Pub Date : 2021-01-06DOI: 10.1177/1463499620977992
Tilman Reitz, Dirk Jörke
This article aims to provide an analysis of the reconfiguration of political orientations in the face of weakening economic growth. We address a widely observed new polarization in the party systems of Western democracies, with radically universalist and ecological orientations, often represented by green parties, versus industrialist and authoritarian values, mainly represented by right-wing populism. In our effort to explain this constellation, we offer an alternative to accounts that merely focus on an underlying change of class structures or that, conversely, declare socio-economic factors obsolete in their relevance for voting behaviour. While the one side focuses on the ‘losers of modernization’ or deindustrialization, the other side emphasizes a cultural conflict between new cosmopolitan values and a defence of male, white, heterosexual, non-migrant privileges. In contrast to such accounts, we analyse how the general trend towards decelerated economic growth provoked new orientations on the (liberal) left and on the (populist) right. In a first step, we provide an overview of diagnoses of ‘secular stagnation’ and of the rise of radically universalist and right-wing parties in Western Europe, focusing in particular on the last decade and looking to the US by way of comparison. We then focus on the attitudes which the political actors in question entertain towards economic growth and offer an interpretation of their ‘cultural’ motives as struggles over economic distribution. The third and last step presents a Gramscian extension of socio-economic analysis beyond the study of voter groups and their attitudes. Here, we take into account the interests of the ruling classes along with the quest for legitimacy and projected changes in the regime of accumulation—if indeed the term accumulation is still adequate in a post-growth context.
{"title":"The reshaping of political representation in post-growth capitalism: A paradigmatic analysis of green and right-wing populist parties","authors":"Tilman Reitz, Dirk Jörke","doi":"10.1177/1463499620977992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620977992","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to provide an analysis of the reconfiguration of political orientations in the face of weakening economic growth. We address a widely observed new polarization in the party systems of Western democracies, with radically universalist and ecological orientations, often represented by green parties, versus industrialist and authoritarian values, mainly represented by right-wing populism. In our effort to explain this constellation, we offer an alternative to accounts that merely focus on an underlying change of class structures or that, conversely, declare socio-economic factors obsolete in their relevance for voting behaviour. While the one side focuses on the ‘losers of modernization’ or deindustrialization, the other side emphasizes a cultural conflict between new cosmopolitan values and a defence of male, white, heterosexual, non-migrant privileges. In contrast to such accounts, we analyse how the general trend towards decelerated economic growth provoked new orientations on the (liberal) left and on the (populist) right. In a first step, we provide an overview of diagnoses of ‘secular stagnation’ and of the rise of radically universalist and right-wing parties in Western Europe, focusing in particular on the last decade and looking to the US by way of comparison. We then focus on the attitudes which the political actors in question entertain towards economic growth and offer an interpretation of their ‘cultural’ motives as struggles over economic distribution. The third and last step presents a Gramscian extension of socio-economic analysis beyond the study of voter groups and their attitudes. Here, we take into account the interests of the ruling classes along with the quest for legitimacy and projected changes in the regime of accumulation—if indeed the term accumulation is still adequate in a post-growth context.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"287 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2021-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620977992","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42637052","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 : 2020-12-08DOI: 10.1177/1463499620974797
Mónica L. Espinosa Arango
Against the backdrop of a world in crisis that plays as the stage of the ontological turn and political ontology, and based on long-term research on Colombia’s Andean southwest indigenous politics, this article critically assesses political ontologýs claims to the powers of difference. Following Wolin, Mouffe, and Laval and Dardot, it presents a notion of the political that takes into account the passionate, educational and transformative aspects of indigenous political praxis and engagements with commonality. The analysis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological multinaturalism, Mario Blaser’s critique of modernity and Reason, and Arturo Escobar’s ontological political practice points at three interconnected problems: the persistent appeal to binary thinking; the making of relativism anew; and the problem regarding the dialogue and knowledge exchange between the ethnographer and the ethnographic subject. Recapturing the political is a way to engage complex and entangled political histories and experiences of democratization in which indigenous peoples emerge as bearers of the political. The feminist concept of situated knowledges is presented as an alternative to deal with knowledge partiality, self-reflexivity, political solidarity, and collaboration.
