incomes and the ethics of risk- and profit-sharing. In exploring this incompatibility, I argue that fiscal systems are key to the production and imaginations of middle-classness, both as they succeed and fail.
玻利维亚税务局(Servicio de Impuestos Nacionales, SIN)最近重新命名并高度数字化，致力于整合各种社会经济群体，如艾马拉资产阶级(认为自己是全部或部分土著的富裕商人)，成为新的中产阶级。SIN这样做的动机与更广泛的国际金融逻辑密切相关，在国际金融逻辑中，典型的欧洲中产阶级——所谓的社会支柱——的发展被认为是健康税收状况的关键。打造新中产阶级的努力包括有意将国家统计局塑造为一个负责任、有效和“现代”的组织，目的是促进体现这些特征的更广泛的财政文化;有针对性地对民众进行纳税教育，使其成为符合高地本土价值观的道德行为;二是政策制定鼓励征收所得税而非增值税。然而，这些新兴的中产阶级经历了SIN系统的暂时性和个体化影响，与他们自己经济生活的资金流动和价值观不相容。具体的争论领域包括收入的节奏以及风险和利润分享的伦理。在探讨这种不兼容性时，我认为财政制度是中产阶级产生和想象的关键，无论是成功还是失败。
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Pub Date : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139160
Jon Schubert
Global imaginaries of middle-classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, more often than not conform to broadly capitalist-liberal aspirations, through globalised markers of consumption and individual social advancement. However, as this ethnographic material from Mozambique’s mining and hydrocarbons sector suggests, even under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, alternative imaginings of middle-classness, based on technical competence, cosmopolitanism, work ethos and professionalism as contributing to a larger narrative of national progress persist as echoes of socialist technical assistance among the technocrats managing the sector. This article explores how professionalism is constructed across regime changes, from a socialist, high modernist socio-political project that has all but vanished today as a global emancipatory reference, to the current, neoliberal economic and political dispensation that requires of public administrators to promote a business-friendly climate. Professionalism, I show, cuts across generations despite considerable differences, indexing this class’s shifting claims on the state.
{"title":"‘A vision for the future’: Professional ethos as boundary work in Mozambique’s public sector","authors":"Jon Schubert","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139160","url":null,"abstract":"Global imaginaries of middle-classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, more often than not conform to broadly capitalist-liberal aspirations, through globalised markers of consumption and individual social advancement. However, as this ethnographic material from Mozambique’s mining and hydrocarbons sector suggests, even under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, alternative imaginings of middle-classness, based on technical competence, cosmopolitanism, work ethos and professionalism as contributing to a larger narrative of national progress persist as echoes of socialist technical assistance among the technocrats managing the sector. This article explores how professionalism is constructed across regime changes, from a socialist, high modernist socio-political project that has all but vanished today as a global emancipatory reference, to the current, neoliberal economic and political dispensation that requires of public administrators to promote a business-friendly climate. Professionalism, I show, cuts across generations despite considerable differences, indexing this class’s shifting claims on the state.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"400 - 418"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47390497","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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139161
Hadas Weiss
If the capitalist state could choose its ideal citizenry, this citizenry would be middle class. It would be so in the conventional sense of the term: modern and individualist, ambitious and hard-working, and above all, propertied and professional. In other words, it would be invested in the material and human-capital projects that constitute a state’s competitiveness in the global economy. In holding up its end of the deal, such citizenry would expect and be entitled to the fruits of the expanding economic pie. Indeed, it could receive those fruits at the same time as surplus would be accumulated and profit pocketed by financiers and employers. The luckiest of these citizens would then be granted enough stability and prosperity to continue working and investing in the projects that enhance national economic growth. This virtuous cycle is a pillar of the modern liberal state project. And to the extent that the middle classes are those for whom the state system delivers on its promise of stability and prosperity (as the introduction to this collection suggests), it works. Until it stops working. Because, in spite of many years of deliberate efforts and public investments designed to turn the core of their populations into model middle classes, states and their citizens run up against insurmountable obstacles to the realization of this ideal. The articles in this collection illustrate some of their failures. In South Africa, cadres of black salaried professionals performing their newfound authority and prestige are plagued with the injuries of limited recognition and unrealized potential. Mining and hydrocarbons functionaries in Mozambique fashion their professional selves in relation to an idealized national project, yet as this project erodes, their relationship to the state become unstable. The Aymara bourgeoisie of Bolivia, who are to demonstrate national success while conforming to global standards, balk at the state’s efforts to redirect their profits away from their kin and business networks. For women in India, the promise of homeownership-related autonomy intensifies their responsibilities as home-makers and caregivers. Jordan’s attempts to redefine gender roles are undermined by unemployment, discrimination, insufficient childcare, lack of safe and reliable public transportation and a suburbanized built environment catering to male breadwinners. And in Croatia, the
