Critique of Anthropology current issue

Introduction: The Limits of Neoliberalism

Kingfisher, C., Maskovsky, J. — 2008-05-28

Neoliberalism has emerged as one of the key concepts for studies of cultural and political-economic change on a global scale. Yet its enthusiastic adoption and application in recent anthropological work raises some significant theoretical and political problems. At the center of these is the challenge of discerning its limits. This Special Issue argues for the need to move beyond abstract and totalizing approaches that treat neoliberalism as a thing that acts in the world. We argue instead for approaches that stress its instabilities, partialities, and articulations with other cultural and political-economic formations, and that direct attention to the ways that culture, power and governing practices coalesce into concrete governmental regimes with their attendant patterns of inequality. Specific articles probe the limits and boundaries of neoliberalism as it plays out in different cultural and political-economic contexts.

Neoliberalism, Indigeneity and Social Engineering in Ecuador's Amazon

Wilson, P. C. — 2008-05-28

This article examines a state-sponsored hacienda invasion by indigenous people in Amazonian Ecuador in the context of neoliberal state restructuring and decentralization. Studies have demonstrated how neoliberal reforms limit the delivery of social services by the state, but in the case examined, the municipal government offered increased access to basic infrastructural and social services to residents of the new community and encouraged the land invasion. This may indicate shifts in neoliberal policy in parts of Ecuador, where decentralization is accompanied by promises of enhanced state services. I argue, however, that Ecuador's changing neoliberal agenda may provide new mechanisms for state control in Amazonia while reinforcing enduring racist ideologies of modernizing nationalism.

Is China Becoming Neoliberal?

Nonini, D. M. — 2008-05-28

Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of `market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a `floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadre-capitalist class simultaneously blur the `state'/`market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The conclusion is that contemporary China is not becoming `neoliberal' in either a strong or weak sense, nor undergoing a process of neoliberalization, but instead shows the emergence of an oligarchic corporate state and Party whose legitimacy is being challenged by disenfranchised classes, but is still in control through its efforts at modernization.

Neoliberalism, the Special Period and Solidarity in Cuba

Powell, K. — 2008-05-28

While the Cuban state's resistance to neoliberalism and to US dominance in particular has been vigorous, it is nonetheless subject to the constraints of neoliberal hegemony, and has entailed a degree of accommodation: the partial introduction of a market economy within a socialist political framework has given rise to some strong contradictions, most notably a sharp increase in inequality. This article considers to what extent the contradictions arising from these reforms have effects within everyday practices of struggle which threaten to problematize dispositions to solidarity — dispositions which are central to continued resistance, and an important social and political resource in confronting and shaping the future.

The Homeland Archipelago: Neoliberal Urban Governance after September 11

Ruben, M., Maskovsky, J. — 2008-05-28

In the post-9/11 period, the power of the concept of neoliberalism to describe US social and political dynamics has been questioned, particularly in light of discourses emphasizing the disaggregation of state power. Relying primarily on ethnographic data collected in Philadelphia between 2000 and 2005, this article examines the melding of neoliberal governance and Homeland Security ideology in the figure of `home', as a social construct more collective than the individual and more private than the community. Examining the arenas of community-based policing through Town Watch, and urban redevelopment through eminent domain, the article argues that the protection of `home' has become a mechanism through which the sometimes contradictory imperatives of capitalism and state governance may be promoted by municipalities and contested by urban residents, particularly those in minority and working-class communities.

The Neoliberal American Dream as Daydream: Counter-hegemonic Perspectives on Welfare Restructuring in the United States

Morgen, S., Gonzales, L. — 2008-05-28

Despite the efforts of its supporters to cast welfare `reform' in the United States as a successful achievement of neoliberal public policy, we argue that among low-income people who have received public assistance, counter-hegemonic interpretations and `possibilities' coexist with, texture and sometimes, challenge hegemonic assumptions about poverty, the state, motherhood and relations of power. Paying attention to these counter-hegemonic perspectives reveals ideological and political possibilities that are foreclosed when neoliberal hegemony is theorized as seamless and complete, rather than partial and vulnerable to disruption. That neoliberalism must be actively produced helps to explain the powerful processes that subject poor women and men, more intensely than many others, to practices and discourses designed to shape compliance with neoliberalism.

Public Health, Patronage and National Culture: The Resuscitation and Commodification of Community Origins in Neoliberal Brazil

Collins, J. F. — 2008-05-28

This article examines state and citizens' reliance on patron—client relations during neoliberal restructuring. It contends that neoliberalism is not an objectively apparent set of processes but an ideology. Building on this insight that emphasizes contradictory power relations, I focus on residents of a historical center, the Pelourinho, and their interpretations of the packaging of their practices as patrimony. As a result of their experience with institutions and patronage networks, these people have cobbled together surprising approaches to their state and its production of value from their habits and themselves. Thus, even as the state structures its attempt to commodify habits around a mix of techniques and patronage, residents employ related idioms to make demands on that state. I develop this argument in relation to an earlier period that was influential in putting together the lineaments of the national culture that is commodified today to argue that a double-bound debunking takes place in the Pelourinho, due to the workings of patronage and an ostensibly objective social science. Such a relational engagement with state attempts to sanitize vernacular habits suggests ways of understanding state institutions and NGOs that are so much a part of ideologies and their contestations under neoliberalism.

Book Review: Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006

Stepputat, F. — 2008-05-28

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2008-05-28