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":null,"pages":null},"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: 10.1177/0308275X221139157
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":null,"pages":null},"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 : 2022-11-21DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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 : 2022-11-05DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"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}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221120170
Sara Lenehan
When Afghans began fleeing war in the 1980s, the Iranian state welcomed them on an ethical premise of care towards fellow Muslims. However, since the 1990s, Iran has pursued exclusionary policies towards their Afghan population. Drawing on fieldwork among Afghan asylum-seekers who arrived in Germany from Iran, this article shows how fantasies of alternative social contracts can motivate migration, and shape relationships with host states in the aftermath. Afghan migrants hoped to ‘opt in’ to a relationship with the German state, which they imagined as more ‘caring’ than the Iranian one. However, in Germany, they were granted limited rights, and only after substantial conditions were fulfilled. Afghans’ interpretations of these outcomes reveal fears and assumptions around state–citizen relations, which they had carried over from Iran, and which informed their reimagination of the German state post-migration.
{"title":"In search of a caring state: Migrations of Afghans from Iran to Germany","authors":"Sara Lenehan","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120170","url":null,"abstract":"When Afghans began fleeing war in the 1980s, the Iranian state welcomed them on an ethical premise of care towards fellow Muslims. However, since the 1990s, Iran has pursued exclusionary policies towards their Afghan population. Drawing on fieldwork among Afghan asylum-seekers who arrived in Germany from Iran, this article shows how fantasies of alternative social contracts can motivate migration, and shape relationships with host states in the aftermath. Afghan migrants hoped to ‘opt in’ to a relationship with the German state, which they imagined as more ‘caring’ than the Iranian one. However, in Germany, they were granted limited rights, and only after substantial conditions were fulfilled. Afghans’ interpretations of these outcomes reveal fears and assumptions around state–citizen relations, which they had carried over from Iran, and which informed their reimagination of the German state post-migration.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42629795","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: 10.1177/0308275X221120167
A. Siddiqi, Sophie Blackburn
Geographical scholarship highlights social contracts as a valuable lens on the dynamic and contested balance of rights and responsibilities between risk governance players. We apply this lens to post-disaster response and reconstruction, which provides an ‘analytical window’ to better understand the types of relationship frameworks between the state and its citizens in postcolonial contexts. Using two post-disaster contexts, Mindanao in southern Philippines and the Andaman Islands in southern India, we uncover intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state. The article complicates structural scalar analysis of state–citizen relations, arguing that respondents in our field sites do not engage at a ‘local’ level with a sub-national social contract or at a ‘national’ level with a central social contract. Rather our empirical work demonstrates that intimate social contracts are found in the intertwining of central government policy, personal relationships and organisational abilities of local community leaders.
{"title":"Scales of disaster: Intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state","authors":"A. Siddiqi, Sophie Blackburn","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120167","url":null,"abstract":"Geographical scholarship highlights social contracts as a valuable lens on the dynamic and contested balance of rights and responsibilities between risk governance players. We apply this lens to post-disaster response and reconstruction, which provides an ‘analytical window’ to better understand the types of relationship frameworks between the state and its citizens in postcolonial contexts. Using two post-disaster contexts, Mindanao in southern Philippines and the Andaman Islands in southern India, we uncover intimate social contracts on the margins of the postcolonial state. The article complicates structural scalar analysis of state–citizen relations, arguing that respondents in our field sites do not engage at a ‘local’ level with a sub-national social contract or at a ‘national’ level with a central social contract. Rather our empirical work demonstrates that intimate social contracts are found in the intertwining of central government policy, personal relationships and organisational abilities of local community leaders.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44920532","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: 10.1177/0308275X221120168
Gwen Burnyeat, Miranda Sheild Johansson
The idea of the social contract resonates in many societies as a framework to conceptualise state–society relations, and as a normative ideal which strives to improve them. Policy-makers, development organisations, politicians, social scientists (including anthropologists), and our interlocutors all live with contractarian logics. While generations of political philosophers have debated the concept and its usefulness, the term has also travelled beyond academia into the wider world, shaping expectations, experiences, and imagined futures of state–society relations. An anthropology of the social contract explores ethnographically how this pervasive concept, laden with assumptions about human nature, political organisation, government, and notions such as freedom, consensus and legitimacy, impacts state–society relations in different settings. In this way, the social contract itself – its many emic instantiations, and its political effects – becomes the object of study.
{"title":"An anthropology of the social contract: The political power of an idea","authors":"Gwen Burnyeat, Miranda Sheild Johansson","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120168","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of the social contract resonates in many societies as a framework to conceptualise state–society relations, and as a normative ideal which strives to improve them. Policy-makers, development organisations, politicians, social scientists (including anthropologists), and our interlocutors all live with contractarian logics. While generations of political philosophers have debated the concept and its usefulness, the term has also travelled beyond academia into the wider world, shaping expectations, experiences, and imagined futures of state–society relations. An anthropology of the social contract explores ethnographically how this pervasive concept, laden with assumptions about human nature, political organisation, government, and notions such as freedom, consensus and legitimacy, impacts state–society relations in different settings. In this way, the social contract itself – its many emic instantiations, and its political effects – becomes the object of study.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43997114","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: 10.1177/0308275X221120176
M. McLaughlin
How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care.
{"title":"Shifting terms: Development discourses and moral imaginaries in Indian state service provision","authors":"M. McLaughlin","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120176","url":null,"abstract":"How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45638559","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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