Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Gender

Anti-Blackness

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:11:24 +0000

Anti Ku Klux Klan protesters marched in Philadelphia on 5 November, 1988, after white supremacist groups agreed to call off a rally that would have been held the same day. Picture by Lori Schaull

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25antiblackness

Abstract:

‘Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it manifests in structural inequalities and in the everyday experiences of communities shaped by the afterlives of slavery.

Anthropology has historically been complicit in producing and legitimising anti-Black ideologies—constructing Blackness as inferior or subhuman while centring a fictive white ideal. Yet, anti-racist anthropologists have long challenged these paradigms, exposing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies. Today, anti-Blackness continues to shape disparities in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration, and cultural representation. At the same time, anthropology’s theories and methods—especially ethnography—offer tools to document, analyse, and challenge anti-Blackness in everyday life. This entry traces the discipline’s entanglement with anti-Blackness, emphasising both its role in reinforcing racial domination and its potential as a critical site for resistance, repair, and reimagining justice.

Introduction

Anti-Blackness is a global structure of domination that positions Blackness as a threat, a problem, or a deficit. It operates through and encompasses a wide range of practices and systems—including violence, exclusion, exploitation, and neglect—that have targeted people of African and Australasian descent across time and place. Though often discussed under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation: it has been foundational to the development of colonial empires, modern capitalism, and liberal democratic institutions (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2018; Allen and Jobson 2016). Anti-Blackness shapes policing practices, incarceration, and economic deprivation, but also standards of beauty, moral hierarchies, and social relations in everyday life. From the commodification of enslaved people to the surveillance of Black life, anti-Blackness remains central to the organisation of the modern world.

Anthropology has played a contradictory role in relation to anti-Blackness. As a discipline, it has contributed to racial classification, legitimised colonial domination, and excluded Black scholars from its intellectual traditions (Harrison 1992; Mullings 2005). Yet anthropology’s core methods—especially participant observation and ethnographic attention to lived experience—also offer tools for understanding how anti-Black structures are produced, contested, and navigated in everyday life. This entry explores that tension. It traces how anthropology has both reinforced and challenged anti-Black ideas, drawing from Black feminist theory, critical race studies, and decolonial ethnography to highlight how Black communities generate practices of endurance, resistance, care, and worldmaking.

Within white supremacist thought, African and Australasian Blackness has long symbolised radical alterity—a condition imagined as incompatible with civilisation, reason, or beauty (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Smedley 1993). In this racial schema, Black people were often cast as subhuman, or as existing outside the category of the human altogether (Douglass 1854; Fanon 1952; Jung and Vargas 2021; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2020). These ideas were not merely ideological—they were embedded in laws, institutions, languages, and cultural norms around the world (Hall 1997; Morgan 2002; Spears 2021).^[1]

Consider, for example, Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. This body of legislation, introduced between roughly 1877 and 1967 and predominantly across the US South, restricted the access of Black Americans to all major institutions of public life. It disenfranchised Black people politically, limited their economic possibilities, reduced their access to education, and supported a climate of anti-Black terror sustained by state officials and white militias. Anthropologists have argued that, under these laws,‘“Blackness” is the master-symbol of derogation in the society, and the “typical” Negro characteristics of dark skin color and of woolly or kinky hair are considered badges of subordinate status (Davis et al. [1941] 2022, 16). Such forms of anti-Blackness continue to shape institutions, economies, hierarchies, languages, desires, and intimacies in everyday life, even today.

This entry examines anti-Blackness in historical and contemporary perspective, showing how anthropologists and ethnographers have both enabled and challenged the racial orders that sustain white supremacy (Mullings 2005a; Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Pierre 2020). Contemporary anthropologists draw on the Black radical tradition and interdisciplinary literatures on Black ontology (i.e. the study of what it means to exist as a Black person) and Afropessimism (i.e. the study of fundamental structural aspects of society that perpetuate anti-Black racism) to examine how anti-Black violence and stigma organise modern life and death (Fanon 1952; Sexton 2008; Vargas 2018; Wilderson 2020). While the social construction of race has been examined across disciplines, anthropology’s ethnographic methods allow for sustained attention to how anti-Blackness is lived, embodied, and resisted in everyday life.

Slavery and anti-Blackness

Slavery was not always synonymous with Blackness (Patterson 1983; Smedley 1998; West 2002). In antiquity and the medieval period, Blackness was often associated with symbolic or spiritual meaning, rather than biological inferiority. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Ethiopians as beautiful and noble; the fourteenth century Maghrebi intellectual Ibn Battuta praised the justice of West African Muslims; and medieval Europe venerated Black saints such as the Egyptian St. Maurice and the Black Madonna (Bindman and Gates 2010; Snowden 1970). Even when Blackness carried negative connotations, it was not yet biologically overdetermined and pathologised. The association of Blackness with heritable enslavement developed gradually through European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, as slavery became racialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Smedley 1998; Gates and Curran 2022).

By the nineteenth century, after centuries of institutionalised chattel slavery, i.e. a form of slavery where slaves are considered to be the ‘property’ of their ‘owners’, Blackness had become a symbol of perpetual bondage and degradation. To be Black in most Euro-colonial societies meant being marked by ‘social death’—alienated from kin, honour, history, and futurity (Patterson 1983; Trouillot 1995; Wilderson 2020). Early anthropologists and ethnologists—especially those associated with the ‘American School’, led by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz—helped naturalise this association by grounding it in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference, transforming a historically contingent condition into an allegedly immutable ‘truth’ (Gould 1981; Painter 2010; Smedley 1993).

In the wake of slavery, Black life continues to be evaluated through a white supremacist gaze—simultaneously feared and exploited, always in relation to its utility for colonial-capitalist accumulation (Du Bois 1903; Robinson 1983; Sharpe 2016). This was the case in the late nineteenth century when recently freed American slaves and their offspring were kept in highly exploitative working conditions, constituting ‘a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 32). It continued in the twentieth century, when Black Americans served as a capitalist underclass both in the American industrial and service economies, but also in the privatised for-profit prison economy that relies disproportionately on Black labour (Gibson-Light 2023; Oshinsky 1996). And it persists today, as Black lives around the world continue to be considered largely disposable, whether they are Haitian emigrants seeking a better life or disadvantaged Black children in the favelas of Brazil being subjected to police abuse (Joseph and Louis 2022; Smith 2016). Anti-Blackness developed as a system of racial domination shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity—privileging whiteness, and especially white men, above all (Baldwin and Mead 1971; Mullings 2005a; Shange 2019).

In the post-slavery world, Black bodies were recast as a ‘social problem’, requiring political and scientific intervention (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1898, 1903; Harrison 1992). In the US, this became the so-called ‘negro problem’; in the British Empire, the ‘native problem’. Both framed Black and Indigenous populations as inherently disorderly and unfit for self-rule—justifying ongoing racial domination. Anthropology was complicit in this global racial order. Emerging alongside imperial conquest, it helped classify, study, and govern the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ subject (Baker 1998; Blakey 2010; Smedley 1998; Trouillot 1991). As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, ‘the savage was the alter ego the West constructed for itself… the raison d’être of anthropology’ (1991, 28, 40).

Yet anthropology also became a space for critique and resistance. Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised scholars have used ethnographic tools to expose structures of racial domination and articulate alternative visions for humanity (Mullings 2005a; Harrison et al. 2018). Understanding anti-Blackness through anthropological and historical frameworks is vital to building an anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial anthropology (Bolles 2001; Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001; Perry 2016).

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

To understand contemporary expressions of anti-Blackness, we must first trace its genealogy through European ‘Enlightenment’ thought. Central to Enlightenment philosophy was the presumption that Black and Indigenous peoples existed ‘without history’, outside the temporal and moral horizons of Western modernity (Fabian 1983; Fanon 1952; Hegel 1894; Trouillot 1995; West 2002; Wolf 1982). Racial difference was increasingly cast not only in cultural or religious terms but as a biological fact, justifying colonial conquest as a civilising mission. Anthropological knowledge, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became an instrument for racial surveillance and control. Black and Indigenous bodies were rendered as objects of study, classification, and debate, often in the service of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide. Thus, anthropology helped to uphold the normative distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ people and situated it along the colour line. In its studies of Black and Indigenous people, anthropology all too often ignored white rule and allowed anthropologists to serve as diplomats and public relations experts for white rule (Willis 1972; see also Baker 1998; Anderson 2019).

The modern scientific racism to which early anthropology contributed emerged alongside Enlightenment rationalism. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (10th ed., 1758) classified humans into continentally-bounded ‘varieties’. He described Africans as ‘Black, phlegmatic, lazy… sly, sluggish, neglectful’, and contrasted them with idealised Europeans, ‘governed by rites’. Relying on dubious colonial travel accounts, Linnaeus also claimed African women had ‘elongated labia’ and ‘breasts lactating profusely’.^[2]These dehumanising descriptors shaped later anatomical and racial science, grounding anti-Blackness in the language of empirical objectivity and universal classification (West 2002; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

European theories of Black inferiority found fertile ground in the antebellum (1815-1861) United States. Thomas Jefferson—Founding Father, slaveholder, and third US president—substantially shaped American racial thought. In Notes on the state of Virginia (1781), he notoriously speculated: ‘I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind’ (222). This conjecture framed racial hierarchy as reasoned observation rather than prejudice, lending intellectual legitimacy to chattel slavery and segregation (Walker 1830; Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014).^[3] Jefferson’s views were not merely abstract. He enslaved over 700 people and exploited the reproductive capacities of African-descended women. His long-term relationship with Sally Hemings—an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry—produced several children, all of whom inherited enslaved status through their mother (Cohen 1969; Woodson 1918; Finkelman 2014).^[4] This dynamic of sexual domination, denial of paternity, and commodification of Black life exemplified the intimate operations of anti-Blackness at the heart of American democracy.

Jefferson’s influence extended beyond the Monticello plantation in Virginia, which he owned, and even beyond the plantation system that dominated the economic development of the American South from the seventeenth until the twentieth century. As president, he severed trade relations with the newly independent Black republic of Haiti, fearing its revolutionary example would inspire slave uprisings across the Americas, and especially in the US South (James 1938; Scott 2004, 2014; Trouillot 1995). His statesmanship and racist writings laid the groundwork for the so-called ‘American School of Anthropology’ which codified pseudo-scientific racial theories and enshrined anti-Blackness in American science, law, and education (Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014, 198).

While Jefferson laid the ideological foundation, the ‘American School’ formalised these ideas. Central was ‘polygenism’—the theory that racial groups like ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caucasians’ were biologically distinct species with immutable traits (Gould 1981; Keel 2013; Painter 2010). Polygenists claimed that Black people were naturally inferior and biologically suited for subjugation. Samuel G. Morton, often called the ‘father’ of American physical anthropology, used manipulated skull measurements to ‘prove’ that Africans ranked lowest in the human hierarchy (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993; Blakey 2020). These claims helped justify slavery and segregation as the natural order (Morton 1839; Ralph 2012).

Closely linked was the theory of ‘hybrid sterility’, which pathologised racial mixing, and popularised the belief that ‘mulattoes’ were biologically unfit hybrids (Nott 1843). For example, an 1843 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, claimed: ‘[T]he mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between whites and blacks… they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived… the women are bad breeders and bad nurses… the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific’ (Nott 1843, 29–30). From such claims, it was concluded that interracial reproduction should be prohibited. These arguments later informed eugenics (i.e. ideas about improving the biological makeup of humans through selective breeding) and anti-miscegenation laws, embedding anti-Blackness in US legal and scientific infrastructure (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Nobles 2000; Pascoe 2010).

Yet these theories were never uncontested. Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass (1854; 1881) and Anténor Firmin (1885) repudiated scientific racism and established and defended the rights of Black people. Rather than accept white supremacist race science, they argued that differences among racialised groups stemmed from historical and environmental conditions—not biology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Drake and Baber 1990; Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Similarly, theories of polygenism and hybrid sterility were attacked as fallacious by noted scholars who condemned white anthropologists for being ‘blinded by passion’ and relying on false ‘audacious paradoxes’ (Firmin 1885, 68). Against the myth of hybrid sterility, Firmin wrote: ‘The fecundity of mulattoes is a fact so well known… that one can only be surprised that a scientist… can question it’ (68). Despite these rebuttals, obsession with Black bodies and racial mixture continued to dominate anthropological debates into the twentieth century (Anderson 2019; Baker 2020). Nevertheless, the early vindicationists, as they were known, laid foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial anthropology—one that exposed race science as spurious ideology serving domination.

Although polygenism lost credibility by the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theories did not end scientific racism. Racial hierarchies were rearticulated through social Darwinism and eugenics (Stocking 1968; Gould 1981; Dennis 1995). Darwin’s theory of common ancestry debunked polygenism but recast human difference as evolutionary hierarchy. In The descent of man, Charles Darwin wrote:

At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races… The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider… between man in a more civilized state… and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla (1871, 156).

Such comparisons gave scientific credence to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous tropes, framing colonial violence as evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer used these ideas to justify imperialism and capitalist inequality as inevitable (Dennis 1995; Magubane 2003). The rise of eugenics, a term and theory coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, reinforced this logic. Eugenicists envisioned humanity as a grand evolutionary tree, with elite Europeans at the top and Black and Indigenous peoples as stunted lower branches. These arboreal metaphors ‘naturalised’ racial hierarchies in society (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

In Europe, anthropologists also illustrated ‘morphological’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘intellectual’ trees to represent and legitimise these imagined racial hierarchies (Mantegazza 1881; see Fig 1). In these hierarchies, ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Caffres’, ‘Papuans’, ‘Australians’, and ‘Negritos’ are placed at the bottom, and ‘Aryans’—white Europeans—at the top (Taylor and Marino 2019, 116–7). In short, social Darwinism replaced polygenism but not racism—it simply gave anti-Blackness new scientific language.

racist_tree_diagram.png

(Fig 1). Paulo Mantegazza’s “Morphological, aesthetic, and intellectual hierarchies of the human race.” (1881).

The Black body

Building on the racial typologies of polygenism and the biological determinism of social Darwinism, physical anthropologists and early social scientists increasingly turned their attention to the Black body as an object of empirical study and political concern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Black body became a central site through which scientific racism was naturalised and institutionalised. Rather than treating race solely as a taxonomic abstraction, anthropologists and state officials began to treat the bodies of Black people as repositories of deviance—biological, moral, and civilisational (Baker 1998). These discourses were not merely academic; they helped legitimise the structural realities of post-emancipation Black life, including structural poverty, segregation, political exclusion, and the ever-present threat of rebellion. Within this context, the Black body was framed not just as different, but as existentially dangerous—a problem to be studied, managed, and contained.

In post-Emancipation America (1865–1955), this racialised scrutiny took the form of what policymakers and social scientists called the ‘negro problem’ (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1903; 1935). The presence of millions of recently emancipated people in a supposedly democratic society raised an urgent socio-political question: What to do with the Blacks? Integration? Segregation? Expulsion to Africa? In response, segregationist laws known as ‘Black codes’, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism reinforced racial domination through legal, social, and extra-legal means—perpetuating exclusion from education, labour, property, and political life (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955).

The so-called ‘negro problem’ was thus a cultural trope shaped by deep-rooted ‘negrophobia’—the psychic and social condition in which Black bodies become projections of white fear, guilt, and fantasy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and settler colonialism (Butler 1993; Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1952; Ralph and Chance 2014). Black bodies became overdetermined by contradictory myths and stereotypes: biologically inferior yet physically threatening, hypersexual yet degenerate, human yet animal. They were objectified as specimens for medical and anthropological study and symbolically constructed as social threats to white civility and national order. As Frantz Fanon (1952) and Winthrop Jordan (1968) note, Black people were positioned somewhere between human and beast—feared, surveilled, and exploited.

American popular and scientific literatures alike portrayed Black men as ‘savages’ with uncontrollable lust for white women (Baker 1998; Fanon 1952). The myth of the Black rapist served to justify lynchings and other extrajudicial forms of racial terror (Wells 1909; Davis 1981). The Black male body was pathologised as criminal, immoral, and uncivilised (Muhammad 2010). These narratives were reinforced by legal mechanisms such as ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws, which limited Black people’s rights to get married, the ‘one-drop rule’, which asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor should also be racialised as Black, and the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy and loitering statutes—all of which enabled the de facto re-enslavement of Black people through the convict leasing system, through which prisons could lease the forced labour of mostly Black prisoners to wealthy individuals and corporations (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1996).

The trope of the Black criminal normalised systemic anti-Blackness and legitimated mass incarceration as a form of racial governance (Jordan 2014; Muhammad 2010). Structural racism, predicated on anti-Blackness, displaced responsibility for Black suffering onto Black people themselves. Structural racism refers to the ways that institutions, policies, and social arrangements collectively produce and reproduce racial inequality. Eugenicists, for example, used demographic data on Black mortality to predict the supposed ‘extinction of the Negro’ by the twentieth century (Brandt 1978; Ralph 2012; Muhammad 2010). These morbid fantasies ignored the systemic conditions of racialised death and pathologised Black existence that persist until today (Dennis 1995; Mbembe 2019). For example, young Black and Latinx men in East Harlem, confronting systemic unemployment, are made to navigate illicit economies —such as the street-level drug trade and other informal survival strategies that emerge in response to exclusion from the formal labor market—while their bodies are surveilled, punished, or absorbed into carceral systems designed for profit maximization (Bourgois 2003).

The commodification of Black bodies has long underwritten the global capitalist economy, from the extraction of labour under slavery to contemporary racialised markets in entertainment, sports, surveillance, and incarceration. Numerous ethnographic studies have examined how Black bodies are treated as fungible assets—valued for their productivity, aesthetic, or capacity for violence, yet systematically devalued as persons. In the US, for instance, Black bodies are hyper-visible in popular media yet constrained by controlling images that reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies (Gray 1995; Jackson Jr. 2005). In popular culture, recurring stereotypes such as the ‘mammy’—the loyal, self-sacrificing domestic servant—and the ‘welfare queen’—depicted as lazy, hyper-fertile, and parasitic—serve to naturalise Black women's social subordination and rationalise structural inequality through familiar visual tropes (Collins 2000).

Even in the American healthcare system, Black patients are often treated as less-than-human within clinical settings, where capitalist logics and anti-Black racism intersect to devalue Black patients’ pain, experiences, and lives (Rouse 2009). These racialised medical encounters are shaped by ‘ethical variability’, whereby clinicians justify unequal care by invoking culturally biased notions of responsibility, credibility, and worthiness.

Afrophobia

‘Afrophobia’ refers to a deep-seated hatred and fear of anything associated with Blackness or Africanness. The concept is closely related to ‘negrophobia’, both emerging from long-standing European traditions of imagining African peoples as inferior, dangerous, disorderly, or contaminating. Its discursive roots trace to Greco-Roman and medieval European portrayals of Africans as monstrous and uncivilised (Stewart 2005, 43; Cantave 2024, 863). In the modern world, Afrophobia encompasses not only aesthetic prejudice but also a globalised fear of African peoples, cultural traditions, and their capacity to unsettle white supremacy and Euro-American hegemony. In Latin America, this manifests in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of African-derived spiritual traditions such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Haitian Vodou (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). These traditions—born in the crucible of slavery and colonial violence—are not simply forms of worship but cultural systems of Black survival, resistance, and world-making (Boaz 2021; Stewart 2005; Cantave 2024).

Historically, anthropology was complicit in shaping Afrophobic knowledge regimes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers often depicted African spiritual practices as primitive ‘superstitions’, aligning with colonial regimes that sought to eradicate them. Classic ethnographies in French and Iberian colonies portrayed Vodou and Candomblé as irrational or pathological—reinforcing racist state policies. Early anthropological writing rarely took these belief systems seriously as coherent cosmologies, instead treating them as exotic curiosities or proof of Black primitivism (Brown 2003).

Yet anthropology has also helped challenge these frameworks. Contemporary Afro-diasporic ethnographers and critical anthropologists have reclaimed the study of African-derived religions as a site of political and epistemological contestation. In this vein, scholars have foregrounded how practitioners understand their own rituals as ethical, affective, and intellectual forms of life-making. They also show how gender, sexuality, and embodiment are transformed through spiritual practice (Pérez 2016; Daniel 2005; Tinsley 2008).

In the Dominican Republic, Afrophobia is materially enacted in everyday life—especially through racialised anxieties about beauty, hygiene, and spiritual purity (Candelario 2007). Dominican beauty salons serve as intimate spaces where Afro-Haitian features and aesthetics are policed and effaced. Here, Haitian migrants are stigmatised not only for their Blackness but for presumed associations with Vodou, often framed publicly as satanic or uncivilised. These anxieties are entangled with fears of national degeneration and cultural contamination. Ethnographic observations such as these show how the body becomes a moral frontier where race, nation, and spirit converge—and where Afrophobic violence is inscribed onto skin, hair, and comportment.

In this context, anthropological studies that centre the lived experiences of Afro-religious practitioners offer critical tools to decolonise knowledge and confront Afrophobia. They reveal African diasporic religions not as threats to national order but as vital repositories of historical memory, resilience, and political possibility. At their best, ethnographic methods can expose the micro-practices of racial domination while amplifying Black cultural life on its own terms.

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

‘Misogynoir’ refers to the specific forms of violence and dehumanisation that Black women experience at the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny (Bailey 2021). Historically, Black women’s bodies were subjected to scientific, sexual, and symbolic violation. A paradigmatic example is Saartjie Baartman (c.1789–1815), a Khoi woman from South Africa exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1985; Magubane 2001; Strother 1999). Her semi-nude body was displayed to curious European audiences, and after her death, her remains were dissected by French anatomist Georges Cuvier and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974. Baartman’s treatment exemplified how the Black female body was racialised, sexualised, and rendered a scientific object—central to the development of comparative anatomy and early anthropological inquiry.

Contemporary Black feminist anthropologists have shown how this colonial gaze continues to shape representations of Black women. They point out that Black women’s bodies have historically been ‘disciplined’ through contradictory social discourses—from Christian morality and motherhood to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality and labour, and that white and Black women are constructed in opposition to each other: white women as symbols of domestic virtue and Black women as oversexualised ‘workhorses’ (Shaw 2001). Consequently, Black women in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as well as the post–civil rights era in the United States, navigate persistent gendered-racial expectations, often by asserting alternative moral, religious, and familial frameworks to reclaim bodily autonomy and dignity (Shaw 2001).

Other ethnographic studies also reveal the complex ways Black women resist, negotiate, or internalise these intersecting oppressions. For instance, Afro-Caribbean girls in New York are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in public space—fetishised as style icons and simultaneously policed as disruptive. Their creative expressions through fashion, music, and dance are often criminalised, yet also serve as strategies of survival and identity (LaBennett 2011). Similarly, young Black women in a transitional housing shelter in Detroit use performance and expressive culture to resist the stigmatisation of Black girlhood (Cox 2015). These ethnographies illuminate the lived experience of misogynoir and demonstrate how Black women mobilise care, kinship, and creativity in the face of structural violence.

Importantly, Black feminist scholars have also highlighted the intra-racial dimensions of misogyny. Black women are often expected to subordinate their experiences of gendered violence to broader racial struggles, leading to silences around the harm they endure from Black men (Collins 2000; Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 2014; Davis 1981; Lorde 1984). Anthropologists have argued that ethnography is particularly well-suited to expose these overlapping systems of oppression by attending to the quotidian textures of abuse, labour, survival, and joy in Black women’s lives (Mullings 2005b; McClaurin 2001). Black feminist anthropologists aim to make Black women’s lives ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21), a political and methodological project that resists both invisibility as well as hyper-surveillance. Gertrude Fraser’s (1998) ethnographic research on Black midwifery and the racial politics of reproductive health exemplifies this approach. She shows how Black women’s bodies and labour are routinely devalued in clinical and institutional settings. Attending to the embodied and generational knowledge of Black women healthcare workers illuminates how racism, sexism, and professional hierarchies intersect to marginalise Black women’s authority and care work. By centring Black women’s voices, labour, and intellectual production, Black feminist anthropology challenges the discipline to reckon with its own racial and gendered hierarchies—and to imagine new possibilities for more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory knowledge-making (McClaurin 2001). Yet, despite these contributions, Black women anthropologists have historically been marginalised within the academy. Their scholarship remains under-cited and undervalued in disciplinary canons (Harrison et al. 2018; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic exclusion reflects broader patterns of anti-Blackness and sexism that pervade the discipline of anthropology itself.

Racial capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ refers to the process by which capitalist economies have always been structured by and dependent upon racial hierarchies and the exploitation of Black labour. First developed by Cedric Robinson (1983), the concept critiques the idea that capitalism is a racially neutral economic system only later corrupted by racism. Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from European feudal orders that already encoded racial difference, and that Black people have been subjected to a distinct form of economic subjugation central to the global capitalist order. In this view, anti-Blackness is not a by-product of capitalism but foundational to its formation and endurance (Du Bois 1935; Williams 1940; Robinson 1983; Matlon 2016).

Anthropologists have documented how Black life is shaped by systems of racialised accumulation and dispossession, from plantation slavery to contemporary neoliberalism. Insurance policies on enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century US South illustrate the fusion of racial logics and financial speculation (Ralph 2012). Enslaved people were rendered fungible labour and abstract instruments of credit and actuarial calculation. Their value derived not from their humanity but from their capacity to generate returns for owners and insurers. Slave insurance reveals how Black life was financialised in ways that shaped modern capitalism, including the development of life insurance, risk management, and governance of future value.

Historian Destin Jenkins (2021) builds on this understanding with a historical analysis of how municipal debt became a tool of racial governance in twentieth century San Francisco—a framework that offers important insights for anthropological approaches to racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, Jenkins shows how bond markets and credit-rating agencies influenced public infrastructure decisions, disinvesting from Black neighbourhoods while underwriting white wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism thus operates not only through exploitation but through financial infrastructures that dictate whose futures are investable.

In the Caribbean, economic policies associated with globalisation, tourism, and austerity have likewise entrenched anti-Black hierarchies (Slocun 2006; Thomas 2019, 2021). In urban Jamaica, Black youth are simultaneously criminalised and commodified—as symbols of urban danger for tourists and as security laborers in the very industries that exclude them. In this way, Blackness is linked to economic disposability while also being monetised within global security regimes (Jaffe 2015).

Similarly, labour struggles in Guadeloupe are shaped by colonial legacies and racialised inequality, as Black workers mobilise both class and race to challenge French imperial domination (Bonilla 2021). Ethnographic research with rural St. Lucian women in the banana export industry also reveals the racialised and gendered dimensions of global capitalism (Slocum 2006). Here, Black women navigate the intersecting pressures of neoliberal trade regimes, postcolonial marginalisation, and local class hierarchies, and underscore how global capitalism reproduces racial and gendered inequalities. For example, many women farmers must absorb the risks of volatile export prices, perform the unpaid labour required to meet stringent quality standards, and contend with male intermediaries who control access to markets and resources, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable within global commodity chains.

