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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-04-20DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221095932
Anselma Gallinat
In this article I will argue that we need to continue working with and through the notion of post-socialism as long as local populations are treated as transitional. That is, as long as policy-makers, politicians, managers and academics engage with local people in the belief that their dispositions, behaviours and personhoods in the democratic present are a result of their own or their predecessors’ life in socialism, and as long as they develop initiatives that aim to counter attitudes seen to result from the state-socialist past. Taking this concept seriously in the sense that powerholders believe in ‘actually existing post-socialism’ allows us to explore not only how such perceptions come about but also their lasting effects on local populations, which is relevant to our anthropological understanding of humanity more widely. The article shows how a perception of a transition to democracy that is yet to be concluded has become intertwined with the production of all-Germany as democratic, which therefore rests upon the continuous reproduction of eastern Germans as ideological, democratically deficient others.
{"title":"Actually existing post-socialism: Producing ideological others in eastern Germany","authors":"Anselma Gallinat","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221095932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221095932","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I will argue that we need to continue working with and through the notion of post-socialism as long as local populations are treated as transitional. That is, as long as policy-makers, politicians, managers and academics engage with local people in the belief that their dispositions, behaviours and personhoods in the democratic present are a result of their own or their predecessors’ life in socialism, and as long as they develop initiatives that aim to counter attitudes seen to result from the state-socialist past. Taking this concept seriously in the sense that powerholders believe in ‘actually existing post-socialism’ allows us to explore not only how such perceptions come about but also their lasting effects on local populations, which is relevant to our anthropological understanding of humanity more widely. The article shows how a perception of a transition to democracy that is yet to be concluded has become intertwined with the production of all-Germany as democratic, which therefore rests upon the continuous reproduction of eastern Germans as ideological, democratically deficient others.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42533394","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: 10.1177/0308275X221095935
Stefan Dorondel, C. Posner
The material relics of socialism continue to affect present-day rural Romania. This article explores the nexus of socialist/post-socialist agricultural infrastructure, groundwater, soil transformations, the privatization process and the constitution of power relations along the Lower Danube rural areas. Positioning ourselves in the anthropology of infrastructure, we document both ethnographically and with Geographic Information Systems tools the social and political consequences of broken agricultural infrastructure in a village located on the banks of the Lower Danube, Romania. We show how the local political elite is able to exploit the surfacing of groundwater in their favour, resulting in economic loss only for small landholders and villagers without power. The interface of the multiple temporalities inherent in infrastructure with the various materialities of groundwater – its propensity to leak, infiltrate and surface – precipitated the emergence of a new ecological order. The new hybrid ecology is made up of pre-socialist feral groundwater, the socialist ‘hydraulic society’ that reclaimed agricultural land, and the post-socialist political economy. We engage a more-than-human perspective in order to offer a more sophisticated – and realistic – picture of post-socialist rural power relations.
{"title":"Infrastructure, feral waters and power relations in rural Romania","authors":"Stefan Dorondel, C. Posner","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221095935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221095935","url":null,"abstract":"The material relics of socialism continue to affect present-day rural Romania. This article explores the nexus of socialist/post-socialist agricultural infrastructure, groundwater, soil transformations, the privatization process and the constitution of power relations along the Lower Danube rural areas. Positioning ourselves in the anthropology of infrastructure, we document both ethnographically and with Geographic Information Systems tools the social and political consequences of broken agricultural infrastructure in a village located on the banks of the Lower Danube, Romania. We show how the local political elite is able to exploit the surfacing of groundwater in their favour, resulting in economic loss only for small landholders and villagers without power. The interface of the multiple temporalities inherent in infrastructure with the various materialities of groundwater – its propensity to leak, infiltrate and surface – precipitated the emergence of a new ecological order. The new hybrid ecology is made up of pre-socialist feral groundwater, the socialist ‘hydraulic society’ that reclaimed agricultural land, and the post-socialist political economy. We engage a more-than-human perspective in order to offer a more sophisticated – and realistic – picture of post-socialist rural power relations.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46221888","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 : 2022-04-18DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221095943
Anselma Gallinat
An introduction to the special issue ‘The anthropology of postsocialism: Theoretical legacies and conceptual futures'.