{"title":"Afterword: The middle class and the capitalist state","authors":"Hadas Weiss","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139161","url":null,"abstract":"If the capitalist state could choose its ideal citizenry, this citizenry would be middle class. It would be so in the conventional sense of the term: modern and individualist, ambitious and hard-working, and above all, propertied and professional. In other words, it would be invested in the material and human-capital projects that constitute a state’s competitiveness in the global economy. In holding up its end of the deal, such citizenry would expect and be entitled to the fruits of the expanding economic pie. Indeed, it could receive those fruits at the same time as surplus would be accumulated and profit pocketed by financiers and employers. The luckiest of these citizens would then be granted enough stability and prosperity to continue working and investing in the projects that enhance national economic growth. This virtuous cycle is a pillar of the modern liberal state project. And to the extent that the middle classes are those for whom the state system delivers on its promise of stability and prosperity (as the introduction to this collection suggests), it works. Until it stops working. Because, in spite of many years of deliberate efforts and public investments designed to turn the core of their populations into model middle classes, states and their citizens run up against insurmountable obstacles to the realization of this ideal. The articles in this collection illustrate some of their failures. In South Africa, cadres of black salaried professionals performing their newfound authority and prestige are plagued with the injuries of limited recognition and unrealized potential. Mining and hydrocarbons functionaries in Mozambique fashion their professional selves in relation to an idealized national project, yet as this project erodes, their relationship to the state become unstable. The Aymara bourgeoisie of Bolivia, who are to demonstrate national success while conforming to global standards, balk at the state’s efforts to redirect their profits away from their kin and business networks. For women in India, the promise of homeownership-related autonomy intensifies their responsibilities as home-makers and caregivers. Jordan’s attempts to redefine gender roles are undermined by unemployment, discrimination, insufficient childcare, lack of safe and reliable public transportation and a suburbanized built environment catering to male breadwinners. And in Croatia, the","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"477 - 480"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42325329","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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139151
G. Hughes
The figure of the middle-class housewife or ‘rabbat bayt’ emerged in the late 19th-century Arabic-language public sphere amidst the colonial encounter. This gendering of middle-classness responded to a perceived cultural ‘lag’ yet now itself increasingly signifies backwardness in relation to ideals of middle-classness emphasizing women’s education and community service over older norms of purity and propriety. Today, amidst unemployment, discrimination, lack of childcare, lack of safe and reliable public transportation and a highly suburbanized built environment catering to male breadwinners, contemporary Jordanian families must navigate multiple class and gender paradigms. Against a tendency towards salvage ethnography that misrecognizes these constraints as manifestations of deeply held ‘traditional’ values, I emphasize their historicity, arguing that it is only by recognizing housewifery itself as a state project characteristic of the 20th century that we can appreciate how state-building projects drive the gendering of class roles – and the classing of gender roles.
{"title":"Engineering gender, engineering the Jordanian State: Beyond the salvage ethnography of middle-class housewifery in the Middle East","authors":"G. Hughes","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139151","url":null,"abstract":"The figure of the middle-class housewife or ‘rabbat bayt’ emerged in the late 19th-century Arabic-language public sphere amidst the colonial encounter. This gendering of middle-classness responded to a perceived cultural ‘lag’ yet now itself increasingly signifies backwardness in relation to ideals of middle-classness emphasizing women’s education and community service over older norms of purity and propriety. Today, amidst unemployment, discrimination, lack of childcare, lack of safe and reliable public transportation and a highly suburbanized built environment catering to male breadwinners, contemporary Jordanian families must navigate multiple class and gender paradigms. Against a tendency towards salvage ethnography that misrecognizes these constraints as manifestations of deeply held ‘traditional’ values, I emphasize their historicity, arguing that it is only by recognizing housewifery itself as a state project characteristic of the 20th century that we can appreciate how state-building projects drive the gendering of class roles – and the classing of gender roles.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"359 - 380"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46166243","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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139157
Maxim Bolt, Jon Schubert
The ‘middle class’ has become the subject of euphoric narratives of growth and improving standards of living around the globe, and the object of government interventions and social engineering. Government interventions may be ineffective, have unintended outcomes, or be left barely articulated. Yet the place of the middle classes as embodying national success, stability and modernity has taken on the power of common sense. Modern states have long made middle classes, and in turn been legitimated by them. Indeed, ‘state’ and ‘middle class’ are sharply normative concepts – bound up with ideals as much as ideas. They represent interrelated, morally loaded projects of demarcation, distinction and recognition. This special issue examines how state institutions make middle classes through such normative commitments, and how they are made by them in turn.