Anthropologists working in the tradition of structural violence—a concept popularised by Paul Farmer (2004)—have shown how racialised violence is embedded in political and economic systems, not just individual attitudes. Structural violence refers to the historically produced social arrangements—such as poverty, segregation, and unequal access to healthcare—that systematically harm marginalised populations by constraining their life chances and exposing them to preventable suffering. While structural racism is a specific form of this violence, rooted in racial hierarchy and anti-Blackness, structural violence more broadly encompasses the multiple social forces that produce patterns of inequality and harm. Farmer’s work in Haiti traced how colonialism and neoliberalism shape health outcomes through institutional neglect and economic exploitation. Building on this, Adia Benton’s (2015) ethnography of Sierra Leone’s HIV response reveals how global health regimes reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies, exposing whose lives are deemed valuable or not.

The Harlem Birth Right Project, led by Leith Mullings (2001; 2005b), further developed this approach in the US context, analysing how race, gender, and class intersect to produce structural vulnerability. Their research linked high rates of infant mortality among Black women in Harlem to housing insecurity, over-policing, and barriers to quality prenatal care. Other ethnographers have likewise shown how structural racism is embodied through cyclical poverty, over-policing, and healthcare inequality (Bourgois 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Together, these studies reveal how anti-Blackness is infrastructural—woven into the built environment, labour markets, and social services—and how racial capitalism renders Black life both exploitable and expendable.

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

Anti-Blackness is a fact of everyday life across the postcolonial world (Fanon 1952; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Keaton 2023). Yet for much of the twentieth century, anthropology’s ability to study racism seriously was constrained by post-Boasian liberalism and its doctrinal commitments to anti-essentialism and ‘colour-blindness’ (Allen and Jobson 2016; Anderson 2019; Baker 1998; Mullings 2005a; Shanklin 1998). These liberal frameworks, dominant since the 1960s, often dismissed structural racism as a serious object of anthropological inquiry. As scholars have argued, late twentieth-century racial ideologies increasingly took the form of ‘colour-blind racism’ or ‘racism without races’—systems of inequality that deny the significance of race while reproducing its effects through ostensibly race-neutral institutions, discourses, and practices (Bangstad and Fuentes 2023; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Omi and Winant 1986). With the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous anthropologists, critical ethnographic research has increasingly foregrounded the structures and lived conditions of anti-Blackness—reshaping academic knowledge and the local-global politics of race.

Contemporary anthropology is especially well positioned to examine the overlapping and divergent manifestations of anti-Blackness worldwide. While unified by a global racialised formation, the expressions of anti-Blackness in Ghana, Brazil, the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Europe vary significantly, shaped by distinct colonial histories, nationalist projects, and local racial regimes (Jung and Vargas 2021, 2022; Mills 2021). Jamaica, for example, enjoys sovereignty without emancipation from US imperialism (Thomas 2019), while African Americans have experienced emancipation from slavery without sovereignty (Shange 2019, 8). These divergent trajectories shape distinct yet interconnected experiences of anti-Blackness which emerge from the afterlives of empire, revealing how racial domination is reproduced across multiple global sites (Thomas and Clarke 2013).

Anti-Blackness manifests through surveillance, discipline, and the differential valuation of Black life. Black people are routinely seen as threatening, unruly, or out of place (Browne 2015; Butler 1993; Sharpe 2016). These racialised perceptions give rise to punitive structures—both spectacular and mundane—that discipline Black bodies. In eighteenth century New York, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race individuals were legally required to carry lanterns after dark to illuminate their faces (Browne 2015). Today, such logics persist in policing, education, and carceral systems. For example, in her study of a San Francisco school, Savannah Shange (2019) describes how Black and Latinx youth are disciplined through ‘carceral progressivism’, i.e. the use of multicultural rhetoric that claims to lament structural racism, but still insists on zero-tolerance and police-based approaches to disciplining Black people and justify racial control. In Australia, Aboriginal youth are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of their white peers, revealing how settler colonialism continues to target Black and Indigenous life under the banner of multiculturalism (Holland et al. 2024; Hage 2000; Povinelli 2002; Wolfe 2016).

Ethnographies in the Caribbean and Latin America show how anti-Blackness animates postcolonial statecraft and global capitalism. In Jamaica, American militarism and neoliberalism have shaped violent policing regimes (Thomas 2019) while in Brazil, anthropologists have documented how militarised policing specifically targets Black favelas (Alves 2018; Smith 2016; Gillam 2022). Perhaps the most striking example comes from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a place that is marketed as an ‘Afro-paradise’—a transnational fantasy that celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture for tourism and national identity—even as the state continues to subject Black communities to pervasive violence and surveillance. Indeed, Black communities have long been sites of routinised, yet spectacular, racialised violence (Smith 2016). Here, Afro-Brazilians resist anti-Blackness through protest and performance practices—particularly bloco afro processions, Carnival-based counter-performances, and community mobilisations against police violence—in everyday life.

In the US, Laurence Ralph (2020) shows how the Chicago Police Department systematised torture against Black men from the 1970s to 1990s. In Detroit, Aimee Cox (2016) details how unhoused Black girls choreograph strategic movements through hostile urban spaces to claim dignity and survival. These ‘choreographies’ are not only acts of endurance but also everyday refusals of disposability. Together, these ethnographies show that anti-Blackness is not limited to spectacular violence but is embedded in quotidian institutions that constrain and surveil Black life. Anthropology, when critically engaged, offers tools to document these dynamics and to amplify Black knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking.

‘Colourism’ is another important facet of anti-Blackness. It refers to prejudice and discrimination based on skin tone, often within Black and Brown communities (Glenn 2009; Jablonski 2021). Coined by Alice Walker (1983), ‘colourism’ names the global preference for lighter skin in proximity to whiteness (Bajwa et al. 2023). People experience it daily: in family life, dating, beauty, housing, healthcare, education, media, and policing (Caldwell 2007; Anekwe 2014; Monk 2015; Spears 2020). Though the term is modern, colourism is centuries old, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and racial science. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1796) identified eleven gradations of racial mixture, praising the ‘mulatto’ as the ideal hybrid. He wrote:

Of all the combination of white and nègre it is the mulatto who brings together all of the physical advantages; of all of these crossings of race he is the one who has the strongest constitution, the most appropriate to Saint-Domingue's climate. To the sobriety and the strength of the nègre he joins the physical grace and the intelligence of the white (1798; Garrigus 2006).

Such fantasies fused early scientific racism with erotic desire, projecting European superiority onto the bodies of the enslaved. As many scholars have argued, early racial science was animated by anxieties over miscegenation, bodily purity, and racial control (Fanon 1954; Jordan 1968; Stoler 2002; Wolfe 2016). Moreover, ‘racially hierarchical social orders, which are rooted in the control and exploitation of (racially identified) peoples and places […] generate complex dynamics of hate and love, fear and fascination, contempt and admiration […] that seems to have a specifically sexual dimension’ (Wade 2009, 2).

Colourism is historically and geographically contingent. In the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ collapsed racial ambiguity into a rigid Black-white binary (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Jordan 2014). Yet lighter-skinned Black people—particularly women—have often been granted greater social capital and proximity to whiteness (Larsen 1929; Walker 1983). In South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, ‘pigmentocracies’ used gradations of skin tone to structure social life (Bacelar da Silva 2022; Jackson 2024; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2014). Terms like ‘coloured’, ‘milat’, ‘mulato’, and ‘mestizo’ mark intermediate racial categories, creating buffer classes that were closer to whiteness but denied its full privileges (Glenn 2009). This stratification fostered internalised racism and horizontal antagonisms (Spears 2020; Walker 1983).

Ethnographic research shows that in Latin America, racial identities are often expressed through skin tone rather than fixed categories, and are shaped by context, class position, and local understandings of ancestry. As Peter Wade (2009) notes, racial classification in the region is fluid, relational, and embedded in broader national ideologies of mestizaje that link colour, class, and sexuality. In many settings, individuals may be identified differently depending on region, social status, or interpersonal interactions. In Mexico, descriptors like ‘moreno’ or ‘güero’ serve as racial signifiers that shift with context (Sue 2013). In Brazil, ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ have long obscured structural inequalities perpetuated by anti-Blackness and colourism (Hordge-Freeman 2015; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998). In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism reinforces the association of Blackness with cultural and national undesirability (Aber and Small 2013; Candelario 2007).

Skin bleaching is a global phenomenon, not confined to Black Atlantic societies. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, Peru, and Ghana, lighter skin is linked with beauty and modernity (Glenn 2009; Jha 2015; Mishra 2015; Pierre 2015). Many products contain mercury, hydroquinone, or potent topical steroids, causing severe dermatological damage—including chemical burns, skin thinning, and ochronosis—as well as systemic risks such as kidney failure, hypertension, and neurological toxicity. Despite these severe health risks, the global skin-lightening industry exceeds $8 billion annually and is expected to continue growing.

Colourism reveals that anti-Blackness cuts across national borders and ‘people of colour’ (‘POC’) categories. Although the term ‘POC’ is often mobilised to foster cross-ethnic alliances and highlight shared experiences of marginalisation, the term can also flatten important differences by subsuming distinct racial histories under a single label. In particular, it can obscure the structural and quotidian nature of anti-Blackness, diluting attention to the specific forms of violence, exclusion, and state surveillance directed at Black communities.

This points to the fact that anti-Blackness is not just a legacy of colonialism—it is a structuring logic of the modern racial order (Vargas 2018). Everyday manifestations of anti-Blackness, whether through skin tone, surveillance, or institutional neglect, underscore the systemic nature of racial violence. Anthropology, at its best, offers the methodological tools to document and disrupt these patterns.

Conclusion

Anthropology has long been complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, at times functioning as a tool of racial domination and colonial conquest (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Gupta and Stoolman 2021; Mullings 2005a). Yet anthropology also holds liberatory potential, precisely because it seeks to understand how social structures and relations, political hierarchies, and hegemonic cultures are experienced by people themselves (Harrison 1991; Cox et al. 2022; Mullings 2005a). By engaging with theories of anti-Blackness—especially those developed beyond the discipline—anthropology can interrogate its own historical complicity while contributing to contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide.

The Movement for Black Lives—a global social movement against the ongoing structural devaluation of Black life and the resurgence of white nationalist politics—underscores the urgency of this task (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Jung and Vargas 2021; Williams 2015). From anti-police violence protests in the US to anti-racist demonstrations abroad, this movement highlights both the persistence of racial violence and the resilience of Black communities.^[5] Anthropological perspectives are essential here—not only to bear witness to how Black people experience and endure anti-Blackness, but also to illuminate how they resist and reimagine these structures in everyday life.

Black feminist anthropologists have long shown that centring Black humanity requires analysing intersecting oppressions and committing to politically engaged scholarship in Black communities themselves (Bolles 2001; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001). Despite this, Black women anthropologists have themselves been marginalised or excluded from the discipline’s canon, and their work remains undervalued (Harrison et al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic erasure not only marginalises scholars but also silences the communities they represent. It exposes how dominant notions of merit and rigor remain shaped by Eurocentric, anti-Black, and sexist assumptions (McClaurin 2001). In response, Black feminist anthropologists continue to counter this devaluation by making Black women’s lives and voices ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21).

Calls for abolitionist anthropology, informed by the Movement for Black Lives, remind us that the discipline must embrace more liberatory frameworks for representing human experience (Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991). Black practices of fugitivity, marronage—historically, the flight of enslaved people who formed autonomous communities in resistance to colonial domination—storytelling, witness-bearing, and radical ‘freedom dreams’ envision life beyond the ubiquitous ‘weather’ of anti-Blackness. These visions are grounded in the lived realities and cultural imaginaries of Black people (Allen and Jobson 2016; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016). To remain relevant to the critical study of the human condition, anthropology must treat anti-Blackness not as peripheral, but as foundational to understanding the modern world (Jung and Vargas 2021; Wilderson 2003). In this way, anthropology can not only interrogate its own colonial legacies, but also serve as a tool for amplifying the voices, experiences, and aspirations of Black communities globally, contributing to the broader struggle for racial justice.

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Note on contributor

Sebastian Jackson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research examines race, intimacy, and the afterlives of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid in South Africa, the United States, and the broader Black Atlantic world. He has published on racism, white supremacist ideology, and postcolonial kinship in academic and public-facing venues.

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Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Dance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:06:39 +0000

Girls dancing at the Celebrating Sanctuary Festival on London's South Bank in 2008. The festival celebrates the cultural diversty that migrants bring to the UK. Picture by Gary Knight.

Panas Karampampas

Durham University

Initially published 2 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25dance

Abstract:

Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are enacted and negotiated. This entry explores dance as both a localised embodied practice and as a globally circulating phenomenon. It begins by questioning universal definitions of dance before outlining key contributions from dance anthropology and ethno-choreology, specifically their focus on embodiment, research methods, and the limits of representation. Subsequent sections consider dance in relation to politics, and the impact of digital media in fostering global hybrid forms of dance. The final section examines staged performances and the role of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has further institutionalised dance by recognising it as a ‘living heritage’. Together, these sections illustrate that dance operates simultaneously as practice, symbol, and political artefact—what might be called its ‘multiple existences’—and explores why understanding these layers is essential across disciplines. As a dynamic and fluid practice, dance remains a vital subject of anthropological inquiry, revealing complex interactions between tradition, innovation, and socio-political power.

Introduction

Defining dance in anthropology is a challenge, since it does not always exist as a clear-cut category as such for the people we study. Speaking of ‘dance’ therefore risks profoundly misinterpreting the activities we try to analyse and the social contexts where they occur. For example, for the sixteenth century Mixtec people of Jamiltepec, in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, no single term for ‘dance’ existed. Instead, the word yaa simultaneously referred to dance, games, and music, which were always performed together and not experienced as distinct or separate (Stanford 1966, 103). Likewise, in classical Greece, the term ‘ὄρχησις’ referred to the inseparable triad of music, song, and bodily movement—much as in many contemporary Greek folk dance practices. Again, ‘dance’ did not exist here as a meaningful stand-alone concept (Zografou 2003). The same point applies for the all-night yamɨn siria ceremony of Papua New Guinea’s Ambonwari people. Held in people’s private houses on celebratory occasions, it combines song and dance with storytelling and bodily decoration, elements that are closely connected to the natural environment and the spirit world. Yamɨn siria is not just a dance, but a holistic ritual that reflects an entire cosmology, reproduces the cultural memory of participants and their ancestors, provides young people with a chance to flirt, and can serve as an opportunity to settle old disputes (Telban 2017). In Arabic, several terms that describe movement and rhythmic expression also do not correspond precisely to the English notion of ‘dance’. Raqs (رَقص) broadly denotes Arabic dancing—often referred to colloquially as ‘belly dance’; dabke (دبكة) designates collective line dancing that embodies social cohesion; and samāʿ (سماع) refers to musical listening and rhythmic bodily movement within Sufi ritual (Rowe 2010, 11–3).

All that said, conceptual clarity can be useful so long as it speaks to the perspectives of the people we study. A fairly encompassing definition of dance considers it to be a practice composed of purposeful, often intentionally rhythmical, and socially patterned sequences of nonverbal body movement (Hanna 1979, 316). This movement is generally considered distinct from ordinary motor activities. It involves time, space, and effort, relies on both individual choice and social learning, and possesses inherent and aesthetic value. Specific criteria tend to determine what is appropriate in each context and what may distinguish the competency of dance practitioners as perceived by their society. Finally, such movement should be recognised as dance by its practitioners and—if an audience is present—by the audience members of the practitioner’s social group.

Understood in these terms, dance can be a powerful social instrument. Often much more than mere entertainment or artistic expression, it physically manifests identity, tradition, and a sense of belonging, while also reflecting and contesting social norms (Desmond 1997a; Kealiinohomoku 1970). Various academic disciplines, from psychology to performance studies, have explored dance from multiple angles, analysing its aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. They have shown that politicians and media often harness dance as a symbol of national identity, and sometimes as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Anthropology brings a unique focus to the study of dance’s social implications and cultural contexts (Buckland 1999), in part because it tends to delve deeper into the meanings and power relations embedded in dance practices (Spencer 1985).

From the early twentieth century onward, dance has attracted the interest of influential anthropologists, including Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1928), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Franz Boas (1927), Margaret Mead (1928) and Gregory Bateson (Mead and Bateson 1952). For these early writers, the documentation and analysis of Indigenous people’s dance was integral to understanding their social structures. As part of ritual, dance was primarily seen as contributing to social cohesion, essential for maintaining social bonds. Evans-Pritchard, for example, argued that that the gbere buda or ‘beer dance’ of the twentieth century Azande people, in what are now the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, allowed for moderate, discreet, and therefore harmless kinds of flirting and sexual play. Thereby, Evans-Pritchard argued, the dance protected the institutions of Azande marriage and the family (1928, 458). Early anthropological studies also emphasised the importance of dance for transmitting cultural knowledge. For example, according to Mead, dance interrupted the otherwise rigorous subordination of Samoan children during the early twentieth century to the social hierarchy they grew up in. Dance allowed them greater degrees of attention and freedom than they were habitually used to. It equally permitted the expression and cultivation of children’s individuality in ‘a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibitionism’ as Mead put it (1928, 118).

Early anthropological studies were equally fascinated by the ways in which ritual dance reflects and shapes people’s spiritual lives, serving as a powerful medium through which people express their cosmologies and influence spirits. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the Kwakiutl of North America used dance to attract life-giving spirits, to tame them, and to receive gifts of supernatural powers from them. As part of the ritual known as the ‘winter ceremonial’, Kwakiutl families came together and danced wearing masks that emulated and personated different spirits, tracing their family histories back to mythical times and supernatural events (Boas and Hunt 1897).

For many Indigenous peoples, ritual dance has remained central until today, as it remains part of ceremonies marking life events, seasonal transitions, and collective identity. The nomadic Wodaabe of West Africa, for example, engage in a series of dance and performance rituals throughout the year, one of which, called the yaake, comprises a beauty contest in which women chose the most beautiful male performer. The young men stand in a long line, facing the sunset, and dance by moving especially their feet and spinal column. Accentuated movements of the face highlight the whiteness of their eyes and teeth, all while being overlooked by Wodaabe women. It has been argued that in this case this dance not only expresses male pride or allows the men and women to flirt, but that it also distinguishes the Wodaabe from the more sedentary Fulani people who live in the same region. It renders the Wodaabe recognisably ‘exotic’ to the people of Niger, and to Westerners who are only superficially aware of their life circumstances. By internalising and cultivating their reputation of being ‘exotic’, Wodaabe dancing contributes to a sense of ‘cultural archaism’, which is but one of several elements of their collective survival strategies (Bovin in Hughes-Freeland & Crain 1998).

Anthropology’s early focus on the ritual contexts of dance laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with dance, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. During this time, the subfield of dance anthropology (or the ‘anthropology of dance’ as it was called in the US) emerged, establishing a dialogue between dance studies and anthropology (Kurath 1960; Kealiinohomoku 1970). As part of a new comprehensive approach to dance, anthropologists and dance scholars synthesised methodologies and theoretical approaches, and began to study dance as a social phenomenon everywhere. They drew on examples from large and small-scale populations, as well as ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ groups.

In this way, they challenged prevailing Eurocentric views, which had, for example, considered ballet as the pinnacle of dance forms and as distinct from folk or ethnic dances. A ground-breaking study viewed ballet through the same anthropological lens as any other dance tradition (Kealiinohomoku 1970). It questioned the perception of ballet as a universal standard against which other dance forms were to be measured. The study recognised that ballet was conventionally celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and technical precision, having evolved from court entertainment to a professionalised art form: an ethnic dance of the West, rooted in the court cultures of Renaissance Italy and France. Political power, social hierarchies, and the spread of European colonialism had all shaped what ballet was and needed to be accounted for as ballet continues to express and reinforce the values and aesthetics of its cultural origins.

Examining ballet as an ethnic dance opened the door to a more egalitarian approach to dance studies overall, which values all dance traditions equally and appreciates their cultural significance (Kealiinohomoku 1970). Such studies and approaches suggested a more inclusive understanding of dance that recognises it in all its forms as ultimately culturally and ethnically rooted, whilst also arguing for the value of often-marginalised non-European dance traditions. Importantly, these authors called for more first-hand observation and participation in dance as part of fieldwork (Kurath 1960). Furthermore, discussions emerged that focused on how dance traditions change over time through incorporating elements from different trends that migrants carried into diverse new contexts. In line with the cultural relativism that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists began to show that dance is often hybridised, constantly changing and blurring boundaries of traditions that had previously been considered fixed. For example, Latin American tango emerged from the fusion of African rhythms, European couple dances, and local criollo musical forms, later becoming reinterpreted through global circulation (Savigliano 1995, 10–5).

Anthropology of dance and ethno-choreology

The anthropology of dance has a close relative, called ‘ethno-choreology’ (sometimes called ‘dance ethnology’). While these fields of study often overlap, they have different starting points, methods, and theories (Kaeppler 1991, 13). Dance anthropology has a tendency to be more ‘interested in socially constructed movement systems, the activities that generate them, how and by whom they are judged, and how they can assist in understanding society’ (Kaeppler 2000, 120). A prime example is the ethnography on lakalaka performances, which are danced and sung throughout the islands of the Tonga archipelago in the South Pacific. Performed at royal weddings, royal birthday celebrations, and coronation ceremonies since the late nineteenth century, the lakalaka is not merely a form of aesthetic expression but also serves to enact and legitimise social hierarchy and political authority. It involves singing poetry which, together with choreographed movements, elevates the monarch and chiefs, linking royal and chiefly power within the broader Tongan cosmology (Kaeppler 2006, 40–1). These performances illustrate the social origins of movement systems, and their role for the broader organisation of society, as they help negotiate rank, genealogy, and political power. Rather than analysing the choreography in isolation, dance anthropology situates it within the Tongan system of social stratification, showing how dance both reflects and reinforces societal structures (Kaeppler 1993). In contrast, ethno-choreologists often focus more closely on dance content, while the cultural context serves primarily to illuminate the dance itself (Grau 1993, 21). For example, Andriy Nahachewsky (2011) examines the movement vocabulary, structural patterns, and stylistic variants of Ukrainian folk dances, drawing on ethnographic context chiefly to clarify regional distinctions and historical layering.

Dance anthropology and ethno-choreology also sometimes differ in how they think about the dancers’ bodies. Dance anthropology has come to question the idea of a natural or archetypal dancer’s body, foregrounding instead the body’s culturally and socially constructed aspects (Grau 1993, 21). Ethno-choreologists, on the other hand, tend to consider the dancer’s body more as a given; an instrument moving in time and space that is largely separate from the dancer’s mind or sociocultural ideas about it. This makes ethno-choreology particularly interesting for dancers and choreographers who are constantly attempting to improve upon existing forms of dance, as well as for folklorists, interested in the preservation of existing cultural practices.

In short, dance anthropologists are ‘not simply to understand dance in its cultural context, but rather to understand society through analysing movement systems’ (Grau 1993, 21), while ethno-choreologists study the dance itself and its changes over time with its cultural context more in the background (Kaeppler 1991, 16–7). Despite these differences, the fields have increasingly converged over time, particularly since the 1990s when both embraced a more holistic view of dance. Both disciplines now recognise that dance is not just interesting as a physical movement but also that it matters as a cultural text that can convey complex meanings and serve various social functions (Rakočević 2020). This shared perspective has led to greater interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling folklorists and cultural critics to employ similar methodologies and theories with the goal of exploring the multifaceted nature of dance.

A relatively recent study of folk dance in Romania, for example, demonstrates the value of combining dance anthropological and ethno-choreological approaches (Giurchescu 2001). Anca Giurchescu examines 45 years of cultural policy in socialist Romania to show how traditional dance, such as in the century-old Romanian Căluș ritual, has changed in connection to its socio-political context. Over time, Romanian traditional dance has turned from a ritual that shapes the daily lives of participants to a more restricted and staged form of folklore, mostly organised and watched rather than practiced. While it continues to be danced on important social events, such as weddings or family gatherings, it is now mostly passively consumed. As a form of folklore, traditional dance always runs the risk of being used for political ends, as in late-stage Romanian Communism, when song and dance were employed to conceal the country’s socio-political contradictions, obscuring diversity while highlighting a singular national narrative. According to the author, studying dance requires examining the philosophical, ideological, socio-political, economic, and cultural systems of a given society, as well as the internal structure of the dance itself. Only through this holistic approach can dance, its social context, and its practice be illuminated simultaneously (Giurchescu 2001, 109).

Dance as elusive and embodied practice

The ephemeral and elusive nature of dance renders participant observation particularly difficult. Dance only fully exists in the moment of performance, making it hard to capture and document. Its transience arises from several factors. Movement notation systems, while developed in order to record dance, are complex and require demanding training. Moreover, describing sound and movement (as well as speech and song in some cases) all at once can often be challenging. Simply filming dance and focusing on its visual aspects does not capture the whole experience as it ignores too many other sensorial dimensions of dance. Dancer’s experiences are deeply kinaesthetic (i.e. relating to their bodily awareness), combining the visual, tactile, and auditory (Bull 1997, 269). Such embodied experience is hard to put into words, so dancers’ verbal accounts of their practices often differ from their actual behaviour. All these issues raise the problem that dance experiences may be sensible to the performers without also being intelligible for others (Bull 1997, 269).

These methodological difficulties raise an ever-prevalent question for ethnographic researchers of dance: Should the ethnographer have practiced or be trained in dance, or is this not a requirement for a deep understanding of it? The people we study may think that dancing is essential if one wants to truly understand it. Members of professional dance companies, for example, have been shown to hold that experience in ballet is an asset to make sense of it (Wulff 1998). In fact, classical dancers are frequently of the opinion that ‘you have to do it in order to understand what it’s like’ (Wulff 1998, 8). Given that dance is a mostly non-verbal activity that requires a high degree of precision and proficiency, having some embodied experience of it allows for insights which are challenging to acquire by other means (Wulff 1998, 10-1). Thus, dance ethnographies often achieve a remarkable level of understanding by relying on the fieldworker's body as a means to attain cultural knowledge. The researcher's immersion in sonic events and movement—their awareness of and participation in sound and dance—induces bodily responses that render fieldwork as a profoundly visceral experience. Thereby, important questions can be raised and put into perspective, such as what the role of tacit knowledge in dance may be, how feelings of unity and community are created and altered by dance, or how dancers conceive of pain and endurance (c.f. Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017, 3, 10-2).

