Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1177/14634996211010508
John Welsh
Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.
{"title":"Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes","authors":"John Welsh","doi":"10.1177/14634996211010508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211010508","url":null,"abstract":"Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"460 - 493"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211010508","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48786134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-21DOI: 10.1177/14634996211014116
Limor Samimian-Darash
In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination.
{"title":"Governing the future through scenaristic and simulative modalities of imagination","authors":"Limor Samimian-Darash","doi":"10.1177/14634996211014116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211014116","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"393 - 416"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211014116","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42759381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-05-02DOI: 10.1177/14634996211010511
J. DeVore
This article develops a democratized account of heterodoxy that draws attention to how heterodoxical discourses may implicitly arise through social interaction. The analysis is based on one rural Brazilian woman’s claim that it tastes better to eat beans and rice by using one’s fingers. Formerly common in Brazil prior to the 20th century—across identities, regions, and classes—the practice of “eating by hand” was gradually erased from public life, and reconstituted as a mark of non-whiteness, through what Norbert Elias described as a “civilizing process.” The woman’s claim registers as a heterodoxical response to hierarchized and racialized notions of taste arising from this process of historical erasure. The analysis draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory to situate the woman’s claim within a wider field of taste, while engaging with Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that aesthetic judgments may implicitly disclose shared and more equal worlds. Whereas Bourdieu’s famous account of heterodoxy focuses on leaders, experts, and spokespersons of the dominated skilled in the “work of making explicit,” the contribution draws on scholarship in analytic philosophy to argue that critical historical awareness may emerge in what philosophers of language and linguistic anthropologists call pragmatic presuppositions. The heterodoxical pragmatic presuppositions implicit in the woman’s claim conjure a notion of semiotic equality, which is disclosed as a defeasible presupposition of the ethnographic situation in which she makes her claim.
{"title":"Between shame and a shared world: Toward a democratized theory of heterodoxical awareness","authors":"J. DeVore","doi":"10.1177/14634996211010511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211010511","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops a democratized account of heterodoxy that draws attention to how heterodoxical discourses may implicitly arise through social interaction. The analysis is based on one rural Brazilian woman’s claim that it tastes better to eat beans and rice by using one’s fingers. Formerly common in Brazil prior to the 20th century—across identities, regions, and classes—the practice of “eating by hand” was gradually erased from public life, and reconstituted as a mark of non-whiteness, through what Norbert Elias described as a “civilizing process.” The woman’s claim registers as a heterodoxical response to hierarchized and racialized notions of taste arising from this process of historical erasure. The analysis draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory to situate the woman’s claim within a wider field of taste, while engaging with Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that aesthetic judgments may implicitly disclose shared and more equal worlds. Whereas Bourdieu’s famous account of heterodoxy focuses on leaders, experts, and spokespersons of the dominated skilled in the “work of making explicit,” the contribution draws on scholarship in analytic philosophy to argue that critical historical awareness may emerge in what philosophers of language and linguistic anthropologists call pragmatic presuppositions. The heterodoxical pragmatic presuppositions implicit in the woman’s claim conjure a notion of semiotic equality, which is disclosed as a defeasible presupposition of the ethnographic situation in which she makes her claim.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"22 1","pages":"52 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14634996211010511","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41881478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-16DOI: 10.1177/1463499620980292
Éric Pineault
This theoretical contribution will examine the process of displacement of the constitutive contradictions of advanced capitalist societies from interior to exterior during the postwar era known as the ‘capitalist Golden Age’ (1945 to 1980). I ask the following question: what if this displacement is both an inherent and necessary process? In that case, the apparent stability or expansion gained in the core during this era was not only at the expense of externalized instability and destruction ‘elsewhere’; rather, this displacement was a precondition for growth in the centre. This has normative, political and methodological implications for current projects of socio-ecological transformation based on a proverbial Green New Deal. By examining theories of unequal ecological exchange and biophysically expanded versions of the labour process as developed by ecological anthropologists such as Hornborg or ecological economists such as Georgescu-Roegen, I will explore the possibility of understanding the material trajectory of advanced capitalism as a zero-sum game. This leads to a view of capitalist development in the 20th century where the accumulation process is no longer seen as progressive. To substantiate this argument, I will re-examine the energy flow patterns that sustained the growth of American capitalism during the Fordist period of accumulation, or so-called Golden Age of American capitalism. This revision of the American experience of growth from 1945 to 1980 can be considered a contribution to the wider study of the development of the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels, or ‘fossil capital’.