{"title":"Engineering the middle classes: State institutions and the aspirations of citizenship","authors":"Maxim Bolt, Jon Schubert","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139157","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘middle class’ has become the subject of euphoric narratives of growth and improving standards of living around the globe, and the object of government interventions and social engineering. Government interventions may be ineffective, have unintended outcomes, or be left barely articulated. Yet the place of the middle classes as embodying national success, stability and modernity has taken on the power of common sense. Modern states have long made middle classes, and in turn been legitimated by them. Indeed, ‘state’ and ‘middle class’ are sharply normative concepts – bound up with ideals as much as ideas. They represent interrelated, morally loaded projects of demarcation, distinction and recognition. This special issue examines how state institutions make middle classes through such normative commitments, and how they are made by them in turn.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"347 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42963120","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 : 2022-11-05DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139158
Henrike Donner
This article traces the way the intersection between gender, class and family values is reorganised in relation to state policies that enable propertied citizenship through home-ownership. Focusing on ethnographic data from Kolkata, India, it discusses how women realise propertied citizenship in exchange for care work rather than through employment as developmentalist and liberal feminist discourses suggest. Here the way women’s lives are envisaged and represented through investment in high levels of educational attainment is in contrast to low levels of employment, symptomatic of what I call ‘liminal states’ – a gendered state of immaturity and dependence on kin. Home-ownership as a means of ‘empowerment’ configures the home as the economic and affective focus of gendered care work, which reproduces Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’, whereby the desire to own a home and the practices of homemaking hamper autonomy and restrict the efficacy of agency.
{"title":"Liminal states: Propertied citizenship and gendered kin work in middle-class Kolkata families","authors":"Henrike Donner","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139158","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the way the intersection between gender, class and family values is reorganised in relation to state policies that enable propertied citizenship through home-ownership. Focusing on ethnographic data from Kolkata, India, it discusses how women realise propertied citizenship in exchange for care work rather than through employment as developmentalist and liberal feminist discourses suggest. Here the way women’s lives are envisaged and represented through investment in high levels of educational attainment is in contrast to low levels of employment, symptomatic of what I call ‘liminal states’ – a gendered state of immaturity and dependence on kin. Home-ownership as a means of ‘empowerment’ configures the home as the economic and affective focus of gendered care work, which reproduces Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’, whereby the desire to own a home and the practices of homemaking hamper autonomy and restrict the efficacy of agency.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"457 - 476"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48704479","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221120172
D. Cook
This article explores ethnographically how digital nomads reconcile their commitment to ‘freedom’ with their relationships to state institutions. It analyses the ways these ‘global citizens’ attempt to weaken ties with nation-states and challenge state–citizen relations in areas of work, citizenship, and mobility. On the surface, digital nomads appear to break the ‘social contract’ via borderless subjectivities, or via the creation of transnational businesses. Yet in practice they remain entangled in multiple state institutions, both directly and via corporate entities, to get closer to their hotly desired ‘freedom’. This article explores digital nomads’ attempts to ‘opt-out’ or ‘re-draw’ the social contract, and illustrates the tension between the imagined social contract and how actual state–citizen relations develop over time and are experienced through the filters of global corporations, free markets, and entrepreneurial thinking.
{"title":"Breaking the Contract: Digital Nomads and the State","authors":"D. Cook","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120172","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores ethnographically how digital nomads reconcile their commitment to ‘freedom’ with their relationships to state institutions. It analyses the ways these ‘global citizens’ attempt to weaken ties with nation-states and challenge state–citizen relations in areas of work, citizenship, and mobility. On the surface, digital nomads appear to break the ‘social contract’ via borderless subjectivities, or via the creation of transnational businesses. Yet in practice they remain entangled in multiple state institutions, both directly and via corporate entities, to get closer to their hotly desired ‘freedom’. This article explores digital nomads’ attempts to ‘opt-out’ or ‘re-draw’ the social contract, and illustrates the tension between the imagined social contract and how actual state–citizen relations develop over time and are experienced through the filters of global corporations, free markets, and entrepreneurial thinking.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"304 - 323"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42919110","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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