Physical participation in dance also shows how ‘movement combines felt bodily experience and the culturally based organisation of that experience into cognitive patterns’ (Sklar 2001, 4). It teaches us that ‘ways of moving are ways of thinking’ (Sklar 2001, 4). For example, for young members of the Greek goth scene in Athens in 2010, dance was an important part of their lives. Goth clubs and goth nights allowed them to link their daily style and ways of living, which often emphasised the fleeting nature of life and the futility of human striving, to dance. Several of them thus danced in ways that involved irony, self-irony, and sarcasm. On the dance floor they recited the lyrics of songs that expressed their disappointment with humanity, expressed anger at their own illness and mortality through stomping movements, or mocked traditional Greek dances in a refutation of Greek national values (Karampampas 2017).

Even when the researcher does not have prior dance experience, it is possible to learn dance in the field, as has been done for other somatic ethnographies that focused on boxing (Wacquant 2004) or Aikido (Kohn 2001). Particularly interesting are the times that the researcher will have to dance with their interlocutors. These moments allow the researcher to demonstrate whether and how they have embodied local dances and how precisely they understand the local movement idioms (Pateraki and Karampampas 2014, 156).

The deeply embodied nature of dance also highlights its role in shaping and experiencing gender, sexuality, and identity (Cowan 1990, Foster 1996). Dance practices often reflect and reinforce gender roles and expectations, but they can also provide spaces for exploring and contesting these norms (Allen 2022, 3–7 and 140–50). For example, Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (2004) has studied a group of middle-class women who form an all-female ‘company of friends’ (parea) near a Greek provincial town that the author calls ‘Kallipolis’. Once initiated to their ‘company’, the women spend time with and support one another, and they engage in same-sex relationships. One way in which they perform gender is through dance, notably the belly-dance tsifteteli, associated with femininity and desire, and the powerful, masculine dance called zeimbekiko. Dance and flirtation enable the women to create intimate relationships, which may be interpreted by people outside of their group as merely playful heterosexual friendships (Kirtsoglou 2004). Dancing thus allows them to negotiate, reveal, and conceal their identities, challenging and reconfiguring the meanings attached to their bodies within their specific cultural context.

The embodied nature of dance also lends itself to exploring how cultural and political meanings are represented, felt, and lived through the body. White competitive Latin dancers may use a fake tan to represent Latinness in the context of the predominantly white dancing culture and sport. In another context, practitioners of Javanese court dances are held to embody an element of national identity that is actively passed on to younger generations and made visible in performances for tourists (Kringelbach & Skinner 2012, 11). Thus, dance frequently turns out to be a site of negotiation where dancers can both conform to and resist social norms (Cowan 1990; Fraleigh 2004). It has, for example, been argued that the bodies of classical ballet dancers can be read as affirming a Western marginalisation of women’s bodies in general. According to sociologist Janet Wolff, ballet dancers preserve a ‘classical body’, emphasising boyish petiteness, clear lines, weightlessness and ethereal presence, ideals that stand in clear tension with most real feminine corporeality (Wolff 1997, 95). This tension is also revealed in roles for women, who in classical dance often depict ‘a strangely disembodied female’ (Wolff 1997, 95).

Deeply embodied activity, such as dance, also lends itself to the expression and transmission of embodied collective memory. Thus, dance is frequently part of spirit possessions among the Songhay people of Nigeria and Mali. The Songhay pantheon is divided into six spirit families, each of which represents a specific historical period. Some stand in for Muslim clerics, commemorating the fifteenth century institutionalisation of Islam in the area, while others are Hausa spirits that entered the Songhay pantheon in the early twentieth century as part of a large migration of Hausa-speaking people to Songhay territory. Spirit possession, which involves dance, thus partially enacts Songhay history, including the ravages of nature, such as when the choreography involved in a possession recounts the movement of spirits ‘from water to heaven and back to Earth’ (Stoller 1994, 642).

In sum, dance is not simply a sequence of movements but is also an embodied system of cultural meanings and knowledge. The meanings of dance are not always explicit, and may be tacit, intuitive, and difficult to articulate verbally. Researchers need to be aware that their own cultural background and experiences may shape their interpretations of dance. It is important for them to be reflexive, considering their own positionality and biases, and it is frequently an asset if, as part of dance research, they dance themselves.

Politics, resistance, and dancing beyond borders

Beyond its artistic or cultural expression, dance is a potent form of political discourse and resistance. The intricate relationship between dance and politics has been extensively analysed, revealing how dance movements and performances can reflect, contest, and sometimes transform political realities (Shay 2002).

Dance frequently intersects with political power in the realm of national identity and statecraft. Dances are often promoted and institutionalised through state-sponsored performances, festivals, and education programs. They may serve to foster national unity, constitute emblematic representations of a nation’s cultural heritage that justifies national sovereignty, or simply project power both internally and on the international stage (Reed 1998). For example, in constructing and legitimising national identity in the modern Greek state, officially established in 1832, ancient Greek statues and monuments were used to associate the state with ancient Greek glory. In this process, folk traditions such as dances and songs were used to bridge the substantive gap between ancient and modern Greek identity, including serving as official ‘proofs’ of the ‘cultural continuity’ between the two (Karampampas 2021, 655). Until today, the so-called ‘Greek traditional dances’ are part of the country’s primary and secondary education curriculum, aiming to demonstrate the coherence of Greek populations by teaching a selection of dances that is meant to represent all the country’s regions (Karampampas 2021, 655). Importantly, this curriculum has excluded dances from the unrecognised Slavic-speaking Greek minority, marginalising some kinds of dance as it foregrounds others (Pateraki 2024; see also Manos 2003 on the minority politics of dance). In addition, some previously Greek dances are today danced beyond national borders and may be called ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’, due to the shared past of these countries during the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, ‘Greek dances’ to music that shares melodies with that of the Cappadocia region of what is now Turkey are performed as far as in the city of Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi where the Muslim minority of Hui people (回族) dances them (personal observation).

In addition to creating national identity, Jane Cowan (1990) provides us with an example of how dance can stand in for European modernity. As part of studying dance in the Northern Greek town of Sohos in the early 1980s, Cowan noticed that formal ‘evening-dances’ (horoesperidha) were regularly organised on the weekends by local civic associations such as political parties or business associations. Rather than celebrating kinship, belonging, or church affiliation, these dance events were meant to promote civic solidarity and the common good, while also fostering the wealth, reputation, and political standing of the associations that sponsored them (Cowan 1990, 134–70). To achieve these goals, the usual opportunities for competitive male dance and folklore were foreclosed, and European symbols and practices were adopted instead, including dancing ‘European dances’ like the waltz, the foxtrot, and the tango, and wearing modern apparel rather than traditional clothing. These evening-dances linked the civic associations to the West, which had long politically and culturally dominated Greece, and stood in for modernity.

National and international understandings of dance can often greatly influence one another. As mentioned above, tango, for example, originally developed in the late nineteenth century around the Río de la Plata that separates Argentina and Uruguay. It fused African rhythms, recreated by former slaves, with music of Spanish descendants born in the Americas (criollos), and with European influences brought by mostly Spanish and Italian migrants. As such, it can be seen as a dance of exiles (Savigliano 1995, xiv). However, tango soon developed into a system of seemingly ‘exotic’ Argentinian identity, considered wild, untamed, and passionate by the colonial and imperial powers of Argentina and Uruguay. As part of a global ‘political economy of passion’ that included tango records, handbooks, films, and fashion, foreigners appropriated the dance throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, London, and New York, and all the way to Japan. Tango underwent an even more widespread revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that it also became Argentina’s national dance can only be made sense of when considering the interplay between Europe’s former Latin American colonies and ongoing Western imperialism. Western countries were eager to consume exoticised forms of dance that ultimately legitimated their own perceived superiority. Once consumed abroad, the exoticised dance could be re-appropriated by national elites as an appropriate marker of national identity (Savigliano 1995, 138).

However, dance can also serve as a site of resistance against colonial or oppressive regimes, providing a means through which marginalised communities assert their own identity and sovereignty. The Irish dance revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, was closely tied to broader nationalist movements seeking to affirm Irish identity in the face of British rule (O’Connor 2013; Wulff 2007). The Gaelic League and other cultural organisations promoted step dancing and céilí dancing as emblematic expressions of an authentically Irish way of life, in contrast to what they saw as British cultural dominance. Standardised competitions, codified techniques, and public performances all became tools for mobilising dance as a marker of national unity and cultural distinctiveness.

Similarly, dance has played a key role in the expression of Palestinian national identity, serving as a form of cultural resistance against European colonial imperialism as well as Israeli occupation and Islamic reform movements (Rowe 2010). Nicholas Rowe, who lived in Ramallah between 2000 and 2008 and worked with local dance groups in refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, raises the question of whether dance can be represented without highlighting the extreme political circumstances in which it takes place. He shows that Palestinian dance productions become impossible as choreographers and their family members are killed, curfews and roadblocks make movement impossible, and dance venues are vandalised and destroyed (Rowe 2010, 189). Yet even under these difficult circumstances, dance may continue, not least to express individual and collective trauma (Rowe 2010). In a similar vein, the resurgence of Indigenous dances in the Americas is not only a revival of cultural practices but also a statement of resistance against colonial erasure and a declaration of sovereignty (Prichard 2022).

Of course, the political affordances of dance go beyond traditional party or state politics. An example of this is the critical role that dance plays in creating a queer Latino/a public in the United States. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the US Latino/a population quickly gained public visibility, dance (along with other forms of performance) was crucial to enable queer Latinos/as to equally claim spaces that allowed them to live publicly. Their increase in social rights was partially enabled by queer Latino/a cultural production, which had in the 1990s permeated the mainstream American queer culture in the form of Latin rhythms and choreographies (Rivera-Servera 2012, 15). Queer Latino/as’ ability to dance eloquently to Latin rhythms helped shift the power dynamics of the dance floor of the clubs they frequented. Their dance skills can thus be understood as ‘choreographies of resistance’—as embodied practices through which minoritarian subjects claim space in social and cultural realms, such as the dance floor (Rivera-Servera 2012, 43). Studying queer Latino/a identity through dance raises the question of whether Latinidad should be thought of as a programmatic political identity in the first place, or rather ‘as a performative modality’ that establishes Latino/a cultural practice (Rivera-Servera 2012, 20).

Importantly, the role of dance in enabling oppressions or resistence is not always clear cut. Thus, dance has been a form of resistance for the Italian mafia, in mafia-patronised religious celebrations of southern Italy. These celebrations include dances on the towns’ main squares, in which prominent members of the mafia dance with local politicians and both parties engage in a symbolic fight with imaginary knives and sticks (Pipyrou 2016, 175–8). These dances imply mutual political recognition, but they also enable members of the mafia to challenge regional state hegemony. They come with ambiguous real-life consequences, as local politicians may participate as they are trying to gain local votes, while members of the mafia do the same to gain recognition and status.

The fact that dance constitutes a form of ‘embodied resistance’ distinguishes it from other forms of political activism. Dance allows individuals and communities to express dissent and critique socio-political conditions in a way that words alone cannot (Fraleigh 2004). For instance, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the gumboot dance, which includes groups of performers stomping and tapping on their rubber boots, evolved as a form of resistance among mine workers. It was a covert way to communicate and to express grievances under the guise of entertainment (Welsh-Asante 1993). Similar roots entangled with a complex and contested history can also be found in capoeira, a hybrid between a dance, a martial art, and a game. It was likely developed in Africa by enslaved people who sought to practise self-defence under the guise of dance before being transported to Brazil. Evidence shows that it has been practised in Brazil since at least 1900 by the male African-Brazilian urban underclass. For some time, the government criminalised capoeira, and practitioners were persecuted until it was legalised in 1937. After 1975, it spread to the US and Europe, and soon after to the rest of the world (Delamont and Stephens 2008, 58). Thus, what began as a form of ‘embodied resistance’ became a global practice that celebrates the hybridisation of Portuguese and African-Brazilian music, dance, and bravery. On 26 November 2014, UNESCO recognised capoeira as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The global spread of dance forms via media and migration has further complicated the dance-politics nexus, introducing issues of cultural appropriation, global inequality, and transnational identities. Street dance styles like breakdancing have been adopted by young persons across the world. This may come as a way of expressing resistance against societal norms and injustices (Koutsougera 2023; Marsh and Campbell 2020). At the same time, the global popularity of dances raises questions about cultural ownership, authenticity, and the commercialisation of cultural expressions (Ana 2017). Cuban rumba, for example, has been strategically packaged for international tourism, where performers are expected to embody ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban identity in ways that cater to visitor expectations; yet rumberos themselves often receive minimal benefits from this commodification, and many view the state-driven ‘heritagization’ of rumba with ambivalence (Ana 2017, 163–7, 173–6, 181–3).

The global spread of dance forms also raises questions regarding their hybridisation, which is often presented as a result of globalisation (Duffy 2005). Hybrid dances emerge when elements from different dance traditions combine to create new forms, reflecting the complex interactions and exchanges facilitated by global flows of people and media. One example is the Tribal Fusion dance, in which North African and Arabic dance (colloquially known as ‘belly dance’) practitioners blend modern electronica and other various styles in creative and largely unbound ways. Dancers in this style thereby mostly do not reference the modern Middle East. As a result, their dance style may be derided by purists as derivative and degenerate compared to seemingly more ‘authentic’ forms of belly dance. At the same time, the freedom of Tribal Fusion enables the dancers to eschew accusations of cultural appropriation and to bring their very own styles to the transnational dance scene, drawing on movements from tango, flamenco, jazz, and modern dance, among others (Scheelar 2013; Sellers-Young 2016).

The digital age has further accelerated the global spread and transformation of dance practices. Social media platforms and video-sharing sites enable the rapid dissemination of dance videos, influencing global dance trends and fostering a sense of global community among dancers and enthusiasts. This has also allowed new dance styles to be created, such as industrial dance, a highly stylised goth-style dance with a well-defined repertoire of movements that is practised in similar ways in different goth scenes around the world. Its creation and development, however, took place almost entirely online. Goth YouTubers from different parts of the world began uploading videos of themselves dancing to industrial music, often inspired by cyber and rave aesthetics. These videos sparked discussion in the comment sections and across online forums, where users debated what counted as industrial dance. Through these public exchanges—offering feedback, critique, and praise—a shared set of movements and aesthetics gradually emerged. Over time, these digital interactions informally established and defined industrial dance, both morphologically and conceptually, without the need for a central authority or institutional framing (Karampampas 2016, 139–46).

A compelling example of rapid global circulation in digital times is Japanese Butoh, developed in the second half of the twentieth century and marked by grotesque imagery, playful experimentation, and slow, hyper-controlled motion. Since the 1980s, Butoh groups have emerged around the world, with many non-Japanese practitioners becoming recognised artists and teachers who establish their own schools and often develop approaches that diverge from the original lineages (Calamoneri 2008, 36–7; Candelario 2019, 245–52; van Hensbergen 2019, 276–84). The global and increasingly digital dissemination of Butoh enables unprecedented participation and innovation, while also raising questions about authorship, ownership, and the ethics of cross-cultural transmission (Garnica 2019, 325–36).

Dance as intangible cultural heritage

Dancing, particularly when it is staged, can often be read as a performance of folklore, i.e. of a traditional custom that links to the beliefs or values of a specific group. It can thus stand in tight connection with broader cultural narratives, identities, and histories. This ‘second existence’ of dance, beyond its initial performance context, matters when dance is reinterpreted, adapted, or incorporated into new spatial, temporal, or cultural settings. Keeping the folkloristic aspects of dance in mind allows anthropologists to explore the dynamic processes through which traditions are transmitted, transformed, and reimagined in response to changing cultural landscapes (Nahachewsky 2001). The second existence of dance may have a parallel life with the ‘first’, i.e. with the folk-dance performances which continue to take place in their initial social context. At other times, the initial social context may have changed, or there may be discontinuity in the transmission of knowledge, and in some cases, the second existence of dance replaces the first. The second existence of dance also encompasses how dance traditions are taught, learned, and practised beyond their original contexts. Dance workshops, festivals, and educational programs serve as important spaces for the transmission and adaptation of dance traditions, contributing to the ongoing evolution of dance forms and the formation of transnational dance communities (Karampampas 2021, 660–1; Sklar 2001).

The staging of dance can thus be seen as a site of cultural production where meanings are negotiated between performers and audiences. When dances are staged, they are often adapted or recontextualised to fit new settings, engaging with audiences unfamiliar with the original cultural context. Staging can thus be seen as a form of cultural translation, where the inherent meanings and aesthetics of a dance are interpreted and potentially transformed (Shay 2016). Moreover, the folkloristic aspects of dance on stage raise questions about its authenticity and about the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Debates about authenticity highlight the tension between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the need for artistic innovation and cultural exchange (Bendix 1997; Theodossopoulos 2013).

For example, in 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) aimed, among other things, to rethink what folklore, now referred to as ‘intangible heritage’, may be. It inaugurated the important shift from trying to record and preserve disappearing traditions to promoting their ongoing transmission. This was to be achieved by supporting both practitioners and the conditions necessary for their practices to continue (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014, 53). While this marks a shift from older folkloristic approaches, the Convention still relies on established methods like listing, mapping, and recording (Kuutma 2012; Tauschek 2011). Notions of authenticity thus persist—albeit in redefined terms—and continue to shape public perceptions of cultural value (Bendix 2018, 6; Bortolotto 2020).

Transforming a tradition into ICH involves a process of ‘heritagisation’. This process can be deeply self-referential, as constructing heritage can itself be part of the cultural and social processes that end up constituting heritage (Smith 2006, 13). For example, when a community prepares a dance for inclusion in an ICH inventory—by defining what counts as ‘authentic’, formalising choreography, or crafting heritage narratives—these acts of preparation reshape the tradition and feed back into how it is understood. At the same time, the dance itself becomes a policy object, especially when viewed through the lens of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where safeguarding frameworks transform lived practices into administratively managed ‘heritage’ (Smith 2006, 13; Tauschek 2011). ICH may therefore be seen not merely as preserved tradition, but as a metacultural production (Tauschek 2011), a policy-oriented reimagining of tradition focused on safeguarding, transmission, and empowerment. Following this logic, ICH could be seen as a third existence (Karampampas forthcoming) of dance: no longer just a performance or culturally relevant social activity, but a policy artefact focused on cultural continuity. Through this lens, dance is framed not as a static, authentic relic, but as a living tradition that carries community values, identities, and histories. This third existence resists overly static and folkloristic views of dance and opens new directions for anthropological inquiry.

Conclusion

The study of dance offers profound insights into the human condition. It allows us to understand and rethink social dynamics and structures, as well as individual and collective identities. Dance is not merely an art form but is also a rich cultural practice that informs and is informed by the contexts in which it occurs. Its analysis reveals the many, often highly nuanced ways in which communities express themselves, negotiate social norms, and maintain traditions, making it an endlessly fascinating subject for future study. As societies continue to change, the relevance of studying dance remains undiminished. It offers a unique vantage point from which to observe the ongoing interplay between tradition and innovation, providing a mirror in which we can view the continuous reshaping of identities in response to global influences and local practices.

The ephemeral nature of dance, with its ability to adapt and morph into new forms while retaining links to the past, makes it an ideal subject for exploring broader questions of continuity and change in contemporary societies. At the same time, the rise of the internet and the turbocharged hybridisation of dance make it more exciting than ever. As a form of embodied, non-verbal communication that transcends social and linguistic barriers, dance is likely to remain crucial to understand the human condition in an increasingly interconnected world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. I am especially grateful to the editors, Hanna Nieber and Felix Stein, whose exceptional patience and valuable suggestions have shaped this entry and supported its successful completion.

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Note on contributor

Panas Karampampas, PhD (St Andrews) is a Social Anthropologist at Durham University. He currently works on Intangible Cultural Heritage policies, bureaucracy, and global governance. His doctoral research focussed on the goth scene, digital anthropology, dance, cosmopolitanism, peripherality, and globalisation. He serves as an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2025–2027).

panas.karampampas@easaonline.org / ORCID: 0000-0001-8712-9445

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Dreams

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:17:37 +0000

Scene from a 2018 mural depicting dream creatures and the women who paint them, by Guatemalen artist María Elena Curruchiche. Picture by UN Women/Ryan Brown

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24dreams

Abstract:

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached—if not always formally recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, social relationships, psychological landscapes, and cultural worlds of those who experience them. This entry examines three prominent themes in the anthropological study of dreams as experience and dreaming as process. The first section considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of selfhood and identity. The second section considers dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section considers dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining in particular dreams’ morality and function as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion considers the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis in light of the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological approach of ‘participant-observation’.

Introduction

There is perhaps no activity more private, individual, or interior than dreaming. Dreams tend to occur as involuntary, sporadic events during slumber, encompassing visual images, cognitive activity, and a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. They are often remembered and recounted in scattered fragments or fleeting impressions rather than coherent or structured events. Their significance can seem glaringly evident, or thoroughly opaque. Some we deem meaningful, others trivial. Some dreams we are happy to share, others we would rather not reveal. Dreams, as such, sit somewhere at the interstices of the experienced and narrated, real and imagined, meaningful and meaningless, conscious and subconscious, and disclosed and concealed. Yet despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their nebulous nature, dreams have often been approached—if not always recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, relationships, affects, and environments of those who experience them.^[1]

Dreams were long considered the primary terrain of psychoanalytic theory, which centres the role of unconscious mental processes in shaping human behavioural and mental states. Anthropological approaches have shed vital light on the socially and historically shaped ways that different communities understand the origins, causes, contents, contexts, and meanings of dreams, both as individual psychic experiences and as culturally situated practices, and in ways that do not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions (Lohmann 2007). The earliest reference to dreams within anthropology can be traced to the late nineteenth century scholar Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who argued that dreaming, as a universally experienced state of reality-transcending and altered consciousness, enabled the emergence of human mythologies, cosmological frameworks, and religious beliefs worldwide. For Tylor, dreams in many non-modern societies were held to put people in touch with objectively existing souls or ghosts, while modern societies understood souls and ghosts to be the result of psychology and biology ([1871] 1920). His theories reflected a broader understanding among Victorian anthropologists that belief in the reality of dreams characterised earlier stages in the development of human society, within a three-part evolution of culture from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’.

Early twentieth century dreaming studies, conducted primarily in non-Western settings and often tied to psychiatric interventions, tended to focus on the collection, classification, and comparison of similarities and differences in dream contents, or what was known as ‘dream data reports’ (e.g. Lincoln 1935).^[2]However, post-war scholars in psychological anthropology, and particularly those affiliated with the US-borne ‘Culture and Personality School’—an influential current concerned with how psychological and cultural forces shape human experience—were critical of the abstraction of dreams from their specific lived and interpretive contexts. They posited that dreams should instead be approached as expressions of collectively shaped personality traits and emotive dispositions shared by particular social groups (e.g. Eggan 1952).

It was primarily in the late 1980s and early 1990s that dreams came to figure more prominently as objects of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural comparison in their own right within the work of social anthropologists, some of whom bring their social scientific analyses into conversation with neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (e.g. Nordin 2011; Laughlin 2011). Sometimes referred to as the ‘new anthropology of dreaming’ (Tedlock 1991), albeit not thoroughly systematised or integrated, this current recognises dreams as communicative events and legitimate modes of interpreting, inhabiting, and effecting change in the world. It draws attention to dreams as both interiorly experienced and culturally contextual social facts, often requiring multi-disciplinary analysis and attention to local psychodynamics. It also considers dreaming as a fruitful way to conduct research. Dreams can help build relations between field interlocutors and fieldworkers as dreamers themselves, allowing them to connect across different sociocultural worlds.^[3]

Drawing on ethnographic examples from diverse regions, this entry considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of self, personhood, and identity. It then approaches dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section examines dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining dreams’ functions as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion assesses the opportunities and challenges entailed in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis, particularly given their often-opaque nature and the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological method of ‘participant-observation’.

Self, identity, and psyche

Dreams play a central role within anthropological investigations into constructions of the self, identity, and psyche across individuals, collectives, and cultures, or what is referred to alternately as the field of ‘ethnopsychology’ (White 2012) or ‘cultural psychodynamics’ (Mageo 2015). Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in rehabilitating dreams as objects of legitimate scholarly inquiry and therapeutic intervention in the West and had a profound influence on early anthropologies of dreaming. Its influence manifests, for instance, in analyses of dreams as the disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes and as expressions of trauma, anxiety, and guilt. It also surfaces in the distinction identified by researchers between dreams’ manifest or conscious content and their latent or subconscious content, and an attention to the multiple symbolic valences of recurring dream motifs or patterns.

Exemplary of this approach is an ethnographic study conducted in the 1980s that centred on the dreams of Jovenil, a recently bereaved father among the Kagwahiv people of the Brazilian Amazon (Kracke 1981). In these dreams, Jovenil witnesses the engorged penis of a man that is snapped off as punishment for the man having slept with his own sister. Jovenil also dreams of suffering the wrath of his wife for inadvertently hunting and killing a monkey and of overturning a canoe that drowns his son, Alonzo. These events, according to anthropologist Waud Kracke, manifest Jovenil’s curiosity in the large penis of a fellow villager he beheld as a child and for which he was later castigated by his mother, resulting in sexual trauma. They also show his repressed guilt for engaging in taboo incestuous relations with a parallel cousin earlier in life, and the blame he places upon himself for the consequent death of his children as a form of punishment. In a society that prescribes that the dead must be forgotten and all memories of them eradicated, it was through the subconscious experience of dreams that Jovenil was able to work through the emotional process of mourning the loss of his children, facing his guilty conscience, and acknowledge his complicity in the tragedy.

If the example above centres on a single individuals’ multiple dreams, other early studies of an ethnopsychological bent took as their primary data a wider array of subjects and dreams to identify basic personality traits and worldviews that are shared by particular social groups, or what was then called ‘culture patterns’ (Eggan 1952, 478). For instance, ‘dream charts’ were deployed to analyse the manifest content of 334 dreams collected from men and women aged 6 to 75 years in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico (Foster 1973). Recurring symbols within these dreams, and particularly among men, include a threatening environment, impotence and loneliness, fear of embarrassment, and unpredictable futures. These repeated motifs point to anxiety over what people will say, or of being found out, as central dimensions of Tzintzuntzan cultural and gendered norms. They suggest that Tzintzuntzan people’s adherence to principles of good behaviour in waking life is driven less by their sense of guilt than by their conformity to what anthropologist George Foster calls a ‘shame culture’. Importantly, dreams’ manifest content directs attention not only to the basic tenets of ‘shame culture’ as a shared disposition among Tzintzuntzan people, but also to the disharmony or tensions that exist between this cultural ideal on the one hand, and the repression of desires that sustaining this ideal demands (Eggan 1952, 478).

