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":"42 1","pages":"238 - 253"},"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: 10.1177/0308275X221120168
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":"42 1","pages":"221 - 237"},"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: 10.1177/0308275X221120167
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":"42 1","pages":"324 - 340"},"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: 10.1177/0308275X221120176
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":"42 1","pages":"254 - 269"},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-27DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221120171
Benjamin O. L. Bowles
‘Resilience’, a quintessentially neoliberal concept, has never been a politically neutral discourse, its intellectual roots situated in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the birth of neoliberal economics. Nevertheless, resilience in infrastructure is often cast as a technocratic, apolitical consideration. This article argues that this is not the case. Using data collected during fieldwork with the UK Government Cabinet Office during a consultation on how to make infrastructure ‘resilient by design’, resilience discourse is shown to be a tool with which government departments, regulators and companies make communities increasingly responsible for the provision and maintenance of their own infrastructure while justifying service failures as inevitable. This is an under-explored discursive battleground in the neoliberal reframing of the social contract as anti-social; concerning the profit-driven logics of corporate entities as balanced by the rights of individual consumers, and no longer about the relationship between ‘the state’ and a collective civil society.
{"title":"Resilience, infrastructure and the anti-social contract in neoliberal Britain","authors":"Benjamin O. L. Bowles","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120171","url":null,"abstract":"‘Resilience’, a quintessentially neoliberal concept, has never been a politically neutral discourse, its intellectual roots situated in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the birth of neoliberal economics. Nevertheless, resilience in infrastructure is often cast as a technocratic, apolitical consideration. This article argues that this is not the case. Using data collected during fieldwork with the UK Government Cabinet Office during a consultation on how to make infrastructure ‘resilient by design’, resilience discourse is shown to be a tool with which government departments, regulators and companies make communities increasingly responsible for the provision and maintenance of their own infrastructure while justifying service failures as inevitable. This is an under-explored discursive battleground in the neoliberal reframing of the social contract as anti-social; concerning the profit-driven logics of corporate entities as balanced by the rights of individual consumers, and no longer about the relationship between ‘the state’ and a collective civil society.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"270 - 285"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48345434","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 : 2022-08-10DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221120166
Gwen Burnyeat
The 2016 Peace Accord signed between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla was narrowly rejected by the public in a polarising referendum. This article focusses on government officials in the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution in charge of peace negotiations, and explaining the peace process to society in an innovative strategy called ‘peace pedagogy’. These officials resorted to rational communication about peace and repudiated the accord’s opponents, whom they perceived as right-wing populists. They then self-critically analysed the referendum loss as due to their strategy being ‘too rational’ and ‘not emotional enough’. Drawing on the anthropology of liberalism, this article characterises these officials as ‘culturally liberal’: liberal ideology was enmeshed in their cultural worldviews, including a perceived binary between rationality and emotions, and a contractarian imaginary of state-society relations as above politics. This both contributed to the loss of the referendum, and confounded their attempts to analyse the result. The normative model of the social contract, enmeshed in real-world interpretations of state-society relations, thus creates inexorably political effects.
{"title":"‘We were not emotional enough’: Cultural liberalism and social contract imaginaries in the Colombian peace process","authors":"Gwen Burnyeat","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221120166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221120166","url":null,"abstract":"The 2016 Peace Accord signed between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla was narrowly rejected by the public in a polarising referendum. This article focusses on government officials in the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution in charge of peace negotiations, and explaining the peace process to society in an innovative strategy called ‘peace pedagogy’. These officials resorted to rational communication about peace and repudiated the accord’s opponents, whom they perceived as right-wing populists. They then self-critically analysed the referendum loss as due to their strategy being ‘too rational’ and ‘not emotional enough’. Drawing on the anthropology of liberalism, this article characterises these officials as ‘culturally liberal’: liberal ideology was enmeshed in their cultural worldviews, including a perceived binary between rationality and emotions, and a contractarian imaginary of state-society relations as above politics. This both contributed to the loss of the referendum, and confounded their attempts to analyse the result. The normative model of the social contract, enmeshed in real-world interpretations of state-society relations, thus creates inexorably political effects.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"286 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47319023","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 : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221095937
D. Kaneff
In this Commentary, I bring together the findings of the articles in this special issue, and advocate for an expanded temporal and spatial application of the concept ‘post-socialism’. My focus is also on the ongoing political and ideological value of the concept as a useful emic and analytical means for critiquing capitalism.