{"title":"Missing the political: A southern critique of political ontology","authors":"Mónica L. Espinosa Arango","doi":"10.1177/1463499620974797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620974797","url":null,"abstract":"Against the backdrop of a world in crisis that plays as the stage of the ontological turn and political ontology, and based on long-term research on Colombia’s Andean southwest indigenous politics, this article critically assesses political ontologýs claims to the powers of difference. Following Wolin, Mouffe, and Laval and Dardot, it presents a notion of the political that takes into account the passionate, educational and transformative aspects of indigenous political praxis and engagements with commonality. The analysis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological multinaturalism, Mario Blaser’s critique of modernity and Reason, and Arturo Escobar’s ontological political practice points at three interconnected problems: the persistent appeal to binary thinking; the making of relativism anew; and the problem regarding the dialogue and knowledge exchange between the ethnographer and the ethnographic subject. Recapturing the political is a way to engage complex and entangled political histories and experiences of democratization in which indigenous peoples emerge as bearers of the political. The feminist concept of situated knowledges is presented as an alternative to deal with knowledge partiality, self-reflexivity, political solidarity, and collaboration.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"411 - 436"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620974797","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43722586","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619840464
Georgina Ramsay
Displacement is typically approached in anthropology as an exceptional experience that is associated with refugees and forced migration. Recent representations of a migration ‘crisis’ have reinforced the exceptionality attached to displacement. Drawing on research conducted with people in both refugee and non-refugee contexts, in this article I put forward a more expansive theorisation of displacement as a sense of temporal dispossession. Additionally, I describe how, by characterising refugees and other migrants as people who occupy a temporality that is distinguished by their migration status, anthropology denies coevalness with and between migrants and non-migrants and thereby reinforces the very logics of otherness that we might otherwise seek to critique. Recognising the shared temporal rhythms of displacement, and how these manifest broadly as the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal restructurings, is one way through which anthropologists can strengthen our analyses and critiques of bordering structures. We must firmly situate refugees and migrants within these shared rhythms of displacement, rather than exceptionalise them through the lens of ‘crisis’.
{"title":"Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object","authors":"Georgina Ramsay","doi":"10.1177/1463499619840464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619840464","url":null,"abstract":"Displacement is typically approached in anthropology as an exceptional experience that is associated with refugees and forced migration. Recent representations of a migration ‘crisis’ have reinforced the exceptionality attached to displacement. Drawing on research conducted with people in both refugee and non-refugee contexts, in this article I put forward a more expansive theorisation of displacement as a sense of temporal dispossession. Additionally, I describe how, by characterising refugees and other migrants as people who occupy a temporality that is distinguished by their migration status, anthropology denies coevalness with and between migrants and non-migrants and thereby reinforces the very logics of otherness that we might otherwise seek to critique. Recognising the shared temporal rhythms of displacement, and how these manifest broadly as the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal restructurings, is one way through which anthropologists can strengthen our analyses and critiques of bordering structures. We must firmly situate refugees and migrants within these shared rhythms of displacement, rather than exceptionalise them through the lens of ‘crisis’.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"385 - 413"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619840464","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47189287","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619890762
K. Miller, S. Lukes
The social character of ethics is best revealed by exploring the complex dynamics linking individuals’ freedom to moral requirements. In this article, we consider James Laidlaw’s influential proposal that an anthropology of ethics makes freedom central to what is distinctively ethical in human life, but we argue that it unduly restricts the proposed scope of anthropology. This account of freedom is both overly cognitive, focusing on reflection, viewed as involving distance, decision, reasoning and doubt, and too individualistic, downplaying the importance of freedom’s normative background and excluding from consideration many documented forms of ethical experience. We propose instead an alternative, more open-ended conceptualization of freedom, distinguishing a concept of freedom that differs from its widely varying conceptions, and drawing on ethnographic material from the Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan and elsewhere to illustrate multiple ways in which the constitution of selves and normative constraints impinge on one another.