{"title":"The ghosts of progress: Contradictory materialities of the capitalist Golden Age","authors":"Éric Pineault","doi":"10.1177/1463499620980292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620980292","url":null,"abstract":"This theoretical contribution will examine the process of displacement of the constitutive contradictions of advanced capitalist societies from interior to exterior during the postwar era known as the ‘capitalist Golden Age’ (1945 to 1980). I ask the following question: what if this displacement is both an inherent and necessary process? In that case, the apparent stability or expansion gained in the core during this era was not only at the expense of externalized instability and destruction ‘elsewhere’; rather, this displacement was a precondition for growth in the centre. This has normative, political and methodological implications for current projects of socio-ecological transformation based on a proverbial Green New Deal. By examining theories of unequal ecological exchange and biophysically expanded versions of the labour process as developed by ecological anthropologists such as Hornborg or ecological economists such as Georgescu-Roegen, I will explore the possibility of understanding the material trajectory of advanced capitalism as a zero-sum game. This leads to a view of capitalist development in the 20th century where the accumulation process is no longer seen as progressive. To substantiate this argument, I will re-examine the energy flow patterns that sustained the growth of American capitalism during the Fordist period of accumulation, or so-called Golden Age of American capitalism. This revision of the American experience of growth from 1945 to 1980 can be considered a contribution to the wider study of the development of the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels, or ‘fossil capital’.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"260 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620980292","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47446587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-07DOI: 10.1177/1463499620982784
S. Schmalz, Ingo Singe, Anne Hasenohr
The article traces the political economy and labour relations in East Thuringia, a ‘post-growth region’ in East Germany with a structurally weak periphery and a declining populace. We argue that the regional decline results from a process of peripheralization which has led to economic stagnation and a shrinking population, and also has fostered political discontent. By drawing on a regional survey, an intensive case study at a manufacturing site and qualitative interviews with policy makers, managers, works council members and employees, we analyse how peripheralization has impacted labour relations and politics in a shrinking region. We discuss our findings by referring to current political sociology debates on the rise of right-wing populism and the scientific discussion on post-growth, as well as recent approaches of critical geography and development sociology. We show how feelings of injustice such as anger about low wages and the democratic void at work interlink with pessimistic assessments concerning the region’s future and feelings of deprivation. We conclude that the economic model based on labour-intensive exports in the internal periphery of East German capitalism is eroding and is contributing to a crisis of hegemony and political instability.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-07DOI: 10.1177/1463499621989130
George Baca
Many anthropologists interpret neoliberalism as a radical break from and dangerous rupture in post-war societies that featured Keynesian economic policies and welfare provision. The allure of a mythic welfare state has boosted John Maynard Keynes’s popularity to many who embrace certain facets of socialism. Many critical social scientists have embraced Keynesianism in ways that overlook how the US used Keynesian policies to reengineer and redeploy state power. Keynes’s liberal synthesis inspired managers in the US Treasury Department to understand depression-era problems of unemployment and poverty in ways that were consonant with the expansion of corporate power. For understanding Keynesianism, as it actually existed during the Cold War, we must analyse how the US Treasury and State Departments used Keynesian principles to rebuild the social reproductive capacities necessary for capitalist accumulation both domestically and in Western Europe. I focus on how the architects of post-war capitalism used full employment policies, labour laws and welfare provision to renovate the nexus of political practices and institutional structures in ways that formed a benevolent and caring image of ‘the state’ and the myth of a class compromise. Through these reforms, governmental planners and administrators used the ‘state idea’ to reorganize capital accumulation as if the post-war economy would represent ordinary people’s best interests. In the process, these sophisticated practices of power became reified as the ‘welfare state’ and the ‘Keynesian compromise’ in ways that endow these institutions and policies with a character divorced from practices of power. The post-war state embodied a dialectic of repression and reform that combined criminalizing dissent with full employment policies and welfare provision. Taking these aspects of power into account, we can see post-war Keynesianism in ways that inspire a robust and far-reaching criticism of the contemporary predicament of economic uncertainty, political instability and environmental degradation.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-03DOI: 10.1177/1463499620981544
Lars Gertenbach, Jörn Lamla, Stefan Laser
To address the relationship between the crises of capitalist growth and democratic politics, this paper discusses the notions of degrowth and conviviality. Both concepts are often interpreted as making similar proposals in response to questions of environmental transformation. However, they bear on different strands of critique. While degrowth criticizes the momentum of capitalist accumulation, conviviality originates in the search for alternatives to the instrumental use of technologies in industrial societies. Although these two rationalities predominantly go hand in hand in the development of modern societies, they are sometimes in conflict and different strategies are required to deal with their consequences. Therefore, the differences between degrowth and conviviality should not be obscured. Instead of using the concepts in an ethical or moral fashion as normative claims directed at some diffuse agency of states, companies and the people, the paper argues for a thorough examination of issues and propositions to overcome the environmental crisis from the perspective of materialist science and technology studies. Since one key factor here is the level of global production and consumption of meat, this paper turns toward a controversial attempt to break new ground in meat production: the vision of artificially producing meat in the laboratory. Lab-grown, cultured meat provides a powerful case study for exploring political and democratic challenges of post-growth societies, all the more so as questions of animal welfare and interspecies conviviality are addressed as well. By taking a closer look at the role of animals in proposed solutions for degrowth and conviviality in meat production and consumption, the complementarity of such claims can be questioned, and a light can be shed on the inherent political implications of such technological innovations.