{"title":"Extending the reach of ‘post-socialism’: A commentary","authors":"D. Kaneff","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221095937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221095937","url":null,"abstract":"In this Commentary, I bring together the findings of the articles in this special issue, and advocate for an expanded temporal and spatial application of the concept ‘post-socialism’. My focus is also on the ongoing political and ideological value of the concept as a useful emic and analytical means for critiquing capitalism.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"209 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45641279","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 : 2022-05-13DOI: 10.1016/j.rceng.2022.02.005
Í Soteras, M Ayala, E Subirats, J C Trullàs, X Jiménez-Fàbrega
{"title":"Acute mountain sickness. Is its prevalence overestimated?","authors":"Í Soteras, M Ayala, E Subirats, J C Trullàs, X Jiménez-Fàbrega","doi":"10.1016/j.rceng.2022.02.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.rceng.2022.02.005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87192957","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221095938
R. Deakin, G. Nicolescu
This article initiates a comparative anthropological analysis of the legacies and endurances of socialism in two different European contexts. It draws on ethnographic and historical material relating to the UK and Romania, 40 years after the first efforts to privatize central elements of the welfare state in the UK and 30 years after the collapse of state socialism in central and eastern Europe. Rather than restricting our analysis to the ‘East’ and the 20th century, as is often the case in the literature on post-socialism, we argue for the need to attend to socialism’s historical border-crossings as well as its persistence today as a set of practices and imaginaries which are not wedded to one historically existing state form. Through controversies around the demolition of council (public) housing estates in London and exploration of work practices in cooperatives of production in Romania this article illustrates such historical border-crossings, and comparatively analyses the contemporary curation of what we call ‘socialist fragments’ at both these sites.
{"title":"Socialist fragments East and West: Towards a comparative anthropology of global (post-)socialism","authors":"R. Deakin, G. Nicolescu","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221095938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221095938","url":null,"abstract":"This article initiates a comparative anthropological analysis of the legacies and endurances of socialism in two different European contexts. It draws on ethnographic and historical material relating to the UK and Romania, 40 years after the first efforts to privatize central elements of the welfare state in the UK and 30 years after the collapse of state socialism in central and eastern Europe. Rather than restricting our analysis to the ‘East’ and the 20th century, as is often the case in the literature on post-socialism, we argue for the need to attend to socialism’s historical border-crossings as well as its persistence today as a set of practices and imaginaries which are not wedded to one historically existing state form. Through controversies around the demolition of council (public) housing estates in London and exploration of work practices in cooperatives of production in Romania this article illustrates such historical border-crossings, and comparatively analyses the contemporary curation of what we call ‘socialist fragments’ at both these sites.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"114 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41712443","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 : 2022-04-20DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221096182
Aet Annist
This article brings together two sets of data – from rural Estonia and the Estonian diaspora in the UK – to analyse the themes of dispossession and distancing. The article highlights links between the processes of Othering and the continuing significance of the concepts of socialism and post-socialism as explanatory in relation to emerging hierarchies related to the region. In Estonia, some people and regions still seem to bear the marks of state socialism and face symbolic dispossession, in particular, the rural regions. Rural Estonians experience social dispossession and distance from one another, as well as from their home regions by migrating. With migration to western Europe, people acquire opportunities for taking new control over their own image, thus enabling some renewed symbolic and social worth. However, in the case of the diaspora in the UK, the migrant setting demonstrates how the use of disparaging terminology linked to the post-socialist transformation travels beyond borders, and also how the symbolic dispossession of eastern Europeans arises from the stigma of post-socialism.
{"title":"Post-socialism as an experience of distancing and dispossession in rural and transnational Estonia","authors":"Aet Annist","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221096182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221096182","url":null,"abstract":"This article brings together two sets of data – from rural Estonia and the Estonian diaspora in the UK – to analyse the themes of dispossession and distancing. The article highlights links between the processes of Othering and the continuing significance of the concepts of socialism and post-socialism as explanatory in relation to emerging hierarchies related to the region. In Estonia, some people and regions still seem to bear the marks of state socialism and face symbolic dispossession, in particular, the rural regions. Rural Estonians experience social dispossession and distance from one another, as well as from their home regions by migrating. With migration to western Europe, people acquire opportunities for taking new control over their own image, thus enabling some renewed symbolic and social worth. However, in the case of the diaspora in the UK, the migrant setting demonstrates how the use of disparaging terminology linked to the post-socialist transformation travels beyond borders, and also how the symbolic dispossession of eastern Europeans arises from the stigma of post-socialism.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"137 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48751506","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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