More recent ethnopsychological scholarship has distanced itself from Freudian and Culture and Personality approaches to studying dreams. It recognised that such approaches risked being ethnocentric, i.e. that they often misinterpreted dreams because they stuck too closely to the cultural understandings of the analysts. Previous approaches had also assumed that cultures were largely static and that insights from one culture were widely generalisable. Working against these assumptions, contemporary ethnopsychological studies consider how cultural transformation, including processes of globalisation, colonisation, and modernisation, reconfigures the ability of individuals and collectives to reorganise their sense of self. They study, for example, how dreams that reflect back to the dreamer how their organisation of self relates to them, their body, and other beings and entities in the world (so-called ‘selfscape dreams’) relate to people’s interpretive frameworks (Hollan 2004). While such dreams may be universal in their basic orienting functions, their content varies within and across both cultures and individuals, conjuring cultural contexts that are more-than-local in their scope, sites, and subjects (e.g. Lattas 1993; Hollan 2005).

In American Samoa, for example, the dreams of young students, and their own reflections on these dreams’ significance, express their efforts to situate their selves in the context of imposed cultural shifts over a century of Christian conversion and Americanisation (Mageo 2004). In one such dream, a female Samoan’s muteness, compounded with her inability or refusal to speak either English or Samoan and her appearance as a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old, point to communication problems, existential confusions, and forms of cultural resistance linked to Samoan girls’ shifting sexuality and gender roles. They reflect enduring traditional hierarchies on the one hand and notions of social equality and racial categories introduced by colonialism on the other. In another dream, the violent silencing and injury suffered by a male dreamer’s girlfriend embodies the challenge of reconciling the customary authority of higher-status Samoan males with the values of romantic engagement, care, and sincerity introduced by Christian missionaries, and American soldiers in WWI. In both instances, dreams and their interpretation by dreamers themselves come to constitute experiences that are creative rather than purely passive, conscious rather than purely unconscious, and generative rather than purely reflective. It is through these experiences that Samoans engage emotionally and discursively in the effects and affects of socio-cultural change and attendant forms of meaning-making.

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

The sociocultural dimensions of dreams accrue particular prominence when dream ritualisation, communication, and interpretation form part of an established local knowledge system. Such insider or local knowledge systems offer valuable insights into how dream experiences are defined, classified, and valued across different communities as significant or mundane, empowering or perilous, or pragmatic or supernatural. They showcase how and when dreams should be communicated to others, or not, and who has the authority to elucidate their meanings. They also shed light on the diverse functions and causes of dreams, including as momentary and revelatory journeys deep into parts of the self or beyond (Mittermaier 2015; Groark 2009); as products of the intentions of the dreamer or unsolicited visitations by outside entities (George 1995; Heneise 2017); as pathways to or predicaments of past and future events (Stewart 2017; Basso 1987); as deliberately induced expressions of creative imagination or unwilled forms of external control (Herdt and Stephen 1989; Chao 2022); as guides to behaviour or reflections thereof (Ingold 2013; Pandya 2004); as experiences of diagnostic, therapeutic, anxiogenic, or punitive valences (Devereux 2023; Traphagan 2003); as expressions of resilience or rupture in the face of change (Graham 1995; Glaskin 2005); and as continuous extensions of, or radical breaks from, waking thoughts (Kracke 1981; Rubenstein 2012).

Ethnographic studies of dreams among the Yolmo of north-central Nepal illustrate the value of attending to local understandings of dreams’ sociocultural significance as categories of experience and modes of practice (Desjarlais 1991). According to one study, conducted in the late 1980s, dreams do not exist for Yolmo as a unitary entity, but rather in three distinctive forms—auspicious, inauspicious, and seemingly insignificant—that manifest in particular dream events. While villagers can articulate these basic distinctions, it is primarily Buddhist spiritual leaders and priests, such as lamas and shamans, who have the authority and expertise to determine what particular dreams signify and to heal those who experience them. They do so by drawing on a ‘dictionary of dream symbols’ (Desjarlais 1991, 215) that identifies and indexes a wide, complex, yet finite range of dream images and meanings that are collectively recognised but also vary in significance depending on the dreamer in question.

In contrast to the notion of dreams as reflective of the individual’s self, psyche, and past, many Yolmo believe that dreams predict events that will impact those around the dreamer in the course of their future waking life. For instance, a tree falling in one person’s dream indicates that one of their close relatives will imminently die (Desjarlais 1991, 216). Another key facet of Yolmo dream knowledge systems pertains to the sustained enculturation in editing, remembering, communicating, and thus in some ways creating dream stories that begin in the early stages of life. Throughout this process, Yolmo not only come to terms with the distresses expressed in their dreams, but also actively ‘make their dreams mean what they want them to mean’ (Desjarlais 1991, 221). What this study offers is an approach to dreams anchored first and foremost in the knowledge systems of dreamers themselves—one that uncovers dreams’ divinatory functions as well as their positioning with local structures of expertise, processes of skill acquisition, and understandings of meaning-making as a concomitantly symbolic and strategic endeavour.

Other ethnographic accounts attend the embodied and ritualised dimensions and protocols of dreams and dream-sharing as collective—rather than individuated—practices that serve to guide everyday social activities. One such case centres on dreaming among the Ongee people of Little Andaman Island and its role in determining communal hunting and gathering practices in daily life (Pandya 2004). Within these dreams, shared sensations of smells help to inform conscious and practical decisions by Ongee groups around what plants or animals should be sought out in the forest, where, and when.^[4]This olfactory dimension stems from the Ongee perception of dreams as moments where individuals’ internal bodies (enteeah) collect the smells left behind or imprinted upon their external bodies (mateeah) in waking life, in a process known as dane korale, which translates literally as ‘a spider making its web’ and is also the Ongee term for ‘dreaming’ (Pandya 2004, 143).

Ongee practice a ritualised form of dream-sharing by participating in lengthy and highly stylised discussions and singing before falling asleep on concentric and mutually facing platforms, in which they describe what they did in the day and what they dreamt of the previous night. Olfactory references identified across different individuals’ dreams, such as the smell of ripe jackfruit, bring these individuals to form groups and look for jackfruit in the forest together. The discovery of ripe jackfruit validates the dreams shared, producing what Ongee call ‘dream success’ (eneyemaga-tegebe) (Pandya 2004, 140). The collective, rather than individuated, nature of dream images and smells thus works hand in hand with Ongee’s collective interpretation of these dreams’ meanings and their implications for shared daily activities. While Ongee have since experienced a transition from circular open campgrounds to private enclosed quarters, and from forest-based subsistence to plantation labour, this ritualised, sensory, and collective ethos persists. People no longer dream or discuss the familiar scents of plants and animals. Instead, their collective dream-sharing rituals speak to experiences of, and guidance found in, the novel smells of plantation foremen and buzzing helicopters.

If symbolism and sensoriality play an important role within some cultural understandings of dreaming, other anthropological approaches invite a more radical appraisal of the primacy of acts and processes of interpretation. They focus less on the instances and categories of imagery and meaning and more on the activities involved in determining and consolidating dreams’ social significance. One example of this are the new dreams of ‘being eaten by oil palm’ (dimakan sawit) experienced by the Marind people of West Papua, Indonesia (Chao 2022, 183–200), wherein sleeping individuals become violently possessed by an introduced cash crop that is rapidly taking over their lands and forests in waking life. These dreams act as cultural critiques of the plantation as a newly established mode of economic production in the region, and they resonate with the new sensory experiences of Ongee community members.

Rather than focusing their discourses on the contents or events of these dreams, or attributing a therapeutic or cathartic value to dream experiences, Marind affirm it is primarily through the oral transmission of dream narratives to and with others that collective healing takes place. For instance, knowledge of kith and kin who have recently been ‘eaten by oil palm’ brings people to travel the landscape to their encounter. Shared dream experiences prompt villagers who are in conflictual relations over land rights to reconcile with one another, or enable starcrossed lovers whose marriage is proscribed by customary law to sustain a different kind of intimate relationship through dream story-telling. In contrast to traditional dreams, whose significance was arbitrated by medicine-men (messav) (Chao 2022, 188–9), new dreams of being eaten by oil palm are open to each and everyone’s interpretation, creating an egalitarian ethos that in turn allows for the participation of women, children, youth, and elders across rural and urban divides. What dream experiences mean, in other words, matters less than what dream sharing does as an exercise in mutual trust-building and as an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability to the attritive forces of plantation capitalism across waking and sleeping worlds.

Another example of how dream interpretation processes come to produce meaning, identity, and consciousness derives from studies of ‘dreamwork groups’ in the United Kingdom (Edgar 1999). These are groups in which six to twelve people share and interpret their dreams in a structured manner. Studying these groups showed that the ways in which dreams are discussed, embellished, and censored depend heavily on social and interactional group dynamics, such as their members’ degree of mutual familiarity, friendship, and shared values.

These dynamics produce dream interpretations that, over the course of conversations initiated by the dreamer but primarily shaped by the group’s questions, suggestions, reservations, and encouragements, become vastly different from the originally recounted experience of the dream and also mutate when dreamwork groups’ composition changes over time. It is through this situated and collective ‘cultural reworking’ of dreams (Edgar 1999, 39), involving the consciousness of both the dreamer and group, that new kinds of mental and affective connectedness are generated and the grounds for individual self-realisation actualised.

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

A third prevalent motif in the anthropology of dreaming pertains to its relationship to religiosity and the transcendent, notably as a source of cosmological knowledge, divination, and power across time. In some contexts, dream experiences and their revelations are intrinsically connected to spiritual understandings of consciousness, cognition, and salvation (e.g. Young 1999). In other contexts, dreams are seen as tied to prophetic figures and events in the past that in turn motivate religious and political movements in the present (e.g. Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2011). Religious authority can be premised on the ability of select individuals to travel in time in the pursuit of sacred knowledge or to access extra-human powers and entities including spirits, gods, ancestors, and the deceased (e.g. Alatas 2019). Dreams may act as informal yet powerful ‘technologies of governmentality’ that self-regulate individuals’ conscience and conduct in everyday life (Eves 2011). They may also constitute sources of ‘liturgical novelty’ when creatively and contextually interpreted and acted upon by recognised experts (McGee 2012). While revelatory dreams may come to chosen humans through the agency of more-than-human beings, they can also be intentionally sought out and cultivated by human dreamers, including in the form of volitional or lucid dreaming, and through rituals, prayer, and trance- or vision-inducing substances, notably hallucinogenic plants (e.g. Hurd and Bulkeley 2014; Brown 1985).

One example of the cosmological and temporal dimensions of dreams is found among the Bardi Aboriginal people of the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia (Glaskin 2005). As with many Indigenous Australian Peoples, the Bardi identify the creative period in the past during which ancestral beings gave shape to the world (or ‘Country’), as ‘the Dreaming’. Local terms for this period include buwarra, which translates as ‘dream’. While ‘ordinary’ dreams are experienced by ‘ordinary people’, particular individuals in the community, known as jarlngungurr (Glaskin 2005, 303), can communicate with ancestral figures, as well as the spirit beings and the deceased from the Dreaming. They do so through dreams that are initiated by these other-than-human beings and through which knowledges are revealed to the human dreamer. While these knowledges have existed since time immemorial, they inform contemporary ritual and ceremonial life in novel ways, including in the form of new songs, dances, designs, and more, pointing to the integration of tradition and innovation, and past and present, in both the dream form and its real-world ramifications. It is also through the knowledges acquired through dreams from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased that jarlngungurr are able to perform healing, divination, shape-shifting, and time-travel. Dreams thereby help the Bardi anticipate future calamities, notably where respect for Country has been violated and must be remedied or redressed.

As the example above demonstrates, dreams and their authority in producing truths play an important role in enabling the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge across times and generations. In other contexts, dreams have played a seminal part in encouraging societal transformation, notably in the form of religious enculturation and spiritual self-reinvention. This is the case among the Asabano of highland Papua New Guinea, for whom dreams (aluma) have always acted as portals to the dead, forest beings, or place spirits, and as experiential evidence through which people describe, explain, and rationalise their religious beliefs (Lohmann 2000). When Baptist missionaries sought to convert them in the late 1970s, many Asabano continued to practice their customary religion. It was only following a series of prophetic dreams experienced by villagers, in which they encountered God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, angels, apocalyptic deluges, and the fires of Hell, that Christian beliefs were truly absorbed and internalised. Christian figures that appear in villagers’ dreams to this day testify to these beings’ reality and power and remind people of the behaviours they must sustain in order to secure an afterlife in paradise, whereas traditional and familiar dream-entities like evil nature spirits and cannibal witches are now interpreted as minions of Satan. As such, while the ability of dreams to convey information has not changed for Asabano, the kinds of information being received, and associated dictates of moral conduct, have significantly transformed, with dreams playing an important—potentially even determinant—role in enhancing villagers’ receptivity to the precepts of introduced Christianity.

Dreams, as such, can be instrumental in validating, inspiring, and sustaining belief among members of religious communities. Their evocative valences can also be harnessed beyond the scope of those individuals who adhere to particular religious groups, as illustrated by Amira Mittermaier’s (2015) reflective account of dream-stories among Egyptian adherents to the mystic body of Islamic religious practice known as Sufism. During her fieldwork, Mittermaier was granted permission by her interlocutor, ‘Umar, to consult and select accounts from the Book of Visions, containing the records of dreams and waking visions of followers of Shaykh Qusi, a renowned inheritor and transmitter of the prophet Muhammad’s teachings. This permission, she later found out, itself stemmed from an order that had come to ‘Umar by way of a dream. However, while Mittermaier originally chose dream-visions for her research with the aim of achieving a representative sample from diverse sources and encompassing diverse themes, ‘Umar replaced these selections with a collection of accounts that, to Mittermaier’s initial disappointment, were all relatively similar in content. What drove ‘Umar’s choices was not the pursuit of neutrality or representationality, but rather the effectiveness of these particular dreams in achieving the key aims of Sufi dream-visions—namely, to communicate the shaykh’s aura, to create a sense of awe, and to buttress the shaykh’s spiritual authority. Just as anthropologists selectively deploy ethnographic examples to convince and draw in their readers, so too Sufis approach dream-stories as invitations to their audiences that enable them to communicate and connect with the Prophet, his descendants, and the dead. Dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of the inaccessible, invisible, and unknown, and to be moved both spiritually and imaginatively. And just as prophetic dreams in Sufi communities are at once highly valued and contested, so too decisions around which dreams to include and exclude in Mittermaier’s ethnographic account were never neutral, but shaped as much by anthropological considerations as by the evocative use of dreams as examples by Sufis themselves.

Conclusions

Dreams are universal as experiences yet specific in their contents, interpretations, and performances. As such, they constitute powerful resources for engaging with long-standing questions around the construction of, and relationship between, self and society, mind and body, and continuity and change, and the meaningful slippages that arise across the realms of the known and speculated, lived and narrated, practical and spiritual, and agentive and reflective. Dreams express cultural creativity, social conflict, potentialities for self-exploratory, self-transcendence or hazardous vulnerabilities. They alternately reflect, resolve, or reinforce individual and collective anxieties and desires, as people move in and across different worlds, knowledges, and relations.

Importantly, attending to dreams anthropologically challenges the notion of a single ‘reality’ and its correlative relationship to the ‘imagination’ as the ‘broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception and conceptualizations of the real’ (Mittermaier 2011, 3). Instead, it invites us to think of dreams as a form of ‘emergent reality’ (Tedlock 1987b, 4)—or as ‘real in a different way’, as Vincent Crapanzano’s Moroccan informant, Tuhami, says when speaking about his nightly visitations by a she-demon (1980, 15). Dreams are multiply meaningful precisely in light of their inherent ambiguity and in-betweenness, or what Jeannette Mageo calls their ‘mimetic incompleteness’ (2004, 151). They also draw attention to the political, affective, and social force of the imagination as a culturally molded yet never entirely graspable or intelligible dimension of human existence (Stephen 1995; Stevenson 2014). And just as not all dreams bear the same hermeneutic weight or consensual meaning for those who experience them, so too it is critical to consider whose dream interpretations are foregrounded within anthropological accounts across insider-outsider and subjective-objective divides.

Since its inception, the anthropology of dreaming has continued to develop in new and exciting directions. It is no longer confined to particular ‘culture complexes’ or world-regions. Instead, comparative studies of dreams across Global North and South divides push against the romanticisation or essentialisation of non-Western dream cultures (Domhoff 1990). These studies identify recurring motifs in the dreams of American and Japanese citizens (Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago 1958), the role of conflict in the dreams of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children (Levine 1991), and the manifest content of dreams experienced by US-based college women of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American heritage (Kane 1994).^[5]

Alongside a burgeoning of multi-disciplinary approaches that combine anthropological methods and theories with cutting-edge findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, some scholars are practicing ‘studying up’ by examining how Western-trained psychotherapists understand their own dream experiences alongside their relationship to both their patients and their profession (Dombeck 1991). Other researchers practice ‘studying in’ by harnessing auto-ethnographic methods to consider how dream-related knowledge systems learned in the field come to bear new meanings in light of their own personal, physical, and psychological traumas back home (Richman 2000). The role of animals as participants in and producers of dreams (Hallowell 1960) has seen renewed attention in emerging multispecies approaches that consider, for instance, dogs’ dreams as expressions of more-than-human perspectival agency (Kohn 2007) or the haunting apparition in dreams of wrongfully killed cows as expressions of more-than-human retributive justice (Govindrajan 2022).

At the same time, dreams continue to pose certain challenges to the classical methods of anthropology. ‘Dream-narratives’ are always fragmentary and often socially or individually motivated accounts of ‘dream-experiences’ (Kirtsoglou 2010) that themselves cannot be empirically verified and lie beyond the reach of participant-observation. The personal nature of dreams, as well as their at-times spiritual, sacred, or supernatural dimensions, can make them a sensitive topic of discussion, often requiring a strong level of rapport between the researcher and her interlocutors. Taking dreams seriously as objects of analysis is also not devoid of risk for anthropologists themselves, whose professionalism and objectivity may consequently come under question—notably when it comes to writing and imparting their own dream experiences (George 1995, 17–8).

And yet, attending to dreams can also open meaningful spaces for conversations around the different yet interconnected worlds of researchers and their informants. Participating in dream-experiences and sharing dream-narratives can drive intersubjective dynamics of fieldwork, and create mutual trust, critical self-reflection, and openness to ambiguity.^[6]As a form of affective and discursive ‘involvement in the cosmology of the Other’ (Sprenger 2010, 61), delving into dreams—both one’s own and others’—can push back on the ‘anthropological taboo against going native’ (Ewing 1994, 574) and attendant assumptions around the nature of cultural belief versus empirical reality (Luhrmann 1989; Favret-Saada 1980). Rather than dismissing dreams as fictive constructs or ethnographic objects alone, it is perhaps in anthropologists’ willingness to become vulnerable to dreams’ intersubjective thrust that dreams’ agentive force as ‘wild possibilities’ (George 1995, 17) might relationally and imaginatively gain ground and grow.

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———. 2005. “Dreaming in a global world.” In A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and psychocultural change, edited by Conerly C. Casey and Robert B. Edgerton, 90–102. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.

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———. 2000. “The role of dreams in religious enculturation among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea.” Ethos 28, no. 1: 75–102.

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———. 1987b. “Dreaming and dream research.” In Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations, edited by Barbara Tedlock, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Note on contributor

Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022, Duke University Press).

[1] On the significance of dreams and dreaming in Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times, see Pick and Roper (2004); Parman (1991). On the role of dreams in medieval world religions, including in Europe, early Asia, and Latin America, see Shulman and Stroumsa (1999); Bulkeley (2008).

[2] These studies found echo in later approaches that were concerned with identifying constant and recurring motifs underlying diverse myths across different cultural settings (e.g. Kuper 1979).

[3] For state-of-the-field syntheses of the anthropology of dreaming, see Laughlin (2011); Lohmann (2019); the edited volumes by Tedlock (1987a); Bulkeley (2001); Mageo (2003); Mageo and Sheriff (2021); and the special issues edited by Stewart (2004) and Heijnen and Edgar (2010). For region-specific anthologies of dreaming, see Lohmann (2003) on the West Pacific; Jȩdrej and Shaw (1992) on Africa; Bulkeley (1994) on the West; Price-Williams and Degarrod (1989) on South America.

[4] On the function of dreams as techniques for solving everyday practical matters, including in the contexts of hunting, curing, craftsmanship, and artistic production, see Brightman 2002; Rushforth 1992.

[5] On anthropologies of dreaming in the Global North, see Hollan 2005; Newsom 2021; Heijnen 2010; Sheriff 2017.

[6] On dreams as an intersubjective research method in the field, see Chao 2023; Lambek 2018.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Work/labour

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:09:10 +0000

Women farmers plow fields in preparation to plant corn in Gnoungouya Village, Guinea on June 15, 2015. Photo by World Bank Photo collection.

Jasmine Folz Rachel Smith

University of Manchester, University of Aberdeen

Initially published 1 Jul 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24worklabour

Abstract:

Most of our lives are spent working, as we frequently engage in purposeful activity to build and maintain our physical and social worlds. The anthropology of work and labour provides a comparative perspective on how people make a living within their natural and social environments, while bringing into focus how people everywhere are interconnected and impacted through global historical processes. Its history and theoretical purchase have been shaped by theoretical shifts within the discipline and by wider political-economic transformations. This overview traces these shifts and begins by discussing how early ethnographic fieldwork helped to overturn Eurocentric assumptions about work. The anthropology of work and labour helped criticize theories of social evolution, but in the process, it often excluded the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on people’s lives. It also developed the idea of the division of labour to understand and critique how different forms of labour are allocated and valorised. From the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists increasingly developed a critical perspective on capitalism, its alternatives, and its consequences. A major contribution of the anthropology of work and labour is that it elucidated perspectives and experiences of people in the peripheries and margins of capitalism. Research into work in industrial centres has clarified the ways in which industrial processes have played out in different regions and political-economic contexts as well as how power is accrued and maintained by elites and professionals. The entry concludes by highlighting key anthropological contributions to understandings of work and labour during the contemporary era, often referred to as ‘late capitalism’.

Introduction

What is considered ‘work’ or not work (play, leisure) varies culturally and historically, and may not be separable as a discrete domain vis-à-vis domestic life, ritual, and religion (Applebaum 1992; Wallmann 1979; Gamst 1995). If a corresponding term for ‘work’ is identifiable, it may carve out a different sphere of human activity from that denoted in English, or be accorded different kinds of value(s) (e.g. Povinelli 1993; Strathern 1982). While definitions of work differ historically and cross-culturally, everywhere activities that could be described as work or labour are frequent and socially necessary domains of human^[1] activity. Consequently, attention to work and labour is important and useful for comparative purposes, and for thinking through how people are interconnected across the globe (Narotzky 2018).

In the English language, the terms ‘labour’ and ‘work’ are often interchangeable, but they also carry different connotations. ‘Work’ tends to cover a more diverse range of purposeful activities including gainful employment, voluntary and community service, crafts and creative activities, domestic and subsistence tasks. ‘Labour’, by contrast, more often describes physical toil, performed out of necessity, coercion, or domination (Gamst 1995; Wallman 1979, 1). It can be argued that anthropology reflects the same divergent tendencies in the differential valorisation of work and labour. While anthropology of work has often encompassed a wide variety of ways in which people transform social and natural environments and the meanings and values they accord to these activities, the term ‘labour’ has more often been used by anthropologists influenced by the writings of Karl Marx who interrogate work through the lens of labour exploitation and class struggle.

The anthropology of work and labour as an organised subdiscipline can be traced from the late 1970s, with themed publications (e.g. Burawoy 1979a; Nash and Fernandez Kelly 1983; Wallman 1979), and the founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Work in 1980, which publishes the Anthropology of Work Review. Interest in work and labour waned through the 1990s and early 2000s, as part of a ‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology which distanced itself from Marxian concepts such as labour, class, and capitalism. However, there has been a resurgence in recent years. In 2018, the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) ‘Anthropology of Labour Network’ was established, and since then there has been a proliferation of publications on work and labour (e.g. Graeber 2018; Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018; Kasmir and Gill 2022; Lazar 2023).

This overview approaches the anthropology of work and labour by tracing how it has responded to shifting political and economic contexts and disciplinary concerns. The entry first examines how anthropologists have situated work within a comparative study of different cultures and societies. It then discusses how the division of labour is a useful comparative frame to understand how different forms of work are allocated and valorised differently across sociocultural contexts. Subsequent sections discuss how ethnographic studies have elucidated the expansion of capitalism, its uneven effects, and on-going transformations. These sections highlight that the anthropology of work can reveal the often-neglected lived experiences of people on the frontiers and margins of capitalism. The entry then explores how industrialisation gave rise to profound global shifts in forms of work and labour relations, but also wrought vast socioeconomic consequences. It concludes with a discussion of renewed interest in the on-going transformations, meanings, and values of work in contemporary life in the context of late capitalism.

Foundational approaches

Early anthropology tended to focus on questions of work and livelihood in what is often termed ‘preindustrial’ or ‘non-market’ societies. In the nineteenth century, anthropologists and ethnologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer propounded theories of social evolution. They often focussed on technological developments as a way of classifying societies into stages and ranking them from a ‘primitive’ original state through to ‘civilised’ (read: white, European) societies. The emphasis was less on work as a social process and more on technological and material differences as evidence of social evolution.

The early twentieth century saw a shift away from this evolutionary emphasis on material technology, as well as conjectures about the origins of man, to a focus on empirical field research. Franz Boas developed the theory of Historical Particularism^[2] as a critique of social evolution theories. Bronislaw Malinowski (1925) also derided the emphasis on material culture of nineteenth-century ethnologists. Contrary to their assumptions he showed that labour in small-scale societies (deemed ‘primitive labour’ at the time) was neither unorganized nor lacking in sophistication. Malinowski argued instead that work should be understood as part of an integrated social system, regulated by gender, kinship, and ritual norms and roles. He was deeply interested in the question, ‘what motivates people to undergo often arduous unpleasant periods of labour?’ (1925, 927); a question he inherited from a long-standing German intellectual tradition (Hann 2021; Spittler 2008; Smith 2024). This interest would culminate in his two volume book Coral Gardens and their magic ([1935] 1965), which provided a detailed account of early 20th century Trobriand agricultural methods. The book continues to be influential, illustrating that even seemingly simple forms of agriculture do not follow automatically from peoples’ ecological conditions. Instead, it highlights that people’s work is deeply influenced by local politics and customs, as well as understandings of magic and kinship. Malinowski’s student, Audrey Richards, was also a key early figure in the anthropology of work, publishing two books on the subject. She initially theorised that ‘biological instincts’, especially hunger, were key drivers for work (1932; see 1939, viii). However, she would later overturn her ideas and argue that custom and institutions shape incentives to work, which in turn influence diet and appetite (1939).