{"title":"Eating ourselves out of industrial excess? Degrowth, multi-species conviviality and the micro-politics of cultured meat","authors":"Lars Gertenbach, Jörn Lamla, Stefan Laser","doi":"10.1177/1463499620981544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620981544","url":null,"abstract":"To address the relationship between the crises of capitalist growth and democratic politics, this paper discusses the notions of degrowth and conviviality. Both concepts are often interpreted as making similar proposals in response to questions of environmental transformation. However, they bear on different strands of critique. While degrowth criticizes the momentum of capitalist accumulation, conviviality originates in the search for alternatives to the instrumental use of technologies in industrial societies. Although these two rationalities predominantly go hand in hand in the development of modern societies, they are sometimes in conflict and different strategies are required to deal with their consequences. Therefore, the differences between degrowth and conviviality should not be obscured. Instead of using the concepts in an ethical or moral fashion as normative claims directed at some diffuse agency of states, companies and the people, the paper argues for a thorough examination of issues and propositions to overcome the environmental crisis from the perspective of materialist science and technology studies. Since one key factor here is the level of global production and consumption of meat, this paper turns toward a controversial attempt to break new ground in meat production: the vision of artificially producing meat in the laboratory. Lab-grown, cultured meat provides a powerful case study for exploring political and democratic challenges of post-growth societies, all the more so as questions of animal welfare and interspecies conviviality are addressed as well. By taking a closer look at the role of animals in proposed solutions for degrowth and conviviality in meat production and consumption, the complementarity of such claims can be questioned, and a light can be shed on the inherent political implications of such technological innovations.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"386 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620981544","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47013607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-24DOI: 10.1177/1463499620982121
Maria Markantonatou
The crisis in Greece in the last decade has led to a wide economic transition, raising the question of whether Greece can be understood as a kind of a ‘post-growth’ society. The article has two aims. First, it examines how the Greek crisis has been discussed within the post-growth debate and focuses on three views: Greece as a post-growth anti-paradigm, Greece as an opportunity for democratic post-growth and austerity in Greece as a path for anti-Keynesian degrowth. Second, the article examines how ideas and projects with a post-growth orientation have influenced specific social initiatives born out of the crisis period in Greece. Some of these initiatives are reviewed (self-organized social and economic collectives, grassroots initiatives for solidarity, solidarity economy actions, etc.). As further discussed in the article, these initiatives were part of a broader ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi), and they faded together with other forms of labour and social protest, in accordance with events at the central political scene, and especially SYRIZA’s adoption of Memoranda politics. It is observed that in the post-Memoranda era in Greece, although past strategies of social reproduction are either unavailable (the pre-crisis finance-led growth model) or no longer equally effective (the familistic social model) and fiscal discipline remains, the search for other alternatives, including social initiatives with a post-growth orientation, did not actually extend as was expected, due to some new growth opportunities, e.g. in the field of tourism. It is finally concluded that, although they constituted an important part of the Greek countermovement, born as responses to the crisis, these social initiatives did not manage to consolidate more permanent structures of social action that could successfully challenge the neoliberal agenda.