{"title":"The other side of freedom: On the sociality of ethics","authors":"K. Miller, S. Lukes","doi":"10.1177/1463499619890762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619890762","url":null,"abstract":"The social character of ethics is best revealed by exploring the complex dynamics linking individuals’ freedom to moral requirements. In this article, we consider James Laidlaw’s influential proposal that an anthropology of ethics makes freedom central to what is distinctively ethical in human life, but we argue that it unduly restricts the proposed scope of anthropology. This account of freedom is both overly cognitive, focusing on reflection, viewed as involving distance, decision, reasoning and doubt, and too individualistic, downplaying the importance of freedom’s normative background and excluding from consideration many documented forms of ethical experience. We propose instead an alternative, more open-ended conceptualization of freedom, distinguishing a concept of freedom that differs from its widely varying conceptions, and drawing on ethnographic material from the Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan and elsewhere to illustrate multiple ways in which the constitution of selves and normative constraints impinge on one another.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"414 - 437"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619890762","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49349574","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499620958206
Anne-Christine Trémon
Over the past two decades, politicians and intellectuals have lent support to rising anti-immigrant sentiments, ethno-nationalist integralism and far-right populism by coining expressions such as ‘cultural exclusion’ and claiming to be speaking in the name of the ‘people’, often under cover of anti-political correctness. In this article I identify a series of recurrent features of such ethno-nationalist identitarian theories. The book I am critiquing, PC Worlds: Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony (2019) by Jonathan Friedman, is a clear example of these trends. The scholar who had previously critiqued racialized politics and the reification of cultures now offers a book in favour of anti-immigrant ethno-nationalism and radical cultural othering. The article shows how this is the result of contradictions related to the evolution in his own thinking and situates these contradictions in regard to different theories of the nation-state. It also demonstrates how Friedman has proceeded to hollow out his own previous model, by making a distorted and normative use of it, and points out a number of weaknesses, particularly regarding the notions of ‘elites’ and ‘hegemony’. Finally, it questions the very project of conducting a study of political correctness.
{"title":"‘PC worlds’: Ethno-nationalist identitarian theories of anti-political correctness","authors":"Anne-Christine Trémon","doi":"10.1177/1463499620958206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620958206","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past two decades, politicians and intellectuals have lent support to rising anti-immigrant sentiments, ethno-nationalist integralism and far-right populism by coining expressions such as ‘cultural exclusion’ and claiming to be speaking in the name of the ‘people’, often under cover of anti-political correctness. In this article I identify a series of recurrent features of such ethno-nationalist identitarian theories. The book I am critiquing, PC Worlds: Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony (2019) by Jonathan Friedman, is a clear example of these trends. The scholar who had previously critiqued racialized politics and the reification of cultures now offers a book in favour of anti-immigrant ethno-nationalism and radical cultural othering. The article shows how this is the result of contradictions related to the evolution in his own thinking and situates these contradictions in regard to different theories of the nation-state. It also demonstrates how Friedman has proceeded to hollow out his own previous model, by making a distorted and normative use of it, and points out a number of weaknesses, particularly regarding the notions of ‘elites’ and ‘hegemony’. Finally, it questions the very project of conducting a study of political correctness.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"107 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620958206","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45399410","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619859107
Kenichi Tani, Kosuke Sakai
The aim of this paper is to define transcendental relativization, by using the binary in some anthropological works, and to give a description of it along with Niklas Luhmann’s sociology. We examine how the binary [the West/non-West] has been used in some anthropological works and how it has contributed not only to understanding ‘them’ as a research object but also to realizing ‘our’ conceptual limitations. This paper is an attempt to deal with political or power-relational asymmetry and scientific observational asymmetry in anthropological works. Luhmann’s sociology, which is based on the functional analysis and theory of social systems, shows that the binary approach in anthropology can be seen as a semantic form of science system, which realizes the existence of blind spots in anthropological observation, and is a possible strategy for anthropological investigations.
{"title":"Realizing the existence of blind spots in the ‘West’: A systems-theoretical perspective","authors":"Kenichi Tani, Kosuke Sakai","doi":"10.1177/1463499619859107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619859107","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this paper is to define transcendental relativization, by using the binary in some anthropological works, and to give a description of it along with Niklas Luhmann’s sociology. We examine how the binary [the West/non-West] has been used in some anthropological works and how it has contributed not only to understanding ‘them’ as a research object but also to realizing ‘our’ conceptual limitations. This paper is an attempt to deal with political or power-relational asymmetry and scientific observational asymmetry in anthropological works. Luhmann’s sociology, which is based on the functional analysis and theory of social systems, shows that the binary approach in anthropology can be seen as a semantic form of science system, which realizes the existence of blind spots in anthropological observation, and is a possible strategy for anthropological investigations.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"438 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619859107","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42976754","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499619894427
Arpan Roy
This article revisits Marshall Sahlins’s theory of kinship as a ‘mutuality of being’, in which two possible kinship orders are proposed: those that are ‘inherited’ at birth, and others that are ‘made’ in life. Sahlins’s theory is not exactly a reformulation of the classical consanguinity/affinity divide in kinship theory, but instead allows a place for consanguineous ‘blood’ kinship in the first of the two orders alongside a myriad of affinal situations. What then does it mean to ‘make’ kinship in life? Taking kinship and community as related problematics in anthropology and philosophy, respectively, I suggest in this article that the conditions for ‘making’ kinship in life can be established by borrowing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of community, in which community is the sharing of being. But being, as Nancy points out, is finite, meaning that it is curtailed by the experience of death. Joining the two discursive paradigms of Sahlins and Nancy, my argument is that if kinship can be ‘made’ in life, and life is delineated by finitude, then it is life and death (here conceptualised as biological forces) that act as frontiers for both inheriting and ‘making’ kinship.