Even when questions of work were not the main focus of ethnographies, they often described in great detail how a given society organised its social and material resources to meet its needs. This is true for ‘functionalist’ and ‘structural-functionalist’ works, i.e. works which ask how individuals and social institutions allow people to meet their needs, including how they maintain social cohesion. For instance, Edward Evans-Pritchard provided a detailed account of cattle-rearing practices among the Nuer in Sudan during the 1930s. He suggested that the Nuer’s social and political system at the time could only be understood in relation to their prevailing mode of livelihood, and relationship with their environment (1940, 4). The Nuer, Evans-Pritchard argued, depended on cattle for many of life’s necessities, and their love of cattle and desire to acquire them shaped not just their work, but also their relations with neighbouring peoples, their ritual lives, and their understandings of personhood.

The early twentieth century saw a theoretical shift from evolutionary to more comparative and relativist anthropological analyses. Yet, a lingering underlying assumption that societies could be ordered according to their predominant mode of livelihood persisted. It often implied a transition from hunter-gather or foraging societies, to farming and agriculture, and finally a ‘modern’ industrial society, based on waged employment. Proponents of cultural ecology and neo-evolutionary theories of culture in mid-century American anthropology offered materialist explanations for cultural change (e.g. Steward 1955; White 1943). They emphasised how labour and technology are applied to exploit a given environment. While neither of these theories survived the test of time intact, their materialism significantly influenced later generations of anthropologists who relied more explicitly on the work of Marx. Following Marx, these studies held that economic, material, and technological relations could determine how work was organized, and classified societies accordingly, for example into being pre-capitalist, feudal, capitalist or communist (Bruun and Wahlberg 2022).

The debates which animated early anthropological theorising about work and labour are on-going, and anthropologists continue to dispel the common assumption that modes of subsistence and division of labour can be ordered into progressive temporal stages. For instance, the proposition that technological developments led to less time spent on production would be challenged by the much-debated argument that hunter-gatherers were in fact more ‘time affluent’ than people of modern industrial societies (Sahlins’ ([1972] 1976; Bird-David 1982; Kaplan 2000). Anthropologists have also argued that there may be no universal trajectory from farm-based or otherwise ‘traditional’ livelihoods into a seemingly natural endpoint of salaried wage labour. They came to this conclusion by documenting the rise and importance of ‘informal’ and highly precarious jobs around the world over the past decades (Ferguson and Li 2018). In working with archaeologists, anthropologists have also shown that human freedom and creativity may be the governing features of socio-cultural change, rather than access to land and calories (e.g. Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Recent publications continue to emphasise anthropology’s potential for highlighting and critiquing the frequently Eurocentric and teleological narratives of progress and development.

While anthropology has successfully challenged many grand but often stereotypical narratives, such as the assumption that hunter gatherers are locked into a primordial ‘struggle for existence’, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow (2021, 136-7) warn us that we must take care not to present a romanticised visions of small scale societies instead. Doing so would equally risk obscuring the wide variety of social structures and livelihoods that human groups such as different foraging societies have chosen. Graeber and Wengrow also suggest that the grand narratives shaped by social evolution theories often serve to present social inequality as natural, or as an inevitable consequence of the transition from foraging to agriculture. They counter that such theories were actually developed as a conservative response to Indigenous critiques of European ‘civilisation’ and inequality (2021, 5, 61).

Division of labour

The concept of ‘division of labour’ is salient across economics, sociology, and anthropology. It is also central to debates around egalitarianism and the origins of social inequalities. In anthropology, important discussions around the division of labour include whether there is a ‘naturalness’ to gender roles, how social cohesion is achieved and if conflict can be avoided, and whether capitalism builds on or supplants prior economic formations, such as processes of racialisation and class formation.

Recurring features of the division of labour include that different tasks are primarily done by one gender, and that women often do work that can be more easily combined with childcare. This idea initially appeared to anthropologists to be one of several cross-cultural universals (e.g. Murdock and Provost 1973; Whyte 1978). However, early analyses of gendered divisions of labour have been criticised for overgeneralising and naturalising social stereotypes (e.g. Anderson et al 2023; Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981; Slocum 1975). Moreover, feminist anthropologists have pointed out how important women’s domestic work has been to the economy, but how little public value it has been given historically (Ortiz 1994). The gendered division of labour should therefore be treated not so much as a technical allocation but as a form of social and political organisation, which ascribes differing power, prestige, and cultural appropriateness to tasks and products. Arguably, this is also true of the specialisation and allocation of roles according to criteria other than gender, including age, religious or social status, ethnicity, or caste (Wallman 1979, 14-5; e.g. Firth 1939; Parry 1980).

In the early twentieth century, many anthropologists tended to see ‘tribal’ or ‘peasant’ societies as relatively homogenous, and the limited division of labour as allocation of complementary roles that contributed towards social cohesion. This resonated with the emphasis by sociologist Emile Durkheim, that a division of labour was conducive to social solidarity. By contrast, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists increasingly employed Marxian analyses that emphasised inequality and conflict between those that control the means of production and those that perform the bulk of the labour. A number of analyses have suggested that where capitalist relations of production are not dominant, there is less separation between production and reproduction and between the use-value of goods and their exchange-value, and therefore also less alienation among workers (Taussig 1977; Wallman 1979). For example, among Aymara speaking peasants studied in the Andean Highlands of Bolivia in the 1970s, festive work parties known as chuqu were important ways of organizing agricultural work. Such parties complete with delicious meals, drink and music minimized alienation. Instead, they enabled different households to help each other, and to affirm personhood and the power of community relations (Harris 2007).

However, some anthropologists have also applied Marxian analyses to the gendered division of labour in non-capitalist contexts. Several of them argued that around the world, women tend to do the bulk of productive labour, but men appropriate much of their product for their own profit (e.g. Josephides 1985; Meillassoux 1981). Others cautioned against imposing Marxian frameworks and categories on all societies to analyse gender relations as if they were class based (e.g. Sillitoe 1985). For example, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1988, 140) suggested that Marxian (and liberal) analyses were based on Eurocentric ‘proprietorial’ understandings of labour, assuming that labour could be owned and alienated like a commodity. Such assumptions, Strathern argued, did not apply to the Melanesian understandings of work and gender relations that she was familiar with. In Mount Hagen, the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea, artifacts of manufacture did not conceal human relations, as Marx had argued. Instead, they made relations visible, thereby limiting the usefulness of Marxian interpretations in contexts where capitalism is not dominant.

In the same period, feminist anthropologists revisited questions of the gendered division of labour and women’s social status under capitalism, frustrated that much prevailing theory was premised on the male, waged industrial worker (Brodkin 1998; Leacock 1986). Some studies focused on how the division of labour changed, especially with respect to gender roles, when rural societies became engaged in commodity production or labour migration (e.g. Guyer 1980; Strathern 1982). While anthropologists often highlighted the role of women’s work in the domain of reproduction, some have pointed to how this separation between production and reproduction can be compounded under capitalism, with women especially taking on unwaged domestic labour. But since the 1980s, more studies have focused on how women have been drawn into the workforce, often to perform highly gendered and feminised forms of labour, such as in garment and electronics factories (e.g. Ong 1987; Lynch 2019), tea-picking (e.g. Chatterjee 2001; Jegathesan 2019), and ‘pink-collar’ office work (Freeman 2000). Often, such studies have found that women’s work is systematically devalued in the process.

Under capitalism, production regimes are based on, exploit, and exacerbate forms of social inequalities and differences, not just of gender, but also of race, age, ethnicity, citizenship status, class, as well as differences between people living in the capitalist core compared to those in its periphery (Kasmir and Gill 2022, Mullings 1986). This has long been recognised by anthropologists, who have been interested in how low-status migrants can be treated as surplus populations or cheap, disposable labour reserves (e.g. Richards 1939, 23; Barber and Lem 2018; Meillassoux 1972). With increasing globalisation, such transformations became understood in a world historical context as a shifting ‘international division of labour’. Within it, young women in developing countries play a fundamental role (Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983). They are the labour force that drives the integration of global production, consumption and waste disposal processes, as they often constitute the lowest paid segment of those countries that pay the lowest wages.

More recently, anthropologists have highlighted the emergence of a global ‘division of reproductive labour’, in which care work, including childcare and nursing, and domestic labour are increasingly disproportionately carried out by racialised or migrant women (Parreñas 2012; e.g. Amrith 2010; Barber and Bryan 2012; Gutierrez Garza 2019). The delegation of feminised care and domestic work can be understood within the context of wider socioeconomic shifts. Given that more middle-class women have entered full-time employment, they require cheap labour to take on gendered household and caring work. For Nicole Constable (2009), the rise in migrant care and domestic work is part of a wider ‘commodification of intimacy’ under globalised capitalism. This draws a relationship between, the commodification of domestic work, and the burgeoning demand for other forms of typically feminised, and transnational labour including sex work and surrogacy.

Frontiers and margins of capitalism

Especially after World War II, it became increasingly difficult for anthropologists to justify studies which focused mostly on ‘tribal’ and ‘traditional’ rural societies, treating them as discrete and isolated from wider global political and economic forces. On the other hand, anthropologists’ historic interest in peripheral and marginalised peoples have improved our understanding of forms of work and labour that prevail outside of metropolitan and industrialised centres of capital. They have shown how uneven global processes of extraction, dispossession, and exploitation really are. In particular, anthropology has contributed much to understanding capitalism from the perspective of the ‘frontier’. It has attended to the displacement and dispossession of local people, often Indigenous people, ‘peasants’ or smallholders, as they get caught up in the process of capitalism’s drive for expansion and accumulation through the appropriation of resources, land, and labour.

The increasing incorporation of many ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies into commodity production and labour regimes required anthropologists to take the impacts of wider political economy into account. While Malinowski’s ethnographies obscured the impact of labour migration and commodity production in the Trobriands, his students including Audrey Richards (1939) and Isaac Schapera (1947) foregrounded such impacts in their studies of rural African societies, sharing findings with colonial administrators. Thus, Richards documented how intermittent job opportunities in mines affected Bemba family dynamics in 1930s Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Whenever young men took up mining jobs, their fathers-in-law tended to assume more dominant roles in the lives of their married daughters and grandchildren. At the same time, those who remained behind and did not work in the mine had to share a greater amount of agricultural work among one another (Richards 1939, 134). In the 1950s, the more critical ‘Manchester School of Social Anthropology’ shifted the focus from concerns of breakdown in tradition to new urban and class identity formation in African towns and mining sites, particularly in the Central African Copperbelt. They documented how European ways of life were soon considered prestigious and desirable by local populations (Mitchell and Epstein 1959). However, anthropologists, including Mitchell and Epstein were later critiqued for underplaying the degree to which colonialism imposed white domination and violence on Africans, not just economically, but also politically and culturally (Magubane 1971).

From the mid-twentieth century, and especially the 1970s, the expansion of capitalism into areas previously deemed tribal, subsistence, and peasant economies led to a new interest in how different modes of production intersect. The 1968 protests which included civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as anti-colonial and peasant political movements and revolutions more broadly, incited critical perspectives on colonialism and imperialism (Cooper 1984; Rio and Bertelsen 2018). French structural Marxists pioneered inquiries into how colonial labour regimes thrived when linking with kinship-based modes of production, obtaining cheap labour without incurring the costs of social reproduction (e.g. Meillassoux 1972). Other anthropologists revisited the ‘agrarian question’: i.e. what happens to farming and peasant economies with the expansion of capitalism on land and labour frontiers, including the extent to which they are proletarianised, and how they resist these transformations. This period also saw much cross-fertilisation of ideas across disciplines including with History and Subaltern Studies, especially around questions of resistance and class formation (e.g. Hobsbawm 1959; Guha [1983] 1999; Scott 1976). Some applied a world historical lens to modes of production, examining how labour regimes in capitalism’s core and periphery are historically linked (Mintz 1978; Wolf 1982). This also allowed them to theorise about the role of slavery in the development of global capitalism. Mintz (1978: 95) for example, studied slavery in the Caribbean historically to show that thinking about work purely in terms of ‘modes of production’ does not capture its everyday meanings. It also obscures the multiple forms of resistance that slaves employed, and downplays the connections between different forms of labour in any given setting.

This period saw greater interest in previously neglected questions of slavery and unfree labour more generally, including a variety of bonded, forced, and trafficked labour (see Kopytoff 1982). Recent discussions of slavery and unfree labour have highlighted continuities and consequences in the twenty-first century including racialisation and racial capitalism (Pierre 2020; Ralph and Singhal 2019), and the ongoing prevalence of plantation regimes and bonded labour (Besky 2014; Chatterjee 2001; Jegathesan 2019; Li 2017). However, some have argued that we should not see unfree labour as a state of exception. Instead we may want to note how contemporary capitalism continues to depend on varieties of dehumanised, undercompensated, and coerced labour (Calvão 2016). This includes not only modern slavery, people trafficking (Howard and Forin 2019) and child labour (Berlan 2013), but also state-mandated labour migration programmes (Li 2017, Smith 2021), and even wage labour in its ideal form (Graeber 2006).

One reflection of anthropology’s historic interest in ‘othered’ and marginalised peoples has been that a significant portion of its research has been about ‘dirty work’, that is, work considered physically or socially polluting and stigmatising. Commonly, this includes work associated with death (Parry 1980), waste (Butt 2023; Millar 2018), and sex (Day 2007; Kelly 2008; Montgomery 2001; Shah 2014). This research problematizes ideas of exploitation and agency by attending to the complexities of how such work operates in various levels of legality, social stratification, commodification, and notions of respectability.

Various forms of production and labour regimes continue to exist, especially in the Global South, where so-called ‘free’ capitalist wage labour regimes are not the norm. Waged, let alone formalised, employment may be a widespread aspiration, but it remains out of reach for most people (Ferguson and Li 2018; e.g. Kauppinen 2021). Keith Hart (1973) proposed the influential concept of the ‘informal sector’ to describe self-organised work by the urban ‘sub-proletariat’ in Ghana, as an alternative or supplement to state-bureaucratised wage labour. Thinking of labour as being either formal or informal allows us to realize how scarce regular and non-precarious forms of work really are.

Anthropology’s long history of studying people on the peripheries of capitalism emerged in part from a division of labour between anthropology and sociology, with anthropology focusing on ‘traditional’ societies, leaving questions of bureaucracy and ‘professionals’ to sociologists. Laura Nader (1972) advised anthropologists interested in how power operates to turn their gaze towards those whose work it is to accrue and wield power. This call to ‘study up’ tellingly entailed new practical and ethical issues, often putting anthropologists in a position of weakness vis-à-vis their interlocutors. Recent decades have seen a burgeoning anthropological interest in elites and white-collar workers, which will be discussed in more detail in the final section.

Industrial labour

Industrial labour is defined as work performed with technology and production processes that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century fuelled by colonial expansion. Industrialisation is associated with social changes and geographic shifts from rural regions to urban centres. It has resulted in vast and uneven socioeconomic change, environmental consequences, and led to the rise of management as a discipline. Anthropological attention to industrialisation highlights how workers at global and local levels have shaped and been shaped by state and market forces.

Early management studies shaped how anthropologists approached industrial organisations throughout the twentieth century (Harding 1955). Elton Mayo’s Human Relations theory stands out here (Holzberg and Giovanni 1981; Burawoy 1979a). Mayo studied worker productivity at the Hawthorne plant of the Chicago-based Western Electric company in 1927. Influenced by functionalist thinking, Mayo’s approach assumed that workers had an inherent need for emotional connection. It thereby emphasised psychological approaches to worker motivation. This had been neglected by Taylorist scientific management, which used ‘time and motion’ studies to rationalise tasks assigned to individuals as if they were machines. Later anthropologists would criticise Mayo and his followers for assuming harmony in the industrial workplace (Burawoy 1979a). On the one hand, this lack of attention to conflict mirrored the interest of structural-functionalist work in the creation of social cohesion. On the other hand, it may have partially reflected the political economic conditions in American and European industrial centres. From the interwar and postwar period until the 1970s, increased productivity through scientific management techniques and mass production was matched by rising wages and better incentives and conditions for workers. This arrangement, sometimes referred to as ‘Fordism’, was a phenomenon not much discussed by anthropologists at the time, although it was analysed by Antonio Gramsci as a form of corporate hegemony (Harvey 1989, 126).

From the 1970s, more scholars focussed on the conflict of interest between the managerial class and workers: how industrial modes of production disciplined and exploited workers, and the extent to which they acquiesced or resisted. Michael Burawoy’s (1979b) ethnography among Chicago factory workers showed how labourers may consent to their exploitation, impeding collective organisation and action. Within the ever-moving spheres of capital expansion and accumulation, anthropologists have revealed a multitude of ways people accommodate and resist industrialization processes. For instance, Aihwa Ong (1987) described how managerial discipline and control was subverted and resisted by Malay factory women. The women Ong studied were caught between often-conflicting demands of factory work and traditional gendered expectations and were under surveillance at work and in their communities. They resisted in subtle and dramatic ways, including becoming possessed by spirits in ‘hysterical’ episodes whilst at work, causing disruption to the capitalist logics of the factory.

While modernisation theories assumed that the relinquishing of tradition and the emulation of a Western individualism was a necessary prerequisite for industrialisation, most anthropologists argued against this ethnocentric teleology. By and large they held that it was best to analyse the historically and culturally specific conditions that accommodate different paths to industrialism (Holzberg and Giovannini 1981, 336-9). Contemporary analyses of industrial work continue to be enriched by attention to themes and insights that gained prominence in early ethnographies of ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies, such as kinship, religion, and gift exchange (Carrier 1992; Martin et al. 2021). Ethnographic writing shows how rituals, sacrifices, and other religious and magical practices can be seen as key to the success of an industrial endeavour, helping people make sense of danger and suffering (e.g. Bear 2018, Ong 1987; Taussig 1977). For instance, June Nash (1979) provided ethnographic insights into the lives of Bolivian tin miners during the 1970s, whose exploitation and dependency underpinned Latin American industrialization. Her study showed that in spite of suffering from great physical and economic hardship, miners were not alienated from their cultural roots, and had not lost their sense of self-worth as part of their work. That is because they made sense of their work by drawing on a mix of ideologies and cultural resources, including socialism and communism as well as Andean and Christian beliefs in deities operating above and below ground.

How industrialisation changes or is folded into local identity categories varies. In his research on a bicycle factory in West Bengal, Morton Klass (1996) found that despite management assuming that workers were a homogenous class, the latter used their caste identity to organise themselves and their labour. However, based upon thirty years of fieldwork in the steel town of Bhilai, Jonathan Parry (2020) argues that even in a hierarchically complex society like post-Independence India, class analysis—in this case between securely and insecurely employed labourers—is the most analytically salient way to understand differing life paths and chances. Other anthropologists have looked at how ethnic, religious, and racial tensions are stoked and mitigated in industrial settings (Sanchez 2016; Yelvington 1995). They have also provided significant insights into how processes of non-capitalist industrialisation, as well as the subsequent transition to post-socialism, were experienced in Eastern and Central Europe (e.g. Morris 2016; Rajković 2018). China’s remarkably rapid industrialisation process since 1978 has also been explored through ethnography, with a focus on the role of labour control and flexible supply chains in the context of the distinctive Chinese state-driven modernisation programme and transnational processes (e.g. Ong and Nonini 2003; Rofel 1999; Rofel and Yanagisako 2019).

Transformations of work under late capitalism

The past forty years have witnessed immense changes in work and the labour process, marked by flexibilisation, outsourcing, increasing use of information technologies, self-branding, and the severing of obligations between employers and employees. These shifts are related but not reducible to neoliberalism. This period has been termed ‘late capitalism’, to frame changes in both work and theoretical concerns. It has been a pivotal period for the anthropology of work and labour. Much of the research produced under and about late capitalism has clear echoes of earlier themes of how work is organised, including the growth of market logics and global inequality. However, it highlights how neoliberal policies, globalisation, and financialisation processes have increased precarity on a global scale, even encroaching on traditionally secure classes of work and workers. Working in precarious times has, in turn, led many to use the frames of ethics and affect to both analyse and interrogate the push towards self-cultivation and emotional management in the workplace. It has also led authors to question (neo)liberal assumptions regarding the necessity and value of work more generally.

Neoliberal policies and financialisation processes implemented in the 1980s ended a Fordist pact between labour, industry, and government in the Global North, in which rapidly rising corporate profits went hand in hand with rising living standards for most people in high-income countries (Harvey 1989). Increased computational capacity and accelerated neoliberal policies shifted the anthropological gaze towards how outsourcing and globalisation were being implemented and experienced unevenly between and within the Global North and South. Ethnographies of the Global South investigated how workers at various points along global value chains experienced intensified exploitative relationships with multinational organisations that needed raw materials and labour to implement the technologies of globalisation (e.g. Ong 1987; Ferguson 1999; Freeman 2000). Meanwhile, anthropologists of work in the Global North were exploring the aftermath of deindustrialisation (Doukas 2003; Mollona 2005; Nash 1989) and the growth of the high-tech industry. The latter facilitated globalisation and offered new but unevenly distributed opportunities to IT workers (Amrute 2016; Folz 2008; Hakken 2000; Xiang 2007).

Following the 2008 financial crisis, many anthropologists became interested in how such transformations were experienced in terms of rising uncertainty and precarity. The shift to more insecure, short-term work has occurred in conjunction with new technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and platform-based work. Several recent studies have highlighted how the technologies may be new but are not as ‘smart’ as they may appear and in fact are dependent upon precarious workers engaged in unstable piece-rate work (Irani 2015; Gershon 2017; Gray and Suri 2019). Studies of gig workers shed light on the contextual nature of why workers resist or welcome the flexibility associated with precarious work. For example, a recent study of Argentinian taxi drivers fighting Uber’s destabilising encroachment (del Nido 2021) contrasts with that of Thai motorcycle taxi drivers who prefer the freedom offered by precarious, dangerous work over the constraints of factory jobs (Sopranzetti 2017). Precarity is increasingly a concern among professionals, including academics. Some anthropologists have turned their gaze inward to the labour process of producing academics and the marketisation of education, demonstrating how precarity can foster exploitative knowledge production (Gershon 2018; Platzer and Allison 2018).

More anthropologists answered Nader’s (1972) call to ‘study up’ with an increased interest in white-collar professionals. Since the 2000s, ethnographies have explored the working lives of investment bankers and traders (Ho 2009; Zaloom 2006), bureaucrats (Mathur 2016), and the ‘consultants’ who fill the gaps created by late capitalist organisational structures that are no longer premised on in-house expertise (Chong 2018; Stein 2017). In much of the world, attaining white-collar and professional employment is highly aspirational, with families mobilising resources and contacts in the hope of attaining economic security, social status, and upward mobility (e.g. Kauppinen 2021).

One fertile area of inquiry in recent decades has been where questions of labour intersect with the burgeoning interest in ethics and self-cultivation, affect, and hope. Anthropologists have shown how people incorporate work into their ethical and aspirational life-projects and cultivating their sense of self (e.g. Kauppinen 2021; Zaloom 2006). This can be seen as the continuation of established scholarly interest in motivations for and meanings of work, as exemplified in the work of Malinowski and his students. But a focus on labour can also offer a critical purchase on these themes, showing how ethical, emotional, and relational capacities can be harnessed to extend and legitimate neoliberal restructuring and flexible accumulation. Scholars have noted that neoliberalism encourages the formation of ‘entrepreneurial selves’ using personal development techniques and self-discipline (Freeman 2015; Mackovicky 2016). For example, the ‘personal branding’ industry exemplifies how individualisation and self-management are mobilised in response to an increasingly impersonal labour process (Gershon 2016).

Work often demands ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ labour, in which often gendered capacities for care, affective and emotional management become commercialised and harnessed for profit (Hochschild 1983; Zaloom 2006). Workers as diverse as Mexican NGO staff and Indonesian steelworkers turn out to be moved by affect, and are constituted as neoliberal subjects in the process (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Meanwhile, governments have increasingly abdicated the provision of public services to the private and the third sector, commanding affective labour in the form of voluntary work. For example, the Italian state sought to mobilise public feelings and post-Fordist desires for social belonging toward eliciting unremunerated voluntary work in the social service sector (Muehlebach 2011). Of course, feelings of exploitation and personal investment in work are not mutually exclusive. Instead a more nuanced understanding of feelings in the neoliberal context may be required, as people who yearn for meaning and connection can sometimes even find it in the midst of exploitative circumstances (Freeman 2020).

On the other hand, some have responded to the end of the Fordist pact, increasing precarity, and jobless growth by questioning assumptions about the value and necessity of work under late capitalism. Graeber (2018) famously argues that a significant portion of jobs done in the Global North, particularly white collar jobs that have proliferated in recent decades, are essentially pointless and contribute little to society. He sees the valorisation of such work as rooted in Protestant and capitalist ethics, which value work and suffering for its own sake. Combined with a neoclassical idea that pay is compensation for the disutility of work, this has resulted in the most socially valuable forms of work, such as nurses, teachers, and cleaners, often being the least remunerated. Meanwhile, ‘proper jobs’ promised to the Global South as a telos of economic development have failed to materialise (Ferguson 2015; Li 2018). Several scholars have thus proposed universal basic income as an alternative to a politics of premising economic citizenship and social incorporation on wage labour (Ferguson 2015; Li 2018). However, other ethnographic accounts show that there is a popular tendency across a variety of sociocultural contexts to predicate ideas of ‘deservingness’ on participation in labour (e.g. Fouksman 2020; Hann 2018). This suggests that the presence of a work ethic cannot be reduced to Protestant or (neo)liberal ideologies. Indeed, in some contexts, labour is seen as fundamental to the achievement of full, independent, adult personhood (Jiménez 2003; Martin et al. 2021).

Many of these issues associated with late capitalism were exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the limitations inherent to flexible supply chains and labour arrangements and upended the lives of workers and consumers globally. The pandemic further disrupted assumptions about the necessity and valorisation of work by raising the question of what kinds of work and workers are ‘essential’ (Collins 2023). The simultaneous valorisation of and disregard for socially essential workers also brings into stark relief processes of flexibilisation, precarity, and individualized risk. The precariously employed were made more precarious as they were thrust into dangerous circumstances by stay at home and return to work orders (Garimella et al. 2021; Iskander 2020; Rath and Das Gupta 2022). It is important to note, however, that for workers accustomed to near-constant crises of one kind or another, such as small-scale miners in Ghana, the pandemic has been experienced as just one of many interruptions to their livelihood (Pijpers and Luning 2021). The pandemic also exposed the fragilities and limits of the state and late capitalism's reliance on civil society and the third sector (Lachowicz and Donaghey 2022). That so many people were moved to contribute additional care and reproductive labour, often without being remunerated, further highlights neoliberal logics, which elicit and exploit individualised ethical, emotional, and relational propensities, as well as capacities for self-discipline.