{"title":"Post-growth, post-democracy, post-Memoranda: What can the ‘post-growth’ debate learn from Greece and vice versa?","authors":"Maria Markantonatou","doi":"10.1177/1463499620982121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620982121","url":null,"abstract":"The crisis in Greece in the last decade has led to a wide economic transition, raising the question of whether Greece can be understood as a kind of a ‘post-growth’ society. The article has two aims. First, it examines how the Greek crisis has been discussed within the post-growth debate and focuses on three views: Greece as a post-growth anti-paradigm, Greece as an opportunity for democratic post-growth and austerity in Greece as a path for anti-Keynesian degrowth. Second, the article examines how ideas and projects with a post-growth orientation have influenced specific social initiatives born out of the crisis period in Greece. Some of these initiatives are reviewed (self-organized social and economic collectives, grassroots initiatives for solidarity, solidarity economy actions, etc.). As further discussed in the article, these initiatives were part of a broader ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi), and they faded together with other forms of labour and social protest, in accordance with events at the central political scene, and especially SYRIZA’s adoption of Memoranda politics. It is observed that in the post-Memoranda era in Greece, although past strategies of social reproduction are either unavailable (the pre-crisis finance-led growth model) or no longer equally effective (the familistic social model) and fiscal discipline remains, the search for other alternatives, including social initiatives with a post-growth orientation, did not actually extend as was expected, due to some new growth opportunities, e.g. in the field of tourism. It is finally concluded that, although they constituted an important part of the Greek countermovement, born as responses to the crisis, these social initiatives did not manage to consolidate more permanent structures of social action that could successfully challenge the neoliberal agenda.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"341 - 363"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620982121","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46991985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-20DOI: 10.1177/1463499620977995
Dennis Eversberg
This contribution investigates the anthropological foundations of European democracies’ continuous entanglement with economic and military expansionism and a hierarchical separation between public and private spheres, both of which have enabled the appropriation of nature and others’ labour as property on which citizens’ abstract personhood could be founded. Drawing on an argument made by David Graeber, it is suggested that modern European history can be interpreted as a process of the ‘generalization of avoidance’, in which such abstract, property-based forms of personhood, which were initially what defined the superior party in relations of hierarchy, came to be a model for the figures of market participant and citizen within the spheres of formal equal exchange of economy and politics. From this perspective, and building on an account of different stages of capitalist history as ‘subjectivation regimes’, the article then analyses the transition from the ‘exclusive democracy’ of post-war organized capitalism in Western Europe, in which citizens’ entitlement, through the collective guarantees of ‘social property’ (Castel), increasingly allowed individualized competitive practices of status attainment and gave rise to individualist movements for extended citizenship, to current-day flexible capitalism. This regime, seizing on those calls and instrumentalizing the desires for competitive status consumption, has effected a broad restructuring of the social as a unified field of competition in which new hierarchies and inequalities materialize in global chains of appropriation, causing a ‘dividual’ fragmentation of property-based personhood and generating calls for responsible citizenship as an inherent counter-movement. In conclusion, it is suggested that anthropologists have much to contribute to investigating the possibility of democratic, post-capitalist ‘anthropologies of degrowth’.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-07DOI: 10.1177/1463499620977984
Tilman Reitz, Peter Schulz, Mariana Schütt, B. Seyd
Talk of crisis is no longer the prerogative of drama-seeking intellectuals. It is increasingly difficult to overlook the many current incidents of economic, ecological and political malfunction and breakdown that call for structural explanations.In the economic dimension, two multifaceted crises frame the last decade. While there has been scant recovery after the global financial breakdown of 2008, the economic rupture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to contain it are the next blow for the global economy, with as yet unclear outcomes. Politically, liberal democracies have been unsettled by the sharp rise of far-right parties, movements and governments, with severe effects in some countries. As this Special Issue goes to print, there is widespread uncertainty about the US presidential elections. With legitimacy already being called into question and voting rights disputed in many local contexts, it is uncertain whether the incumbent will accept defeat if he loses or whether democratic procedures will remain intact in the case of a narrow result. At the same time, strained ecological conditions are making themselves felt in all parts of the world, from melting polar icecaps through to flooding and massive wildfires returning autumn upon autumn with increased force.
{"title":"Democracy in post-growth societies: A zero-sum game?","authors":"Tilman Reitz, Peter Schulz, Mariana Schütt, B. Seyd","doi":"10.1177/1463499620977984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620977984","url":null,"abstract":"Talk of crisis is no longer the prerogative of drama-seeking intellectuals. It is increasingly difficult to overlook the many current incidents of economic, ecological and political malfunction and breakdown that call for structural explanations.In the economic dimension, two multifaceted crises frame the last decade. While there has been scant recovery after the global financial breakdown of 2008, the economic rupture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to contain it are the next blow for the global economy, with as yet unclear outcomes. Politically, liberal democracies have been unsettled by the sharp rise of far-right parties, movements and governments, with severe effects in some countries. As this Special Issue goes to print, there is widespread uncertainty about the US presidential elections. With legitimacy already being called into question and voting rights disputed in many local contexts, it is uncertain whether the incumbent will accept defeat if he loses or whether democratic procedures will remain intact in the case of a narrow result. At the same time, strained ecological conditions are making themselves felt in all parts of the world, from melting polar icecaps through to flooding and massive wildfires returning autumn upon autumn with increased force.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"251 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620977984","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43026787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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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