{"title":"The returns of life: ‘Making’ kinship in life and death","authors":"Arpan Roy","doi":"10.1177/1463499619894427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619894427","url":null,"abstract":"This article revisits Marshall Sahlins’s theory of kinship as a ‘mutuality of being’, in which two possible kinship orders are proposed: those that are ‘inherited’ at birth, and others that are ‘made’ in life. Sahlins’s theory is not exactly a reformulation of the classical consanguinity/affinity divide in kinship theory, but instead allows a place for consanguineous ‘blood’ kinship in the first of the two orders alongside a myriad of affinal situations. What then does it mean to ‘make’ kinship in life? Taking kinship and community as related problematics in anthropology and philosophy, respectively, I suggest in this article that the conditions for ‘making’ kinship in life can be established by borrowing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of community, in which community is the sharing of being. But being, as Nancy points out, is finite, meaning that it is curtailed by the experience of death. Joining the two discursive paradigms of Sahlins and Nancy, my argument is that if kinship can be ‘made’ in life, and life is delineated by finitude, then it is life and death (here conceptualised as biological forces) that act as frontiers for both inheriting and ‘making’ kinship.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"484 - 507"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499619894427","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42155687","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/1463499618807294
Nana Okura Gagné
This article analyzes how the Japanese state and corporations promoted neoliberal restructuring and how employees responded to and reflected upon such changes. I show how neoliberal reforms have aimed to produce greater flexibility for corporations and promote a specific mode of control—“self-management”—among employees. However, rather than rationalizing and legitimizing risk and becoming self-regulating “enterprising selves,” many employees displayed a reflexive and reactive subjectivity that eschewed such neoliberal values. The reaction of many individuals to reforms in Japan can best be understood as “silent resistance” through a combination of discrete competition, turning inward, and stronger desires for stability and security. Economic restructuring thus produced a new kind of “alienation” characterized by narrowing corporate welfare and the breakdown of corporate community. At the same time, employees’ critical reflections reveal a post-Toyotist affect marked by retrenched desires for security and control under the changing national and global economy. Rather than a new, unprecedented subjectivation, the Japanese case of risk-aversive reflexive reaction reveals how existing cultural complexes produce different forms of subjectivity in response to reforms. Further, this nuances our understandings of how the kinds of subjectivities that emerge via the diverse processes of neoliberalization are always contingent upon the multiscalar historical and cultural contexts of work, responsibility, and risk.
{"title":"Neoliberalism at work: Corporate reforms, subjectivity, and post-Toyotist affect in Japan","authors":"Nana Okura Gagné","doi":"10.1177/1463499618807294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618807294","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes how the Japanese state and corporations promoted neoliberal restructuring and how employees responded to and reflected upon such changes. I show how neoliberal reforms have aimed to produce greater flexibility for corporations and promote a specific mode of control—“self-management”—among employees. However, rather than rationalizing and legitimizing risk and becoming self-regulating “enterprising selves,” many employees displayed a reflexive and reactive subjectivity that eschewed such neoliberal values. The reaction of many individuals to reforms in Japan can best be understood as “silent resistance” through a combination of discrete competition, turning inward, and stronger desires for stability and security. Economic restructuring thus produced a new kind of “alienation” characterized by narrowing corporate welfare and the breakdown of corporate community. At the same time, employees’ critical reflections reveal a post-Toyotist affect marked by retrenched desires for security and control under the changing national and global economy. Rather than a new, unprecedented subjectivation, the Japanese case of risk-aversive reflexive reaction reveals how existing cultural complexes produce different forms of subjectivity in response to reforms. Further, this nuances our understandings of how the kinds of subjectivities that emerge via the diverse processes of neoliberalization are always contingent upon the multiscalar historical and cultural contexts of work, responsibility, and risk.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"455 - 483"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499618807294","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43233845","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 : 2020-11-08DOI: 10.1177/1463499620959247
Alf Hornborg