Conclusion

The anthropology of work and labour reveals the concreteness of how people make a living in the context of their immediate natural and social environments. It elucidates diverse perspectives on work from within and beyond capitalism. In particular, ethnographies show how social roles and identities everywhere are made meaningful through the labour process, and how they are valued differently through time and space. This entry has charted how anthropologists increasingly wrestled with the transformations wrought by colonialism and capitalist expansion often left out of earlier theoretical frameworks. However, insights drawn from the holistic frameworks of early ethnographic studies in small-scale societies continue to enrich contemporary accounts of work. Ethnographies conducted in the heart of industrial and commercial centres can capture the integration of production and social reproduction, and the perpetuation of kin-like, ritual, and gift-like social relations and practices where one might assume either alienation or self-maximisation. Ethnographic methods also reveal the contradictions in how paid and unpaid work can simultaneously elicit experiences and feelings of exploitation, alienation, discipline, and tedium, as well as forms of emotional and relational attachments, meaning, fulfilment, and creative expression.

To some extent the anthropology of work and labour maps onto broader theoretical developments in anthropology, as it can be divided into evolutionary, functionalist, Marxian, feminist, and ethical approaches. Yet, it also reveals how these theoretical ‘turns’ themselves reflect and respond to broader political economic transformations. The anthropology of work and labour is particularly susceptible to such societal shifts, as it focuses on how people everywhere are interconnected, and how modes of livelihood are themselves the outcome of global historical processes. An anthropological understanding of work and labour therefore sharpens our understanding of emerging questions surrounding the future of work. It teaches us how we may respond to rapid technological transformations, political and economic uncertainties, conflicts and resource competition, as well as pandemics and climate change.

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Note on contributors

Jasmine Folz is a Research Associate in the Human Computer Systems group at the University of Manchester. Her research deals with the political, economic, and social aspects of high-tech workers generally and the Free and Open Source Software community in particular. She has conducted fieldwork in the United States and India.

Dr. Jasmine Folz, Department of Computer Science, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. jasmine.folz@manchester.ac.uk

Rachel E. Smith is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University of Aberdeen. Her doctoral research focused on the local perspectives on work, development, and social change in a rural Vanuatu community with a high degree of engagement in New Zealand’s seasonal labour mobility programme. More recently, she has looked at the production and export of kava, a crop traditionally grown and consumed across the Pacific.

Dr. Rachel Smith, Department of Anthropology, Edward Wright Building, Aberdeen AB24 3RX, United Kingdom. rachel.smith1@abdn.ac.uk

[1] The degree to which work and labour is uniquely human has been long contested. Marx defined labour as distinctly human because although a bee may construct a hive that puts a human architect to shame, only the human architect can imagine the end product and thus their work is borne of conscious purpose (1992, 284). By contrast, Lewis Henry Morgan (1868, viii) saw in a beaver’s dam communicative labours that were “suggestive of human industry”. Timothy Ingold (1983) rejects Marx’s distinction between animal instinct and human work, arguing that if humans are both objectively part of the physical world and subjective agents, so too are at least some nonhuman animals, whose labour must be acknowledged as such. Others argue that what makes humans unique is not that they work but that their ability to expend and harness more energy than other animals allows more time for leisure necessary for developing our unique sociocultural lives (Kraft et al. 2021). Certainly, many anthropologists have focussed on human-animal relationships as central to discussions of livelihood (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fijn 2011; Blanchette 2020) and recent anthropological interest in multispecies relations has some revisiting Marx to ask, can (nonhuman) animals, and ‘nature’ more generally, be exploited? (e.g., Beldo 2017; Besky and Blanchette 2019; Hurn 2017).

[2] Historical particularism is the first American school of anthropological theory. Founded by Boas and popularised by his many students, it was developed in reaction to what Boas found to be an uncritical use of social evolutionary frameworks popular in the late 19th century. Historical particularism was premised on the belief that cultural differences and similarities had to be understood within the contexts of unique environmental, psychological, and historical conditions. It introduced the concept of cultural relativism, and the four field approach that combines cultural anthropology with archaeology, linguistics and physical anthropology and that still predominates in many American anthropology departments (McGee & Warms 2000: 131).

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Debt

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 17:25:24 +0000

Cartoon depicting the former king of Great Britain and Ireland George III receiving funds from Prime Minister William Pitt. Authored by James Gilray in 1786.

Ryan Davey

Cardiff University

Initially published 25 Mar 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24debt

Abstract:

Debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe, but it often accompanies inequality, oppression, and unrest. Responding to this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. It considers a debate in anthropology about whether debts of money are akin to reciprocity. Anthropologists have traced the connections between debts of money and reciprocal obligations in a wider sense. Yet the business of lending, borrowing, and repaying (or not repaying) money also differs from other kinds of social interdependency in ways that merit consideration in their own right. The entry explores the violence and dispossession that so often feature in experiences of debt, considering their connection to the rise of quantified obligations in impersonal markets. The coercive quality of debt relations is often latent yet can incite responses ranging from organised collective refusal to optimistic attempts to disregard debt collectors’ demands. The multiple ways in which debts form channels for the extraction of wealth and resources, sometimes known as financial exploitation, mark important shifts in class relations along with new solidarities and divisions. Finally, the entry considers the gendered aspects of debt, which arise through the often-unrecognised labour involved in borrowing or paying on time, as well as debt’s capacity to re-work gender norms and bring new social forms into being.

Introduction

Across the globe, debt and credit are a dominant framing for many economic and political relationships. Such relationships are often extractive, restrictive, or distressing. An excess of subprime mortgage debt in the US in 2008 led to the collapse of financial markets there and subsequently many other places. From the ‘Third World’ debt crisis that started in Mexico in 1982 to 2010s austerity in southern Europe, national governments’ attempts to repay their debts to international creditors have involved structural adjustment, mass unemployment, and rising inequality (Knight 2015; Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). On the other hand, credit is often associated with the creation of new possibilities and freedoms. It has been touted as a vital means of empowering the poor. Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank, which provides small loans to groups of poor people in a type of lending known as microcredit, advocates viewing ‘credit as a human right’.^[1]

Strictly speaking, debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe. Yet while this implies an outward logic of balanced reciprocity, debts so frequently feature in situations of inequality, devastation, and unrest. Exploring this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. The entry considers a debate in anthropology about whether debts of money are akin to reciprocity, thinking about what such an analogy enlightens and what it obscures. It then explores debt’s relation to violence and dispossession, and how debts can become channels for the extraction of wealth and resources, marking shifts in class relations and in how accumulation takes place. Finally, the entry considers how gendered dynamics arise through the often-unrecognised labour involved in borrowing or paying on time.

What is debt?

On many counts, anthropologists agree about what debt is. Debt is a kind of social relation: between the debtor who owes something and the creditor who is owed it, as well as often third parties who somehow oversee the repayment.^[2]Economic and common-sense framings of debt acknowledge this simple relational point. Yet anthropologists extend it further. Debts do not merely shape or corrupt pre-existing social ties. Instead, debts powerfully constitute social relations or even sociality itself (Roitman 2003; Schuster 2015). Debt creates a temporal relation, too: it is able ‘to link the present to the past and the future’ by ‘lending concrete resources […] in the present and demanding (or hoping for) a return in the future’ (Peebles 2010, 226).

Debt often appears with credit as ‘an inseparable, dyadic unit’—the one always requiring the other (Peebles 2010, 226). ‘Giving credit’ refers to the act of putting your faith in someone. The phrase implies considering someone to be credible, honourable, and trustworthy (Gregory 2012, 384). Incurring a debt, meanwhile, refers to the idea that once you have received credit from someone, you owe them something in return. Across cultures, when people discuss credit and debt, they tend to understand credit as ‘beneficial and liberating’, yet debt as ‘burdensome and imprisoning’ (Peebles 2010, 226)—in other words, many societies consider that ‘credit is to debt as virtue is to vice’ (Gregory 2012, 386). While this may suggest a neat opposition, the relation between credit and debt is more complex: credit is ‘a shapeshifter’ that is ‘reborn as debt’ after it is obtained (Gregory 2012, 383). The word ‘credit’ can refer to lending (whose opposite is ‘debt’) or a payment into an account (whose opposite is a ‘debit’, an expense out of an account) (Gregory 2012, 382). The meanings of the word ‘debt’ subtly vary as well: usually it means owing an amount of money, yet often the word refers to problems repaying such an amount (sometimes called ‘bad debt’ or ‘debt problems’) or alternatively owing things other than money.

Debt and reciprocity

Credit and debt often operate as reciprocal relations: what is given is later returned, or so it goes. (This picture is complicated below.) Anthropologists have persistently found that debts as reciprocal relations are themselves enmeshed in wider webs of reciprocity, both including and going beyond what might conventionally be described as a debt (Peebles 2010, 228). In post-apartheid South Africa amid ‘a proliferation of credit sources’, many people were borrowers in one capacity and lenders in another (James 2012). Some people loaned out their salaries or state welfare payments at interest, at times to help with repayments on their bank loans. This web of economic relations all premised upon tapping someone else’s income formed a kind of ‘money-go-round’ (James 2012). Similarly, women in rural India, in ‘juggling with debt’, take up microcredit and ‘join it up with countless other debt ties’ including informal and familial lending (Guérin 2014, 41). Debt can thus become a ‘driving force in social life’ (Guérin 2014). Looking at debt in terms of its quality of reciprocity highlights that debts of money tend to spawn multiple versions of themselves at a variety of scales and in apparently distinct social domains.

Anthropologists have connected debts of money with reciprocity and social interdependency in a wider sense, too, including gift-giving and obligations to kin. (See ‘Gender and care’ below.) Incorporating debt into kin ties, Papua New Guineans living in North Queensland, Australia, in the early twenty-first century used mortgages and other financial products to complete the payment of their bridewealth obligations (Sykes 2013). Most typically, links between debt and reciprocity arise in studying gift exchange. Pearl divers in 1990s Eastern Indonesia, for example, participated in a system of trade and debt whereby they tended to be chronically indebted to traders who purchased the divers’ catch in exchange for credit at their stores (Spyer 1997). Entwined with this mundane system, the pearl divers also maintained gift exchange relations with supernatural undersea female spirits whom they called their ‘sea wives’. The divers considered their sea wives to provide them with pearl oysters in exchange for token offerings of food and store-bought goods. As goods cycled between the two realms, the sacred undersea relations both sustained the profane transactions on dry land and formed a utopian alternative to them. For the pearl divers, there was an implied analogy between the two sets of exchange (Spyer 1997).

Anthropologists drawing connections between debts and gifts have drawn inspiration from Bronislaw Malinowski’s analysis of the kula in the Trobriand Islands—a ceremonial practice whereby bracelets and necklaces were transported and exchanged in complementary directions between islands (Malinowski [1922] 2014; Peebles 2010).^{^[3]} Malinowski argued that the ethnographic study of a given phenomenon should involve ‘an exhaustive survey of […] the broadest range possible of its concrete manifestations’, in order to understand how they ‘functionally depend on one another’ ([1922] 2014, 515; in Candea 2019, 81). Hence Malinowski observed a dazzling breadth of interlinked relations of reciprocity. Later anthropologists described the exchange of gifts and the exchange of women (by men) explicitly in terms of debt (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 1969, 265; Leach [1954] 1977, 163), leading to the concept of ‘gift-debt’ (Gregory 2015, 13, 55). This expanded the concept of debt from ‘that simple notion of debt that the lending of money creates’ to include reciprocal obligations in general (Gregory 2012, 380). This has sometimes been seen as anthropology’s quintessential contribution to the understanding of debt (Gregory 2012).^[4] The likening of debt to reciprocity has been helped by broadening the definition of reciprocity. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proposed a typology of different kinds of reciprocity. He distinguished ‘generalised’ reciprocity, or transactions that are putatively altruistic; ‘balanced’ reciprocity or the direct exchange of things of commensurate worth or utility; and ‘negative’ reciprocity, i.e. the attempt to get something for nothing with impunity. He thereby allowed for the idea of reciprocity, conventionally connoting a to-and-fro, to encompass one-way flows of goods as varied as unbridled generosity and theft (1972, 194–6).

Yet anthropologists have also questioned the merits of re-defining debt from owing money to reciprocity in general. Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of gift exchange ([1925] 2001) is taken by some to be ‘anthropology’s foundational text on credit and debt’ (Peebles 2010, 226). Yet the extent to which Mauss engaged with concepts of credit and debt is contentious. He wrote that ‘the origin of credit is […] the gift’ ([1925] 1974, 34), but he described the obligation to reciprocate a gift as a ‘debt’ only a handful of times and without fully developing a concept of debt per se (e.g. [1925] 2001, 126–8; see also Graeber 2009, 112–3).^[5] Debates around the relation between debt and reciprocal giving go back to the time of Franz Boas—a founder of North American anthropology—and his lesser-known contemporary Edward Curtis (High 2012). Boas studied competitive gift-giving among the Kwakiutl people in North America, a practice known as the potlatch. He wrote that ‘the gift […] is nothing but an interest-bearing loan’, thus likening it to a debt (Boas 1897; in High 2012, 367). Curtis, in his study of the Kwakiutl, came to a different conclusion. Curtis found that the Kwakiutl kept potlatch gift-giving separate from the accounting of debts owed for everyday purchases: only the latter (debts owed on purchases) could ever be explicitly enumerated and called in, whereas with the potlatch it would be considered shamelessly greedy to demand an exact amount in return. As a shorthand, we could describe as ‘Boasian’ the position that debt and reciprocal gift-giving are assimilable, and describe as ‘Curtisian’ the position that they are distinct (High 2012). Inspired by Boas, as well as Malinowski and Mauss, anthropologists have shown how debts foster bonds of solidarity, strengthen hierarchies, and demarcate wider social boundaries (Peebles 2010). They have generated insights that debt is ‘productive’ of new forms of sociality, morality, care, political subjectivity, belonging, social worth, and relatedness (Roitman 2003; Guérin 2014).

Very often the people anthropologists study liken reciprocal and other obligations to debts of money, in a Boasian fashion; or they reflect Friedrich Nietzsche who, ruminating on the likeness between ‘the moral concept Schuld (‘guilt’) [and the] material concept of Schulden (‘debts’)’ (1887, 39), described morality itself as a debt people imagined owing to ancestors, god(s), or the cosmos. (See also a critique of notions of ‘primordial debt’ in Graeber 2009, 121). In Oceania, the Americas, and South Asia, some groups frame ritual and sacred relations explicitly as debts of money (Gregory 2012, 380). In contemporary Vietnam, burning money is a commonplace activity whereby people supply money to ancestors, gods, or ghosts (Kwon 2007). This practice draws on ‘an ancient concept of life as a type of bank loan’ from ‘the treasury of the other world’ or ‘the bank of hell’ (Kwon 2007, 77). In a more profane manner, in 1990s Chile, amid an overwhelming crisis of government debt and an explosion of consumer debt and default, the national government framed its obligations to the poor as a ‘social debt’ and its obligations to those affected by torture under Pinochet as its ‘moral debt’ (Han 2012). Characterising these injustices as debts was a strategy of self-exculpation, however, as the Chilean government implied that upon payment of an amount that it decided unilaterally, those injustices should be forgiven. (Poorer households did not appear to use the word ‘debt’ in this way.) By contrast, in campaigns among Black Americans for reparations for slavery, framing what is owed as a debt is considered by some to be self-defeating (Cooper 2011).

An alternative anthropological approach that does not equate debt with reciprocity, nor even describe debt as a form of exchange, was pioneered in the early 2000s (Roitman 2003; 2005). This approach is sceptical of an unqualified proposition that debt constitutes social relations, because such a proposition without an accompanying analysis of power risks being functionalist, in the sense of presuming consensus, stability, and an overall benignness in social arrangements that may in fact lack them (Roitman 2003, 212). Debt is seen instead to be ‘at the origin of a fundamentally asymmetrical social relation, which breaks with the logic of parity in exchange’ (Sarthou-Lajus 1997, 2; in Roitman 2003, 213), a logic common to viewing debts in terms of gifts and reciprocity. By this alternative view, debt is a ‘structure of dependence’ and ‘a particular condition in human relations […] inherent to the constitution of certain forms of subjectivity and hence […] a historical phenomenon’ (Roitman 2003, 213) rather than a universal feature of human life. This position was enhanced by conceiving of reciprocity more strictly than in Sahlins’ typology, noted above: reciprocal exchange is distinguished from mutualistic relations, hierarchies, and competitive gift-giving, such as the potlatch; and the assumption that human interactions everywhere are a matter of balanced, to-and-fro exchanges is robustly challenged (Graeber 2009; 2011).

As such distinctions underscore, when defaults and non-payment are rife, insisting that credit and debt are reciprocal may be a normative, rather than descriptive, act. The same point applies more broadly when debt is a relationship between institutional creditors and lay debtors. During times of financialisation and crisis, then, Curtis’s position is arguably more fruitful than Boas’s (High 2012). A Curtisian hesitation about identifying debt with reciprocity creates space to attend to debt’s violent and exploitative tendencies, as can be seen in a wave of anthropological scholarship since 2008 (see below). This does not preclude analysis of the imbrication of debts of money with other kinds of social interdependency, but rather calls for semantic precision in how they are all described (e.g. Guérin 2014; Guérin and Venkatasubramanian 2022; Elyachar 2005). There may be ‘a temptation to apply debt reasoning to almost every other relationship one can think of’ (High 2012, 363)—framing what politicians owe their constituents as a social debt, what scholars learn from their mentors as an intellectual debt, morality as a debt to society, family relations as debts to caregivers, or culture as a symbolic debt. But doing so ‘only grinds down the vast array of human action into a single transactional logic’ (High 2012, 365; see also Sneath 2012). We might, therefore, prefer not to ‘collapse all distinctions into debt’ but instead to investigate ‘the distinctions that matter’ (High 2012) to the people in our fieldsites. This includes distinctions between debt and other kinds of obligation, as well as distinctions between different kinds of debt. It is significant that in South Africa, for instance, the term sekôlôtô connotes entrapment in debt while the term lobola refers to long-term reciprocal obligations (James 2014, 22). This underscores the value of reflecting in anthropological analysis people’s subtle uses and significations of the word ‘debt’ and of other words like it, even (or especially) if this goes against some seemingly foundational precepts.

Violence and dispossession

Efforts to distinguish debts of money from social interdependency in general have significantly influenced anthropological understandings of the relation between debt and violence. The anthropologist David Graeber defined debt as ‘an obligation to pay a sum of money’, as opposed to a ‘mere moral obligation’ (2011, 13). Unlike if ‘what was owed was a favour, or gratitude or respect’, with a debt, the human costs are often disregarded since ‘a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified’ and this act of turning ‘morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic [can] justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene’ (Graeber 2011, 13–4). In making this distinction, Graeber identified in debt ‘two elements […] violence and quantification’ that are so closely interwoven that ‘it’s almost impossible to find one without the other’ (2011, 14). While obligations in general do not necessarily have anything to do with violence (see also Englund 2008), Graeber claimed that debts of money generally do (2011). He explained this difference by contrasting market economies, which feature debts of money and where money’s primary purpose is to acquire goods, from ‘human economies’ where any currencies that exist primarily serve to ‘rework relations between people’ (Graeber 2009, 125; 2011). Unlike with human economies, in a market economy, individuals can settle their accounts and never have anything else to do with one another. Shifts from human economies to market economies have involved transitions from currencies with very specific purposes that were used only to pay lip service to something owed of immeasurable value (such as an arm lost in combat or the ability to produce new life), to the general-purpose money used today whose value is considered equal to the thing for which it is offered (Graeber 2009, 121–4). What was instrumental to this transition was violence, especially the violence that made it possible to separate human beings from their social contexts and so treat them as objects of exchange (Graeber 2011, 159). The violence of slavery in particular played a formative role in the rise of impersonal markets, for instance in converting a slave, who supposedly owed their whole life to a particular master, into a slave whose obligation to their master could be quantified so that the slave could be sold to someone else (Graeber 2009, 124–5). Hence states, with their recourse to legitimate violence, and markets, that draw equivalences between people and things, ‘were born together and have always been intertwined’ even though they are commonly assumed to be diametrically opposed (Graeber 2011, 18).^[6] Throughout the growth of impersonal markets, the language of debt has been an extremely effective way ‘to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral’ (Graeber 2011, 5).

At a more mundane level, the coercive quality of relationships between creditors and debtors often becomes patent when creditors attempt to collect or enforce unpaid debts. This includes forcibly dispossessing people of homes, belongings, land, income, or wealth. The violence is often latent and can include ‘subtle or not-so-subtle threats of physical force’ being applied if rules and commands are not followed (Graeber 2012, 105). Lenders’ ‘draconian repossession tactics’ during a nationwide farming crisis in the United States in the 1980s had traumatic effects on farmers, including suicides, social ostracism, and hospitalisation for mental ill-health (Dudley 2000, 40; see also Shah 2012 on indebted farmers’ suicides in India). As both land value and demand for US grain plummeted, lenders required additional collateral and foreclosed loans ‘not because [the farmers] were delinquent or in default, but because their loans had grown “larger” than the value of the property securing them’ (Dudley 2000, 40). Farmers were forced to auction off their land and machinery at low prices, leaving no means of production and a shortfall to repay (Dudley 2000). Likewise, microlending practices, while designed to empower the poor, often involve coercive pressures to repay. In Egypt in the 1990s, NGOs providing microfinancing could, under Egyptian law, take cases of non-payment to criminal courts (unlike the civil courts ordinary banks had to use) and so draw on the repressive apparatus of the state to recover the debt (Elyachar 2005, 199). Even without state enforcement, microfinance loan officers may use coercive pressures from embarrassment to harassment to induce repayments (Kar 2013). With the 2008 global financial crisis, dispossessions took place on a mass scale across North America, Europe, and beyond. In some jurisdictions, money could be taken straight out of household borrowers’ bank accounts if they did not repay (Mikuš 2020). Mortgage repossessions incited a variety of responses among at-risk homeowners, from defaulting to debt refusal and critiques of predatory lenders that reformulated what borrowers owed them (Stout 2019; Sabaté 2016). At times, attempts to enforce debts have been met with embodied defiance—such as with activists in Spain assembling outside the homes of potential evictees to physically obstruct debt enforcement agents and the police (Suarez 2017).

Given the violence of debt, one would be forgiven for thinking that the futures debt inspires are uniformly bleak. Yet as well as fears of being trapped in debt and anxieties about enforcement, debt and credit are also channels for and objects of optimism, hopes, and dreams. In 2010s Britain, the enforcement of household debt, including bailiffs seizing goods or landlords taking eviction proceedings, was a method of securing repayments yet also formed part of a wider structure of expropriation to which poorer working-class households were exposed (Davey 2025). The daily efforts of over-indebted people to ignore the demands made by their creditors, by stashing unopened debt collection letters away or hanging up on telephone calls, is pervasively assumed to be an irrational or irresponsible attempt to wish debts away (Davey 2025). Yet it is better seen as part of an uneven and complexly optimistic struggle against the prospect of lawful coercion, indeed one that often succeeds (Davey 2025). Credit can also render certain hopes possible when there is no obvious violence or enforcement at work. In South Africa after apartheid (James 2015), the would-be members of a new Black middle class took out credit to improve their position in society through university education, bridewealth payments, and mortgages. The expansion of lending thus ‘unleashed aspirations for upward mobility’ (James 2015) that, without credit, would remain tractionless dreams, while more egalitarian hopes fell by the wayside. A similar point holds for student debt and middle-class status in the United States (Zaloom 2019).

Extraction and class

While the ambivalence of debt means it sometimes brings increments of freedom, prosperity, or hope (Guérin and Venkatasubramanian 2022), very often debt relations entail unequal transfers of wealth or resources. These latter processes are variously known as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2009), ‘financial exploitation’ (Saiag 2020b), ‘financial expropriation’ (Lapavitsas 2013a), or ‘predatory debt extraction’ (Stout 2019, 72). The first of these is a way of accumulating wealth that relies on taking things from people rather than from exploiting their productive labour. The concept modifies Marx’s formulation of ‘primitive accumulation’ as an act of dispossessing land and property at the origins of capitalism through Rosa Luxemburg’s insight that such dispossession is on-going ([1913] 2003). Anthropologists studying state debt have explored ways in which debt can be a mechanism for accumulation by dispossession (Roitman 2005; Bear 2015). State debt, also known as government debt or sovereign debt, is what a national government owes to the various bodies from whom it has borrowed money. While state debt crises gained headlines in Europe in the 2010s, in most of the world they are longer-standing (Muehlebach 2016). The geopolitical order since World War II is one whereby international relations are mediated through debts (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). Since the 1970s, loans were often conditional on structural adjustment policies which generally did not foster prosperity in Global South countries (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). In the 1980s, state debt was financialised, in the sense that the loans given to national governments (known as sovereign debt bonds) became capital on which commercial banks could speculate in order to accumulate wealth (Bear 2015).^[7] At the same time, the control of how sovereign debts would be repaid gradually shifted from the hands of elected politicians to technocrats in central banks, which became increasingly independent from political control. (For ethnographies of central banks, see Holmes & Marcus 2007, Holmes 2009, and Riles 2018) With national governments ever keener to appear like well-behaved debtors, ‘[e]conomic governance became newly constrained by the new public good of interest repayment’ (Bear 2015, 7).

These processes become extractive insofar as states prioritise their debt repayments over providing welfare or alleviating inequality. In 1980s India, sovereign debt transformed from a source of funds for national social investment into a mechanism by which middle-class and institutional investors could extract value from public-sector institutions (Bear 2015, 12–3). This was helped by policy-makers, trained at the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who implemented austerity measures, reducing government spending on public services or requiring governments to get more done with the same funding (Bear 2015). Austerity is a way in which governments remove resources from public ownership and transfer them to commercial banks, the IMF, and the World Bank (Bear and Knight 2017). In the 1990s, the government of Cameroon imposed extreme austerity (Roitman 2005). The once-prosperous Cameroonian economy had experienced a sharp downturn in the 1980s, which had led Cameroon’s international creditors to pressure the Cameroon government to reduce its public expenditure and prioritise its debt repayments. State debt created new channels for continuous economic extraction, in the form of debt repayments and interest payments (Roitman 2005). Hence ‘debt […] generates […] economic and political rents’: regular payments someone receives simply because of owning something (Roitman 2005, 74). This mode of economic extraction takes place through financial and commercial relations, rather than through the exploitation of labour. And yet Cameroon’s austerity did not go unchallenged, with protests and popular rejection of the government’s narrative of what it had to do domestically to service its debts (Roitman 2005).