特刊“后社会主义的人类学:理论遗产和概念未来”的导言。
{"title":"The anthropology of post-socialism: Theoretical legacies and conceptual futures – An introduction","authors":"Anselma Gallinat","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221095943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221095943","url":null,"abstract":"An introduction to the special issue ‘The anthropology of postsocialism: Theoretical legacies and conceptual futures'.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48828756","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 : 2022-04-18DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221095930
F. Ringel
When accounting for changes in the post-socialist era, anthropologists were forced to carefully distinguish between what had remained the same, what had actually changed and what was emerging anew and on its own terms. As a sub-discipline, the anthropology of post-socialism has thereby contributed prominently to theories of time, change and temporal agency. It has also shown that the post-socialist present is, if at all, as determined by its socialist past as it is by its insecure futures. Based on a few ethnographic examples from a former socialist model city in East Germany, and my own experiences as both a post-socialist anthropologist and an anthropologist of post-socialism, I scrutinize the temporal logic of the sub-discipline’s defining concept. I do so by testing its applicability to three objects of anthropological inquiry, and by pondering upon its implications for a more sustained study of the future. The temporal multiplicity that this concept affords, I claim, is crucial for the discipline overall, but demands further scrutiny. Rather than abandoning it, as I and others have previously argued, it is time to rewrite the time of post-socialism with regards to the future.
{"title":"The time of post-socialism: On the future of an anthropological concept","authors":"F. Ringel","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221095930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221095930","url":null,"abstract":"When accounting for changes in the post-socialist era, anthropologists were forced to carefully distinguish between what had remained the same, what had actually changed and what was emerging anew and on its own terms. As a sub-discipline, the anthropology of post-socialism has thereby contributed prominently to theories of time, change and temporal agency. It has also shown that the post-socialist present is, if at all, as determined by its socialist past as it is by its insecure futures. Based on a few ethnographic examples from a former socialist model city in East Germany, and my own experiences as both a post-socialist anthropologist and an anthropologist of post-socialism, I scrutinize the temporal logic of the sub-discipline’s defining concept. I do so by testing its applicability to three objects of anthropological inquiry, and by pondering upon its implications for a more sustained study of the future. The temporal multiplicity that this concept affords, I claim, is crucial for the discipline overall, but demands further scrutiny. Rather than abandoning it, as I and others have previously argued, it is time to rewrite the time of post-socialism with regards to the future.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48366518","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 : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221074828
C. Laurent, Xavier Robillard-Martel
This article draws attention to the shifting dialectical relationship that exists between everyday acts of resistance and the forms of domination they seek to subvert. Using ethnographic data collected in Osaka’s Koreatown, we analyze some of the ways in which young Zainichi Koreans, the descendants of colonial subjects who migrated to Japan, use daily acts of self-preservation to chip away at hegemonic notions of Japanese national homogeneity. Seemingly trivial choices to dissimulate one’s identity, transmit cultural practices, and maintain historical memory constitute neglected forms of opposition that illustrate the contextual nature of Zainichi Korean resistance against marginalization and forced assimilation. These strategies offer a reservoir of resources that can be tapped into for collective political action, keeping the embers of resistance alive in between periods of open protest.
{"title":"Defying national homogeneity: Hidden acts of Zainichi Korean resistance in Japan","authors":"C. Laurent, Xavier Robillard-Martel","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221074828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221074828","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws attention to the shifting dialectical relationship that exists between everyday acts of resistance and the forms of domination they seek to subvert. Using ethnographic data collected in Osaka’s Koreatown, we analyze some of the ways in which young Zainichi Koreans, the descendants of colonial subjects who migrated to Japan, use daily acts of self-preservation to chip away at hegemonic notions of Japanese national homogeneity. Seemingly trivial choices to dissimulate one’s identity, transmit cultural practices, and maintain historical memory constitute neglected forms of opposition that illustrate the contextual nature of Zainichi Korean resistance against marginalization and forced assimilation. These strategies offer a reservoir of resources that can be tapped into for collective political action, keeping the embers of resistance alive in between periods of open protest.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42292086","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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