Anthropologists have generally found it reasonable to understand the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a product of global historical processes including colonialism and the structure of world trade. The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global processes has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori. Andre Gunder Frank proposed that we should reconceptualize technological development as a ‘world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy’. Yet the theoretical implications of understanding industrial technological systems as global and unevenly distributed phenomena have, by and large, not contaminated mainstream conceptions of technologies as politically neutral and fundamentally innocent manifestations of enlightenment, detachable from the societal contexts in which they have emerged. Social theory nevertheless offers perspectives for a radical rethinking of this conventional ontology of modern technology. If the premises of actor–network theory, material culture studies, Marxism and poststructuralist critiques of power and inequalities are combined with the perspectives of ecological economics on global social metabolism, the fossil-fuelled textile factories of 19th-century Britain can be reinterpreted as social instruments for appropriating embodied human labour and natural space from elsewhere in the global system. A renewed ‘anthropology of technology’ might focus on the observation that technology is not simply a matter of putting nature to work, but a strategy of putting other sectors of global society to work. 1
{"title":"Machines as manifestations of global systems: Steps toward a sociometabolic ontology of technology","authors":"Alf Hornborg","doi":"10.1177/1463499620959247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620959247","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropologists have generally found it reasonable to understand the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a product of global historical processes including colonialism and the structure of world trade. The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global processes has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori. Andre Gunder Frank proposed that we should reconceptualize technological development as a ‘world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy’. Yet the theoretical implications of understanding industrial technological systems as global and unevenly distributed phenomena have, by and large, not contaminated mainstream conceptions of technologies as politically neutral and fundamentally innocent manifestations of enlightenment, detachable from the societal contexts in which they have emerged. Social theory nevertheless offers perspectives for a radical rethinking of this conventional ontology of modern technology. If the premises of actor–network theory, material culture studies, Marxism and poststructuralist critiques of power and inequalities are combined with the perspectives of ecological economics on global social metabolism, the fossil-fuelled textile factories of 19th-century Britain can be reinterpreted as social instruments for appropriating embodied human labour and natural space from elsewhere in the global system. A renewed ‘anthropology of technology’ might focus on the observation that technology is not simply a matter of putting nature to work, but a strategy of putting other sectors of global society to work. 1","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"206 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620959247","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45193811","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 : 2020-10-08DOI: 10.1177/1463499620958857
Arne Mellaard, T. Meijl
In a number of countries, domestic violence is represented as a governable phenomenon that is amenable to policy interventions. Over the past 40 years in the Netherlands, however, this approach has not resulted in a reduction of domestic violence. Yet new policy strategies continue to be designed to improve existing interventions. In this article, we focus on a Dutch policy measure that aims to detect early signals of violence and abuse. We argue that this strategy, by approaching domestic violence as a technical problem, fails to take into account structural and symbolic violence. As a consequence, the impact of domestic violence policies on women, particularly poor women, and especially women with a migration background, is to intensify their difficulties. Moreover, these policies deploy a technology that shapes the subjectivity of professionals engaged in protection practices, while maintaining the status quo of inequality and violence against women. The connection between these two flaws of domestic violence policies leads us to claim that the current approach is constituted as a regime of deficiency.
{"title":"Domestic violence policies in the Netherlands: A regime of deficiency","authors":"Arne Mellaard, T. Meijl","doi":"10.1177/1463499620958857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620958857","url":null,"abstract":"In a number of countries, domestic violence is represented as a governable phenomenon that is amenable to policy interventions. Over the past 40 years in the Netherlands, however, this approach has not resulted in a reduction of domestic violence. Yet new policy strategies continue to be designed to improve existing interventions. In this article, we focus on a Dutch policy measure that aims to detect early signals of violence and abuse. We argue that this strategy, by approaching domestic violence as a technical problem, fails to take into account structural and symbolic violence. As a consequence, the impact of domestic violence policies on women, particularly poor women, and especially women with a migration background, is to intensify their difficulties. Moreover, these policies deploy a technology that shapes the subjectivity of professionals engaged in protection practices, while maintaining the status quo of inequality and violence against women. The connection between these two flaws of domestic violence policies leads us to claim that the current approach is constituted as a regime of deficiency.","PeriodicalId":51554,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"437 - 459"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2020-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1463499620958857","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47684801","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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