Another form of accumulation by dispossession takes place through microcredit (Elyachar 2005). Microcredit, also known as microlending or microfinance, involves giving small loans to groups of poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. After widespread criticism of international lending to nation-states and amid state debt crises, microlending was designed to empower the poor. Egyptian microfinance providers aimed to achieve this by ‘financialising [the] social networks’ of the ‘informal’ economy, yet the microloans eventually served as capital by which Egyptian banks could trade on international markets (Elyachar 2005, 194).

Household debts can also work as channels for transfers of wealth and resources. Sometimes called personal debt, household debt includes credit cards, loans, overdraft fees, and mortgages, as well as being ‘in arrears’ (behind on bills) and student loans. Here the terms ‘financial exploitation’ and ‘financial expropriation’ have been suggested. The latter describes a process where households’ reliance on ‘the formal financial system to facilitate access to vital goods and services’ leads to a ‘systematic extraction of financial profits’ from household incomes, and so has ‘an exploitative aspect’ (Lapavitsas 2013b, 794, 801). It is only compounded by ‘securitisation’, a practice whereby banks trade and potentially profit on their loan portfolios (Palomera 2014; Langley 2009). In Argentina, a subproletariat of informal workers and unemployed people living mainly in shantytowns had long been excluded from consumer credit (Saiag 2020a). Yet thanks to a new social protection system of pensions and family allowances introduced by social democratic President Cristina Kirchner (2007-15), every household gained access to a stable monthly income. Consumer lending to this group boomed. It gave rise to a mode of exploiting labour by finance, due to

the mismatch between the time of finance (monthly instalments over the medium to long term) and the time of work (erratic and often short-term) [which] increasingly feeds financial transfers from people’s labour to financial institutions, as debtors structurally fail to honour their instalments on time. This, in turn, exacerbates the existing stratifications within the working class, because those relegated to the most precarious jobs are the most exposed to late fees and penalties (Saiag 2020a, 18).

This mismatch ‘is emblematic of a specific form of capital accumulation, in which a large proportion of the working class remains at the margins of the wage-labour nexus, but is exploited [instead] through financial mechanisms’ (Saiag 2020a, 24).

The Marxian concept of ‘money fetishism’—whereby social relations of production, exploitation, and domination are misrecognised as inherent properties of money as a commodity (as with the notion that money itself has a capacity to generate more money)—enhances the anthropological understanding of exploitation through debt (Mikuš 2019; see also Taussig 1980). Marx believed the appropriation of surplus value through lending and borrowing, as a way of converting money into capital, took place through the charging of interest (Marx 1894, 593; in Mikuš 2019). Close ethnographic attention, however, shows a greater variety and contingency in the lending-related practices involved in appropriating surplus labour (Mikuš 2019). Amid ‘peripheral financialisation’ in Croatia in the 2010s, this included: foreign-currency lenders profiting on cross-border currency differentials and/or shifting exchange rate risks onto borrowers; frequent property repossessions accompanied by bargain auction prices; lenders making it harder for the borrower not to default (e.g. by refusing to renegotiate repayment schedules, or lending to those with precarious incomes); and penalty fees (e.g. for late repayments) (Mikuš 2019). Lending is made profitable thanks precisely to this sheer variety in the forms of money fetishism, as well as from hierarchies within and between markets that allow institutional lenders to manipulate and convert between the different kinds of money fetishism: banks can ‘on-sell’ the risks of borrowing and lending, and borrow in ‘money markets’, for instance, but lay individuals with access only to ‘retail’ or ‘consumer’ credit markets cannot (Mikuš 2019, 301). Islamic finance further complicates the association between debt and interest through the observance of proscriptions on usurious interest, for example through Muslim Americans’ efforts to achieve economic and cultural citizenship with mortgages that fuse Islamic law with US ideologies of opportunity (Maurer 2006).

Processes of financial expropriation often tie closely into the reproduction or transformation of class relations, including shared experiences of (and struggles against) exploitation and domination. In the city of Ferrol, in northern Spain, the extension of personal credit and mortgages in the 2000s fuelled popular aspirations for upward mobility and eroded the city’s tradition of labour organising (Narotzky 2015). An aspirational identity gained ground of being desclasado or ‘un-classed’. And yet once prospects of upward mobility began to fade amid a contraction of credit and wider recession, borrowers who still had to service debts and maintain credit scores began to feel increasingly dominated by their debts (Narotzky 2015). In such contexts, ‘credit and debt [may become] the centre of a new form of class consciousness’ for ordinary employed and unemployed people as well as small-scale entrepreneurs against financial institutions (Narotzky 2015, 67–8). Such experiences of ‘exploitation in the realm of […] consumption’ form ‘the basis of their understanding of systematic dispossession’ (Narotzky 2015, 67–8). The anthropology of debt has thus elicited a re-thinking of class beyond exploitation in the sphere of production to also encompass extraction taking place in the sphere of circulation (Narotzky 2015, 68-9)—or even ‘in social reproduction generally’ (i.e. not limited to any one domain) (Hann and Kalb 2020, 25). Conversely, where mortgages and consumer credit have become widespread, a middle-class identity as self-reliant and enterprising, all pinned on property ownership, can reinforce a tolerance of exploitative working conditions because the imperative to repay debts is tied into status and success (Weiss 2019). Creditor-debtor relationships have arguably ‘replaced labour as the key to value extraction and, perhaps, to class formation’ (Hann and Kalb 2020, 26).

As debt reconfigures class relations, it may spawn new anti-capitalist movements and alliances, as well as nationalist populist ones (Mikuš 2019). Working-class Ecuadorian migrants in 2000s Spain were trying to become part of the global middle classes through subprime (i.e. high-interest, high-risk) mortgage borrowing. When the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, this ‘subprime middle class’ (Suarez 2016) often defaulted; half a million evictions took place in Spain within ten years. Many Ecuadorian migrants joined a social movement, called la Plataforma de afectados por la hipoteca, or ‘la PAH’: ‘the platform for people affected by the mortgage crisis’. La PAH is an example of debt-based collective political action. Its activities include debtor assemblies, in which people with mortgage debt come together to share experiences and give support. While some dismissed this movement of homeowners as middle-class and reformist, it is arguably better seen as a ‘cross-class alliance’ with revolutionary potential (Suarez 2017; see also Gutierrez Garza 2022, Ravelli 2021).

Wider social divisions than overtly class-based ones, too, may be linked to the forms of capital involved in lending. In peripheral neighbourhoods of Barcelona in the 2000s, tensions arose between working-class migrants from the Global South and longer-standing residents (Palomera 2014). The former bought apartments on predatory mortgages and then would sublet two bedrooms to other families so as to afford the repayments while struggling to cover repairs; the latter had bought apartments decades earlier to have one family per home, and thanks to house prices rising some were now moving to more affluent areas. While it may appear that the older Spanish residents were intolerant of new Black migrant neighbours, or had ‘cultural’ differences, it is more fruitful to understand the social fragmentation in terms of changing relations between real estate and financial capital, and the differing relations the two groups had to the Spanish state (Palomera 2014). Recognising finance as a form of capital (distinct from, but entwined with, real estate and productive capital) is thus relevant to understanding many debt-based practices in capitalist societies (Palomera 2014), although anthropologists differ on whether this capital is fictitious or as real as any other (Maurer 2012, 181; Graeber 2014, 75).

Gender and care

As a field of structural inequalities within capitalism, class is, as feminist anthropologists have found, ‘generated within historically shifting dynamics of gender’ as well as sexuality, kinship, and race (Bear et al. 2015). Hence understanding the inequalities of debt involves attending to the ways in which debt-related practices and experiences are often deeply gendered and even a site at which gender norms are produced in the first place or re-worked. Womanhood itself is ‘transformed through debt’ and this transformation in turn feeds financial capitalism (Guérin, Kumar and Venkatasubramanian 2023). When poor women in rural India draw on multiple sources of formal and informal credit, in addition to financial motivations they make deliberate choices to multiply their social relationships (Guérin 2014). These women’s deliberations are gendered, since norms for women to manage household budgets without control over incomes mean they often resort to emergency loans that confer a low status, while also having to anticipate accusations of prostitution for borrowing from non-kin men (Guérin 2014)—a situation that heightens the appeal of microcredit.

Indeed, microfinance is a prime example of how gender is produced through debt. Often, microfinance loans are targeted at women with the aim of bringing about women’s empowerment through financial inclusion (Kar 2018). In India, maintaining access to this credit has become a central part of women’s domestic labour (Kar 2018). The groups organise among themselves the dispersal of credit and the gathering of repayments. The ties among the women thus act as a kind of ‘social collateral’ backing up the repayment (Schuster 2015). In Paraguay, pre-existing familial and neighbourly ties made up only a portion of this social collateral (Schuster 2015). Paraguayan microfinance providers asked relative strangers to rely on one another for credit access and repayment, thus actively shaping the social priorities of its borrowers. The relations among women that microfinance collateralises do not necessarily precede the collective debt, but may rather come into existence upon the debt’s creation and be shaped by its terms (Schuster 2015). Credit can therefore produce a social unit, rather than the social unit always pre-existing the debt (Schuster 2014), as one might assume for, say, family households. Such insights develop feminist analysis by denaturalising the ‘seemingly obvious [social] embeddedness of women’ involved in gendered practices of credit and debt (Schuster 2014, 564).

With household debts, gendered inequalities arise from the demands debt places on caring or reproductive labour. The task of managing debt repayments is often integrated into feminised activities, especially around home and family life (Allon 2014). Amid a boom in consumer credit in Chile in the 2000s, formal credit was often intertwined with familial care (Han 2011). Credit had become ‘a resource in caring’, for instance by buying time for mentally ill or drug-addicted kin to stabilise (Han 2011, 20). Support between households could also ‘mitigate the forces of economic precariousness’, for instance through women’s informal savings and borrowing associations (Han 2011). Yet caring relations also became strained or found their limit when demands for repayment induced ailments in the body of a debtor. Such situations open out ‘the rhythms of the domestic to the calendrics of debt’ (Adkins 2017, 6). Not only are kin and intimate relations central to strategies for dealing with debt, but also growing household indebtedness—such as in Greece in the late 2000s and 2010s—has transformed the household (or oikos) itself by adding credit to the gendered dynamics of dependency, exploitation, and cooperation that constitute it (Kofti 2020, 267-8). Feminist analysis of debt renders visible feminised labour and cautions against positing a universal creditor-debtor relation (cf. Lazzarato 2011), precisely because debt exploits gendered, sexual, racial, and locational differences (Cavallero and Gago 2020). It involves exploring ‘how debt is linked to violence against feminised bodies’, for instance when debt binds women to harmful relationships or is conversely the condition for fleeing (Cavallero and Gago 2020, 6). Studying the household-level processes of converting non-financial assets into more liquid, financial ones shatters assumptions that capitalism somehow occupies a realm distinct from households (Bear et al. 2015).

Conclusion

One of anthropology’s distinctive and long-held contributions to the study of debt has been to trace the social and material connections between debts of money, on the one hand, and reciprocal obligations and social interdependencies in a wider sense, on the other. The anthropology of debt is remarkable for having tended to follow a method of ‘internal comparison’ (Candea 2019, 80–1) that considers analogous phenomena, such as reciprocal relations, within a single fieldsite, rather than only between settings. Yet equally long-standing is a disagreement over whether to equate debt with reciprocity or rather to define debt as owing money. This tension is a virtue of the comparative approach anthropology takes. It is this tension between alternative conceptions of debt, rather than a habit of simply identifying debt with reciprocity irrespective of vernacular definitions and practices, that best encapsulates the value of anthropology’s engagement with debt. Considering debt and reciprocity alike, anthropological research into debt extends as far back as the start of the discipline itself through its vast record of ‘gift-debt’ (Peebles 2010). Yet if we accept that the practice of lending, borrowing, and repaying commodity-money differs in significant ways from other kinds of social interdependency, and so bears consideration in its own right, then anthropology’s inquiries into debts of money arguably begin much more recently. They may begin with ground-breaking studies of state debt emerging in the 1990s (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998, Roitman 2003), in response to the 1980s crisis, and new work on microcredit (Elyachar 2005) and household debt (Dudley 2000, Maurer 2006, Williams 2004) emerging in the 2000s before a surge of interest in debt in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession (see the authors cited throughout this entry). As Graeber wrote in 2009, debt in this latter sense had received surprisingly little attention in anthropology (2009, 111). Attending to the specificity of debt (and of debts) enables us to ask new questions and draw new comparisons. While research in the 1990s and 2000s on debt across anthropology, the social sciences, and geography often emphasised its cultural aspects (see, as an example, MacKenzie 2006 and the ‘social studies of finance’ approach), anthropological research on debt in the last fifteen years has explored power asymmetries, accumulation, labour, and struggles, along with livelihoods, politics, kinship, and care across multiple scales (Hann and Kalb 2020, 4). Forerunners of this approach include the work of Janet Roitman (2005), Julie Elyachar (2005), and Kathryn Dudley (2000).

It is possible, when exploring the role of violence in enforcing debts of money, to identify subtle inequalities in lenders’ and borrowers’ influence over whether or not violence is exercised. We can do this by asking: how capable is the debtor of preventing violence from being done to them? Research into state debt has shown how it generates new channels for economic extraction in the realm of circulation (or ‘rents’). Household debts, too, involve not only distinctive forms of exploitation arising from mismatched temporalities between work and repayment, but also the expropriations generated by interest payments, penalty fees, predatory lending, and the like—even while fetishising money glosses over the extractive processes at work. Practices and experiences of debt are complexly gendered, as studies of microcredit schemes designed to promote women’s empowerment in the Global South show. These studies highlight the vast contingency of the social formations that constitute a ‘borrower’ or ‘lender’ in any given setting. Feminist research on debt helps to de-familiarise constructs such as ‘the household’ and draws attention to the usually unrecognised labours that go into their continual creation. Indebtedness shapes the way people imagine the future, with debt-based aspirations for household prosperity often leaving existing structures of inequality undisturbed. Yet this does not preclude struggles to envisage liberation beyond the social units in and through which borrowing, repayment, and default take place.

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———. 2020. “Making debt work: Devising and debating debt collection in Croatia.” In Financialization: Relational approaches, edited by Chris Hann and Don Kalb, 241–65. New York: Berghahn.

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Note on contributor

Ryan Davey is interested in subjectivity, lawful violence, and political economy in Britain. This includes a forthcoming book titled The personal life of debt (2025, Bristol University Press), based on several years’ work with housing estate residents in southern England. Ryan works as a lecturer in social sciences at Cardiff University.

Dr Ryan Davey, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT. Email: daveyr2@cardiff.ac.uk. Web: https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/daveyr2.

[1] Yunus, Muhammad. 1990. “Credit as a human right.” The New York Times. April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/02/opinion/credit-as-a-human-right.html

[2] In financial capitalist contexts, creditors may also agree with third parties to turn the promise to repay into a tradeable asset.

^[3] Malinowski himself refers to credit, debt, or lending only once, in writing that the kula’s ‘economic mechanism […] is based on a specific form of credit’ ([1922] 2014, 164). Yet his influence on the anthropology of debt makes a brief consideration of his approach worthwhile. Personal correspondence with Marek Mikuš.

[4] While the question of anthropology’s distinctive contribution is fair, at least as much has been learned about debt through interdisciplinary dialogues, including with geography (Harker 2021; Langley 2009), sociology (Deville 2015; Adkins 2017), and political economy (Soederberg 2014).

[5] Differing views on this point may arise in part because different translations of The gift into English make greater or lesser use of the words ‘credit’ and ‘debt’. See Gregory ([1982] 2015, 13) for an account of Mauss indeed writing about credit and debt, based on Ian Cunnison’s 1966 translation (Mauss 1974), and see Graeber (2009, 112) for the alternative view that ‘Mauss never develops this connection [between gift and debt] explicitly’, based on W.D. Hall’s 1990 translation (Mauss 2001).

[6] In Ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, states minted coins, paid soldiers in silver, then demanded subjects pay tax in the same currency, forcing its uptake and enabling soldiers to buy everyday goods, while those with unpaid debts or who were defeated in combat were enslaved (Graeber 2009, 127).

[7] The term ‘financialisation’ refers to a process where ‘the reproduction of societies as a whole becomes more dependent on finance, credit and debt, and on the logic of speculative money capital’ (Hann and Kalb 2020, 1). Research on financialisation has grown in the last decade, tending to focus on the last forty-five years, although making money through lending and borrowing is nothing new (Bear et al. 2015).

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Masculinity

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 20:57:05 +0000

Matthew Gutmann

Initially published 6 Nov 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21masculinity

Abstract:

To know what men are, anthropologists look beyond dictionary definitions, personal experience, and opinions and study societies across the globe and throughout history. They study not only people who call themselves men, but also people who call themselves men only some of the time, people who have testicles but know they’re not men, people with ovaries who know they are men, and many more. Until the early 1980s, anthropology’s contribution to the understanding of men, maleness, and masculinities was more talk than actual empirical study of men as having gender. Among the major anthropological contributions to the study of gender and society in general are grounded ethnographies of men as gendered human beings (i.e. ‘men-as-men’), as well as synthetic work across subdisciplines, linking cultural and biological, contemporary and historical approaches to issues like reproductive health, aggression, and fatherhood. Anthropologists pay special attention to the language used in reference to men and masculinities, including terms such as ‘toxic’, ‘dominant’, ‘traditional’, ‘alpha’, etc. They try to understand not only what, if anything, biology tells us about maleness, but also what people may believe biology says about men and masculinities. This entry provides an overview of this work and examines whether anyone is indeed better served by labels like ‘alternative’, ‘emerging’, and ‘new’ masculinities, and whether it may be more useful to avoid sweeping categories like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in the first place.

Introduction

Around the world and throughout history, one of the first questions asked after a baby is born is often, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’. However, today as never before, there is growing criticism of this very question, because, some believe, no one should be pigeon-holed from birth in this way, and because, it is also argued, such a binary distinction between male and female may be archaic and should be made obsolete. The controversy does not stop there, since even the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ are contested when used with humans. They may enhance comparisons between species, which in turn may make us prone to simply assume interspecies similarities in sexual, reproductive, and other forms of behaviour that may not actually exist. Gender is thus simultaneously taken-for-granted and the subject of debate in the world today, and anthropologists are among the scholars who study it the most carefully and on a large, comparative scale.

In some parts of the world (like the United States and Mexico) it is common for anthropology departments to include not only ethnographers but also archaeologists and biological anthropologists. They combine the study of culture and biology to understand human male patterns and disparities (e.g. Gutmann, Nelson & Fuentes 2021). Sometimes this is done by comparing humans with nonhuman animals, like chimpanzees and bonobos (e.g. Bribiescas 2005 and Fuentes 2012). Instead of repeating a hierarchy of components that starts with evolution, throws in anatomy, and mixes a dollop of culture, such biocultural analyses usually seek to combine a focus on pan-human physical traits and an attention to the vastly different cultural manifestations of human life on equal terms. And, sometimes anthropologists discover significantly different ‘local’ biologies, proving that superficially male and female anatomies cannot always be easily or profitably compared (see Lock 2017).

In order to better understand masculinity, it is helpful to consider the meanings of related terms like ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. Notoriously slippery concepts, for some researchers and practitioners ‘sex’ is the biological constant while ‘gender’ is the cultural variable (see WHO 2021). Many feminist scholars in recent decades have found this formulation problematic, arguing firstly that gender and sex are too mutually related and dependent to separate them off so neatly, and secondly that gender is often based on perceived sex differences, just as sex is often shoehorned into perceived biological differences (see Rubin 1975; Butler 1990). What is most important for our purposes here is that neither gender nor sex can easily be defined by universal dictionary definitions. That doesn’t mean people don’t use words like ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘nonbinary’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘transsexual’ to address the world they live in. It just means that people tend to associate a broad range of different meanings with each of these terms. A widespread premise for the study of masculinity is the understanding that men, too, ‘have gender’ and that ‘manhood’, ‘masculinity’, and related terms refer to the symbolic, embodied, performative, and practiced natures of real engendered persons. The complex and dynamic nature of masculinity is part of the challenge and charm of the anthropological study of men, masculinities, and maleness. This entry addresses the part of gender studies in anthropology that focuses on men and masculinities, a topic that is both obviously relevant to gender overall, and one whose significance has often been underrated outside gender studies.

From its earliest days, and for several decades as a discipline, anthropology was ostensibly about men. There were important and prominent exceptions (such as Margaret Mead’s 1928 Coming of age in Samoa [1961] and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 Mules and men [2008]), but anthropologists were most often men, and the people on whom they concentrated their attention were as well. In fact, men were generally considered the best representatives of ‘their people’, so male anthropologists often did not bother studying with and about women. In the early days of the discipline, if a male anthropologist had any interest in learning about the women in the area he studied, he often recruited his spouse to do so (for example, in his study of Andalusia, Stanley Brandes writes, ‘My wife … provided me access to the world of Monteros women’ [1980, 15].) The problems with this neglect of women’s lives only began to be systematically addressed in the 1970s. At that point, a boom of feminist studies in anthropology began to fill in the blanks and indeed transformed our understanding of basic concepts of politics, religion, kinship, language, economics, medicine, and much more (a very early exemplar is Wolf 1960; see also, Weiner 1983). Two major collections of feminist anthropology published for English readers in the mid-1970s were crucial: Woman, culture and society (Rosaldo & Lamphere 1974) and Toward an anthropology of women (Reiter 1975). Both collections powerfully made the case that no society can be understood if the nature and the activity of women remain under-studied. Other pioneering studies include Myths of male dominance (Leacock 1981), a book that challenged the universality of female subjugation and foregrounded the frequently egalitarian gender relations across societies. These volumes in turn contained key essays by Sherry Ortner (reprinted in 1996), Gayle Rubin (1975), and Karen Sacks (1975), among others, that became cornerstones in the anthropology of gender and sexuality, and proved similarly influential in the anthropological study of men and masculinities.

Feminist anthropologists soon invigorated debates and discussions even further by challenging the universality of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that underlie patriarchal stereotypes of universal male dominance (see, for example, MacCormick & Strathern 1980). In their studies of men and masculinity, unfortunately, male anthropologists too seldom engaged directly with these dialogues or, for that matter, explored conceptual differences among themselves.

The first noteworthy contribution of anthropology to the study of men and masculinity was simply to look at men as having gender at all. Inspired by the catalytic impact of feminist anthropology that had itself been launched by feminist and gay liberation movements in the 1970s, anthropologists began to turn a more critical eye on men and masculinities in the 1980s (Brandes 1980; Herdt 1981). They discovered that there had previously been plenty of talk about men but precious few actual studies of men-as-men that treated them as having gender and not just as the textbook exemplars of particular societies. To a large extent, early studies on men and masculinities focused exclusively on interactions between men, conversations with men, and observations of men. Women were, at most, implied in the lives of men.

The second set of contributions that anthropologists provided to the overall study of men and masculinities came in detailed, grounded ethnographies from around the world. This research used a new, gendered lens to examine a broad set of issues like sexuality (including sex between men in Latin America [Parker 1999] and New Guinea [Herdt 1981], and masculinities and multiple sex partners in southern Africa [Hunter 2005]); fatherhood (everything from ‘paternity uncertainty’ in Palaeolithic times, when doubts existed about who had fathered whom, to ‘milk fathers’ in Brazil who provide baby formula to children they have not biologically fathered); the possibility of evolutionary origins of men (Bribiescas 2005); the link between masculinity, colonialism, and racism in South Africa (Morrell 2001); relations between nationalism and manhood in Hawai’i (Tengan 2008); AIDS, masculinity, and privilege in Africa (Wynod 2016); the role of language, ‘gender-variance’ (nonconformity with gender binaries), and humanitarian work in Syria (Saleh 2020); masculinity and suicide in northern China (Wu 2009); masculinity and work in Eurasia (Marsden 2019); money and masculinity in Nigeria (Smith 2017); and the links between masculinity and violence, including in the Turkish military (Açıksöz 2012), the police in the banlieues of Paris (Fassin 2013), and gender-based violence in India (Baxi 2021).

This ‘ethnographic moment’ in anthropological studies of men and masculinity that began in the 1980s has been anything but parochial and atheoretical. It has often been aimed at upsetting views that posit all-encompassing categories of men and masculinities; for example, ‘honour/shame societies’. In the decades following World War II, anthropologists tended to make broad generalisations about men in societies circling the Mediterranean (both European and North African), arguing that the honour of men (acting in manly ways, whatever that might mean) and shame of men often in relation to not being manly enough (whatever that might mean) were both ubiquitous and could broadly explain attitudes and behaviour from marriage patterns to animal husbandry. Among the many problems with the ‘honour/shame’ complex, as it was sometimes known, is that there are widespread beliefs and practices that are nonetheless anything but uniform in the real world; one man (or woman) can feel an act honourable or shameful (for instance, premarital sex, the theft of animals, being able to drink, fight, or play sports well) that others may not worry about whatsoever. Variation by age, class, and other factors were deemed less important than the ideology of honour and shame as motivators and constraints on life in this region (for a critique of the honour/shame concept and ‘problems in the comparative analysis of moral systems’, see Herzfeld 1980).

At the same time, important work in anthropology as well as history has shown clearly that the impact of empire, colonialism, imperialism, and racism on men and masculinities worldwide has been profound if not uniform. Franz Fanon (2008 [1952]) has shown that racialised black masculinity is part and parcel of the repression inherent in colonial regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Tom Boellstorff’s (2005) study of same-sex desire in non-Western contexts such as Indonesia has shown how post-coloniality shapes gay subjectivity, while Rick Smith’s (2021) writings on ‘queer molecular ecology of colonial masculinities’ describe the gendered effects of white conquest of Native American lands. Today, as gender theorist Raewyn Connell writes, ‘a gender order is emerging in transnational space’ that is both contested and is marked by changing power structures related to masculinities (Connell 2016).

Drawing on their broad interest in all things human, from testosterone to tea ceremonies, sociocultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological anthropologists have thus been at the forefront of debates around how nature and nurture affect human sexuality and gender, seeking a biocultural synthesis that emphasises human malleability and environmental factors (often emphasising poverty, colonialism, and oppression) as key to understanding human relationships and activities. More recently still, synthetic work across subdisciplines within anthropology, linking biology and biocultural approaches to cultural ones, have challenged our understanding of topics like gender-based violence (Gutmann, Nelson & Fuentes 2021), trans politics (Rogers 2020), and reproductive health (Inhorn 2012).

Apart from anthropology’s contributions of paying attention to men as engendered and engendering, and offering ethnographies rich in detail and conceptual framing of men, maleness, and masculinities, a third major contribution of anthropology to the study of men and masculinities has been a series of conceptual debates over whether and how maleness is relevant to understanding cognitive frameworks and actual practices—in human and all species—or whether cultural preconceptions have fostered more than a few erroneous ideas about innate qualities of maleness, males, men, and masculinities. This discussion about human maleness has been complicated further by major cultural developments witnessed by anthropologists and other scholars, charting the growing independence of women politically and financially, and assertions of bodily autonomy, together with the ensuing backlash among some men who deem these changes unwarranted and unwelcome. Studies of male rape of females show this ‘backlash’ clearly, as male rapists attempt to reassert male privilege violently in this way (see Sanday 1990).

In general, anthropology’s insights regarding men and masculinities may be nothing surprising: they illustrate that there is a diversity of ways of being a man and thinking about men, just as there is a wide range of opinion (within and across societies) about what constitutes a more ‘manly’ man, a good or a bad man, father, or son. The rest of this entry will outline some of these insights, focusing on sex and power; language and religion; hormones and violence; and renegotiating the gender binary.

Sex and power

Take sex, for instance. Based on their meticulous ethnographies, archaeologies, and field research, anthropologists have tended to expand our appreciation of the variety of ways humans think about and engage in sex. This is not surprising given that not all men have penises (Rogers 2020) and some men who have low levels of testosterone are violent (see Jordan-Young & Karkazis 2019). Some of the most significant work has focused on people who identify as men who have sex with other people who also identify as men. These studies have reshaped our understanding of what it means to be gay—whether this is an identity that permeates and determines people’s daily lives, a sexual practice, an emotional state, or something else entirely. Guillermo Núñez Noriega (2014), for example, has written an ethnography of cowboys in northern Mexico, many of whom are married to women with whom they have sex, while they also have sex with other men from time to time. They do not identify as gay in any sense that they understand the term. Núñez Noriega has also questioned old-fashioned descriptions of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ sexual acts (who penetrates, who is penetrated). The binary way of looking at men who were said to be ‘active’ versus men who were thought ‘passive’ in sex simply didn’t hold up, as men do all sorts of things sexually at different times. Among other things, this was part of a refutation of the older notion of males being ‘active’ and females ‘passive’ in sex that has come to seem ridiculous to almost all students of sexuality. Noriega and other scholars have also illustrated that asexuality can defy simplistic notions of biological male sexual drives.

In another example, Gilbert Herdt (1996) describes boy-to-man ritual practices among the Sambia of New Guinea in which boys as young as seven years old are taught and compelled to perform fellatio on older boys. When these same boys become adolescents themselves, they are fellated by younger boys. When they are a few years older, they marry young women and, according to Herdt, never resume sexual relations with boys or men. Among the Sambia, the belief was at the time of study widespread that this practice enabled boys to develop their adult sense of masculinity.

Anthropologists have also contributed important studies of heterosexual men and masculinities, including in regards to birth control, circumcision, impotence, and infertility. For example, Everett Zhang (2015) discusses an ‘impotence epidemic’ in China, distinguishing between biomedical doctors there who see erectile dysfunction (ED) as mainly a result of lack of blood flow, while practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine more often see ED as a series of problems throughout a man’s body, often requiring more attention to kidneys than penises.

The anthropology of heterosexual men and masculinities has been especially useful in showing the influence that women have on men, including but not limited to sexuality and sexual conduct. From circumcision of adult men in Japan (Castro-Vazquez 2015)^[1] to vasectomies in Oaxaca, Mexico (Gutmann 2007), anthropologists have countered a commonplace view that the primary power of women over men is the relationship of mothers with their boys. In the case of vasectomies, for example, men may not just decide to get sterilised because they have had enough children but also because their wives have had to shoulder the burden of birth control, pregnancy, and childbirth over the years, and men now consider it to be their turn (Gutmann 2007).

Through their fine-grained studies of diverse populations across space and time, anthropological ethnographies and archaeologies of men and masculinities have also contributed in important ways to our understanding of basic questions of power and privilege; for example, at the level of governments, economies, and cultural institutions, as well as in more intimate spheres of family and neighbourhood life (see, for example, Peletz 2021). The more we learn through historical reconstructions, the shibboleth that in the distant past there was a rigid division of labour in which all men were hunters and all women were gatherers has proved less accurate than some firm believers in the gender binary wanted to believe. It now appears clear that women, too, participated to a far greater extent in hunting, and men in gathering, and that cultural bias may have contributed to looking back at the past through contemporary gender prisms (Widlok 2020).

Relatedly, the notion that men through the millennia have had little to do with their children beyond procreation is remarkable for its pervasiveness and its historical inaccuracy. On many matters relating to paternity and paternal investment in offspring, of course, debates among anthropologists mirror wider social disagreements about what men do and don’t do, what men should and shouldn’t do with children. Certain realities, however, are beyond dispute. To begin with, the variety of paternal patterns in societies around the world today and in the past belies simple generalisations about fathering. What is more, in every agricultural society on earth for at least the last 10,000 years, human males have been more actively and regularly involved in day-to-day ‘childcare’ than is true in modern, urban settings, because, among other reasons, men in cities can no longer take their children to work with them (see Gutmann 2006 [1996]).

This does not negate the very real burden for women and mothers of a ‘second shift’ after wage labour, that includes housework and childcare, which have become commonplace for women in contemporary households. (‘Second shift’ is a term coined by feminists to emphasise when domestic labour is carried out by women far more than men, thus forcing women to work so much extra that it constitutes an essentially second job shift each day.) The point anthropologists have emphasised, instead, is that men shirking their share of childcare is not simply a matter of attitudes and ideologies, but also structural changes in societies worldwide that have contributed to these challenges. In recent decades, in parts of southeast Asia and other locations where women and not men have had to migrate for better employment opportunities in order to support their families financially, anthropologists have showed clear changes in parenting practices. In these situations, fathers may assume the lion’s share of every aspect of childcare (Thao 2015). The rapidity of such transformations in nurturing and support of children is a testament to the malleability of patterns that have been commonly taken for granted in recent decades.

Language and religion

In the terminology of linguistic anthropologists, by calling attention to the gendered identities and practices of men-as-men, one ‘marks the unmarked’. Men as a category have long been the implicit stand-in for ‘people’, ‘citizens’, ‘residents’, and other generic categories, and therefore are said to be unmarked for special notice. In one of the earliest anthropological studies of men-as-men, Stanley Brandes (1980) explores the language of and about men as exemplified in the folklore of Andalusia, Spain. Men reported that there were two factors central to their conception of masculinity: their place in the social hierarchy and their relationships with women. ‘Just as a man in infancy depends on milk to survive, so too he relinquishes his milk in adulthood in order to produce children’, Brandes was taught (1980: 83).

The language used by and about men in other contexts reflect similar concerns, as descriptions of masculinity and maleness can have a regulatory effect, turning mere ‘norms’ into normalising political projects. For example, the label ‘alpha male’, ostensibly adopted from primate studies has the cachet of scientific rigor, derived from observational research in the wild. Indeed, the phrase has become ubiquitous in English-language disparagement of certain kinds of controlling male demeanour that usually have nothing to do with any primate behaviour, in the wild or in captivity. Similarly, anthropologists have showed that the casual invocation of words referring to anatomical qualities considered by some to incarnate maleness—like testosterone and Y chromosomes—usually tells us more about particular social mores of those employing these words than it does about boys or men themselves—or girls and women, who after all also carry testosterone.

The term ‘testosterone’ didn’t even exist before 1905, and for most of the twentieth century it was simply one component of male (and female) bodies contributing to the functioning of various other body parts. Since the 1990s, however, more due to the prevailing winds of evolutionary psychology and an overreliance on biology to explain human behaviour than any especially noteworthy new discoveries related to the hormone, testosterone has come to take on an outsized role in explaining male sexuality and aggression. Beliefs that high testosterone levels, for example, necessarily lead to violence are as specious as they are widespread. In men who have between 20 percent and two times normal levels, there is generally no correlation whatsoever between aggression and testosterone (see Sapolsky 1997; Fuentes 2012; Bribiescas 2006).

Of critical importance in discussing language related to men and masculinities, and more broadly gender, sex, and sexualities, is the fact that, because of the global influence and dominance of English and English-language texts, even when it can be argued that key words in English reflect important social relationships, identities, and struggles, these same words do not necessarily translate well in non-English-speaking contexts. To show how this can work, Fadi Saleh (2020: 49) discusses ‘the risks of the global institutionalization of [the word] transgender’, linking the introduction of the name in Syria in the context of war, migration, and asylum by human rights workers from Europe and the United States. Although the term ‘transgender’ may capture what these advocates think they encounter in Syria, an anthropological approach instead favours local ways of describing and naming gender variance. Saleh thus shows that local terms that denote gender variance are not simply subsumed by the term ‘transgender’. Instead, local terms continue to exist alongside it, carry different meanings, and remain useful, not least because they avoid the negative stigma of being seen as ‘Western’ impositions. Saleh writes of one person:

Sara, despite fully presenting as a woman in public and applying at the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] as a transgender woman … adamantly identifies as a tant, a word that within al-Jaw [‘a community-invented word that literally translates as “the atmosphere” and refers to the large, well connected, imagined, and real queer and gender-variant communities across the big cities of Syria and now in the diaspora as well’] indexes an array of ways of being gendered, including feminine gay men, cross-dressers, and transfeminine persons pre-op or feminine gay men taking birth-control pills aiming for a more androgynous (read: female) body, but ultimately, any person assigned male at birth who has no problem with being given a female name or addressed with feminine pronouns, even if they were presenting as masculine within al-Jaw or in their everyday lives’ (2020: 45).

Since studies such as these enable anthropology to develop new ways to think and talk about gender, they can put the discipline itself at odds with institutions who aim to determine gender discourse. The Vatican, for example, issued a major statement on ‘gender theory’, in the summer of 2019, weighing in on terminology and beliefs related to the gender binary, masculine mentality, transgender politics, queer, and ‘third gender’ (a concept invented to name and emphasise people who do not consider themselves and/or are not considered by others to fit neatly into the gender male-female binary).

The text, entitled ‘Male and female He created them’ (Versaldi & Zani 2019) took square aim at putative ‘gender confusion’ in the world, invoking medical science and the Almighty to counteract the growing and pernicious influence of … yes, anthropologists in particular. The substance, agenda, and theoretical armature of anthropology as a discipline were called to task for spreading gender ‘confusion’, and as an impediment in resurrecting the gender binary to its once hallowed and unchallenged place in the hearts and minds of Catholic parishioners. Gender and the gender binary, according to the Vatican document, are not social constructions, as anthropologists aver, but unchanging and unchangeable. The crux of the argument is that the wishful thinking of gender theorists have deterred them from accepting the material world of ‘the actual biological difference between male and female’, and in so doing, have taken scholarship too far afield from the realities of nature (emphasis in original, Versaldi & Zani 2019: 12).

Anthropologists have therefore challenged not just Church doctrine, but what might be even more damning: they are held to have attempted the ‘denaturalization’ of the gender binary through talk of sexual indeterminacy and the like. The authors of the report criticise what they believe is pandering to the hope that individuals have more control over their lives than God and nature actually will allow. As they put it,

the underlying presuppositions of these theories can be traced back to a dualistic anthropology, separating body (reduced to the status of inert matter) from human will, which itself becomes an absolute that can manipulate the body as it pleases. This combination of physicalism and voluntarism gives rise to relativism (Versaldi & Zani 2019: 11).

In particular, the text in question contends that the Church, and societies more broadly, needed to reaffirm an appreciation of ‘the values of femininity’ and the place of husbands within the family as pater familias. No good will come, they argue, if anthropologists persist in spreading these ‘wilful untruths’.

This forceful statement points to the interplay of gender (and masculinity) and religion. A recent collection of essays on the anthropology of religion and masculinities shows that,

By considering the stakes of masculinity for the religious and the wages of religion for the masculine, we hope to highlight religion’s role as a strategic avenue of identity formation for many actors, men included, and to uncover new areas of cultural reproduction, contestation, and change (see Dawley & Thornton 2018: 15).

At the least, the Vatican document should provide encouragement to those who seek to break down the gender binary; if these efforts had not had such a powerful impact among youths and others around the world, there would have been no need to launch such a broad scale critique of anthropology’s contributions to gender studies.

Hormones and violence

Hormones are frequently invoked to explain male behaviour when it comes to sex and violence. Yet, as stated above, when you know a man’s testosterone level, you cannot predict the likelihood he might come to blows. Instead, work on militaries, militarism, and masculinity, for example, has shown that appeals to social attributes (service, sacrifice, protection, invincibility, determination) matter to male violence and are frequently couched by militaries and the general public in terms of men and masculinities. For example, Kimberly Theidon (2009) examines masculinity among ex-guerrillas in Colombia, while Andrew Bickford (2011, 2020) addresses manhood among German and US troops. These anthropologists and others have shown that the allures of participation in armies—in invasions, conquest, war, and occupation—are routinely expressed as the highest form of patriotism and citizenship, and that a soldier, usually male, never epitomises masculinity more than he does in taking life and putting his life in harm’s way. Killing and masculinity are here culturally conflated. Centring her archaeological study on Black male soldiers in the 1870s US-Mexico borderlands, Laurie Wilkie uses historical artefacts to trace ‘opportunities for reimagining the confines of racialized categories of manhood’ among Black soldiers, specifically performances of masculine gentility that reveal their ambitions and experiences as freedmen and citizens (2019: 135).

Rape, in wartime and in all times, has become a pivot point in discussions in about men’s supposedly natural proclivities toward aggression, violence, and physical domination of others. In gender studies broadly, including in the anthropology of men and masculinities, forms of gender-based violence like rape are examined to understand the role of power and control, and the enormous variations in rates of rape from one society to another. For example, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2009) conducted interviews with soldiers and officers in the Congo, where rapes were widespread in a conflict in the 1990s and 2000s that killed over five million people. The authors show that rape in this context must be understood in relation to a broader cycle of violence driven by social factors that include learned gender behaviours, hostile civil-military relations, marginalisation, and attempts at reasserting power and authority. Rape is here not simply a strategic weapon of war but a frequently chaotic outcome of dysfunctional institutions. Alexandra Stiglmayer studied mass rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, writing, ‘rape seems to be part and parcel of a [male] soldier’s life, a “normal” accompaniment to war’ (1994: 84). Yet she also shows that rape was in this instance conducted to facilitate mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing, reflecting the overall goals of military intervention.

Such examples stand in contrast to the notion that there are any ‘underlying’ biological and evolutionary factors making human rapes obligatory. The comparative study of other species does not help much in this instance. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, hundreds of millions of people around the world had access to the program Animal Planet on television. Based on their viewing of this program, they might reasonably have concluded that when it comes to sexuality, there are more similarities than differences between the males of various primate species. They might have also learned that forty percent of male mallard ducks participate in what some researchers call ‘gang rape’ (see Prum 2017). Yet the producers of this program and the researchers cited should have been horrified by the use of this term in this context, because it implies that there is something predetermined about rape throughout the animal kingdom and that, for humans as well as ducks, it is a matter of acting out one’s male nature. This ignores that for humans rape is a matter of choosing to impose one’s (male) power through force. Adaptability among humans means that there is not only a far wider range of attitudes and manners, but that unlike ducks and even our closest primate cousins, humans have an almost bottomless well of capacities to alter and transform their attitudes and manners. Anthropologists and sociologists have thus been keen to point out that there is no biological basis to sexual coercion, and that the fact that rape can be found in nature does not make it natural for human beings. They show that in a human context, rape is not primarily about sex, and sex is not primarily about procreation (see Kimmel 2003).

Similar arguments hold in the anthropological study of suicide. Three to four times more men commit suicide than women in the world, though more women try to commit suicide (see WHO 2014). Male suicide is thus assessed from many perspectives in anthropology, and violence and masculinity are certainly among the most important filters through which to chronicle this pressing health concern. Although most academic writings on suicide in the last forty years have come from psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and have emphasised individuals with crippling depression, anthropologists have looked to social factors, including the effect on young men of participating in wars of invasion and conquest, as well as suicide among migrant men who are no longer able to support their families back home. Silvia Sara Canetto (2017) has found that ‘rigidity in coping’ with less obvious purpose in life, and an inability to develop a new ‘sense of self’ are social factors that may contribute to a higher incidence of suicide among white, middle class, retired men in the United States (see also Wu 2009, Imberton 2012, and Chua 2014). Again, the variability of suicidal tendencies among men outweighs the role of hormones, and socio-cultural factors seem to account for the largest share of male violent behaviour.

Anthropologists do not argue that hormones or any other physiological factor are irrelevant in human or other animal aggression. Yet, what they do emphasise is that social factors outweigh biological tendencies, and that aggression (and sexuality, and much more about human activity) is ultimately a chicken and egg situation: not only do biological processes in bodies change human behaviour, but changes in behaviour and environmental conditions, for instance, can significantly change our bodies.

Renegotiating the gender binary

Anthropological theorist Gayle Rubin writes that there are moments in history in which the tussle and tumult around erotic life seem more fraught with possibility and danger (1984: 4). She was referring in particular to sexual mores in times of religious upheaval, but the point is relevant here, too. In these times there is a widespread renegotiation of norms that may have been taken for granted in earlier times. In 1900, few national political leaders in the world were women. It would have been easier at that point to claim that men made naturally better leaders. Today, women ministers and heads of government have become commonplace around the world and are often extremely successful. On an entirely different scale, but along the same lines, in 1950 if you analysed alcohol use and abuse in many parts of the world, you might have concluded that there were stark differences based on gender in terms of what people drank, how much, and how often. Today, far fewer distinctions exist based on purely gender lines (see de Garine & de Garine 2001).

Finally, by way of example, until the creation of the Internet, pornography was rather exclusively associated with men and not women. There were even scientific papers explaining that this was the case because men were hard-wired differently, especially with respect to visual stimulation. Yet, when porn could be viewed anonymously in the privacy of one’s own home, it turned out that many women also availed themselves of the opportunity (see Gutmann 2019). In all three cases, you could say, there has occurred a degendering of both actions and our association of particular actions and abilities with a uniform and ubiquitous gender binary (see Gutmann 2019).

The study of transgender politics illuminates this tendency, as it challenges a broad array of issues regarding biological sex and assumptions about people’s lives. In the field of forensic anthropology, for instance, Jenna L. Schall, Tracy L. Rogers, and Jordan C. Deschamps-Braly make a clear case that when exhuming human remains, researchers should ‘consider the possibility that an unidentified individual could be transgender, and not limit their analyses and conclusions to binary sex categories’ (2020: 8). This outlook represents a radical departure from standard practice for disinterments throughout history until the early twenty-first century. It is an excellent example that an anthropological sensibility is tremendously valuable in reframing taken-for-granted conventions.

Similarly, in an ethnographic study of Puerto Rican transwomen, Mark Padilla and Sheilla Rodríguez-Madera ‘consider the ways that the transgender body is systematically excluded and “designed to die”’ through exclusion and benign neglect on the part of biomedical practitioners (2021: S26). Gender transitioning is often facilitated through commercial sex networks and very low-quality silicone and hormones, exposing transwomen to multiple health risks. In part, this is due to the state medical system that refuses to facilitate sex transitioning, whereby it essentially abandons and further marginalises these women. In this case, the systemic othering of people is directly related to transitioning women’s elevated risk of disease and bodily distress.

Constructions of masculinities can vary significantly even within countries. Studying trans masculinities in the southeast of the United States, Baker A. Rogers has argued that regional identities ‘shape how trans men understand and do gender’ (Rogers 2020). The men Rogers studied were found to enact masculinities much like their cis counterparts, holding stereotypical ideas about masculinity that link it to values of honour, independence, and mastery. While the people Rogers writes about do care about what kind of bodies they have, their issues of maleness and manhood are not reducible to male bodies. Anthropologists who have focused their studies on women have also contributed directly and indirectly to our appreciation of men and masculinities. As simplistic as it may sound, the idea that only men can study men and only women can study women took some debunking in anthropology. Some of that clarity came about by studying more carefully intimate interactions between men and women, for instance regarding sex work. Sealing Cheng (2010) and other scholars have turned the tables on previous interpretations of women’s agency, giving voice and volition to sex workers, for example, and providing an alternative to the view that all women sex workers are helpless victims who have no choice in how they earn a living. Through giving women in these circumstances agency, our view of the men involved also has had to shift. Our assessment of men has thus been called into question, in particular the disconnect between men’s professed control over various situations and the new reading that makes decision-making and domination along strict gender binary lines more complicated (see Viveros 2015).

Where will these renegotiations of gender lead? As anthropologists are at pains to demonstrate, nothing along these lines is preordained. The extent to which degendering will expand into more and more realms, or whether the gender binary will be reasserted as some might wish, will depend largely on the outcome of the fierce renegotiations around gender, sexuality, and the gender binary that are taking place in bedrooms and boardrooms across the globe.

Conclusion: a modest proposal

In anthropology and other academic disciplines that have paid attention in recent decades to the study of men and masculinities, ethnographers have sought to capture developing trends and directions in how people in a range of walks of life are thinking about and being men. More attentive parenting by men is called a new way of being a father. Anger management has emerged as code for men’s aggressive inclinations (see Kimmel 2013). Negative traits and tendencies associated with men, maleness, and masculinity—toxic, hegemonic, patriarchal—are counterpoised to emergent, new, and alternative masculinities. Anthropologists have tried to capture these transformations with an array of labels, such as ‘sensitive’ or ‘nontoxic’ masculinities (see Carabí & Armengol 2014).

At the same time, and reflecting the influence in particular of feminist and queer theories and social movements, anthropologists have recorded the anguish of coming to terms with maleness, as well as pride in defying views and practices associated with certain men and masculinities regarded as sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.

Recent work has developed around descriptions and concepts rooted in nonbinary gender identities, bodies, and analysis. What this has meant, among other things, is that the simplistic use of terms like ‘masculinity’ (or even ‘masculinities’) has been problematised, as being biologically male is no longer universally a prerequisite for being masculine. Some, but by far not all, anthropologists are even engaged in the more radical pursuits of getting rid of the binary gender paradigm altogether. Perhaps one of the strongest examples for their applied work is the movement to upend gender pronouns; it has spread throughout the world, in creative and linguistically-specific ways, reflecting frustrations on the part of some, often young people, with the restrictions of binary gender conceptions.

At the very least, anthropologists increasingly hold that it is no longer sufficient to merely seek novel forms of masculinity. Instead, their comparative and empirical study has led them to consider that we live in a world in which gender is more fluid and nebulous than a binary gender model allows. This is directly relevant to the undercurrent in all gender studies that seeks to address inequalities that manifest along gender lines. The language used to describe men, maleness, and masculinities in anthropology has always emphasised the relational nature of gender, sex, and sexuality. If inaccurate portrayals of men and masculinities have rarely had the same social consequences as similar mischaracterisations of women for example, they nonetheless have contributed to misleading explanations, and therefore excuses, for male deeds, including those related to gender-based violence (see Merry 2006; Das 2008; Merry 2008; Wies & Haldate 2011).

By highlighting that men and masculinities exist, anthropologists have attempted to highlight the problems of male dominance and also the tremendous variation and malleability of human maleness. Their modest proposal is for the world to recognise this diversity and to sweep away overly constraining prisms of current gender analysis in the name of greater human flourishing.

At the end of a detailed treatment of changing men and masculinities in the United States, journalist Susan Faludi quotes Michael Bernhardt, a veteran of the US war in Vietnam: ‘All these years I was trying to be all these stereotypes of manhood, and what was the use? I’m beginning to think now of not even defining it anymore. I’m beginning to think now just in terms of people’ (1999: 607). Faludi concludes that Bernhardt was thus beginning ‘to conceive of other ways of being “human”, and hence, of being a man’.

Anthropologists know that there is still good reason not to ignore what men-as-men do, say, and think in the world. But they also know that there is an evident need not to reduce everything every man does to masculinity, and to look for ways that someday we might associate a range of human practices—from political leadership to sex to alcohol use and abuse to childcare—less with men and masculinities and more simply with what it means to be human.

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Note on contributor

Matthew Gutmann is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Brown University. His research has focused on men and masculinities, especially in relation to politics and health. He is currently studying men and suicide in China, Mexico, and the United States.

Matthew Gutmann, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA. gutmann@brown.edu

[1] On adolescent circumcision, more common in parts of Africa and the Middle East, see also Heald 1999.

Social reproduction

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 21:09:51 +0000

Hadas Weiss

Initially published 25 Sep 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21socialrepro

Abstract:

Social reproduction is a lens through which to analyse the persistence of society over time, even as its human and material components keep changing. Its main value is in identifying and explaining tensions that emerge between the logic that reproduces society, and the continued survival (biological reproduction) and wellbeing of the population. Its origins are in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalist society, as governed by a drive towards accumulation. Initially, anthropologists have sought inspiration from Marx in examining the reproduction of non-capitalist societies, but they have since largely joined adjacent disciplines in focusing on capitalism. Modern social reproduction theory has proceeded from blind spots in Marx’s analysis, primarily regarding the role of women and domestic work in maintaining current workers and non-workers. From there, it has expanded to examine other fault lines in the reproduction of capitalist society. Contemporary strands of social reproduction theory attend to crises that emerge with respect to care work and livelihoods as finance becomes the main motor of accumulation. They also underline ways in which the reproduction of society reproduces inequalities within it. For ethnographers, attention to social reproduction illuminates the entanglements of any chosen fieldsite and plights therein with broader dynamics of accumulation.

Introduction

Social reproduction is a concept used in anthropology and adjacent disciplines to make sense of society’s continuity over time as recognisably the same entity. Its primary focus is therefore the logic (a composite of forces and institutions) that organises finite, ever-changing things and people into categories, positions, and patterns of behaviour that exceed their individual existence. Inevitably, social reproduction also attends to the persistence of society’s members: their biological reproduction (including the sexual relations and fertility that generate it) and the sources of their survival, longevity, and wellbeing. Biological reproduction, no less than the reproduction of a specific culture, institution, or phenomenon, is nevertheless understood to be subordinate to the reproduction of society writ large, which is the unit to which ‘social reproduction’ refers. The analytic value of social reproduction theory is precisely where the two key aspects of society—its logic and its human components—are in tension with each another. Focusing on social reproduction tends to work best when it allows us to recognise this tension, explain it, and identify ways in which it could be reduced or overcome.

The tension between society’s logic and the survival and wellbeing of its members is particularly jarring in capitalist society. This is so because the logic that holds capitalist society together cannot be reduced to the decrees (supporting the continued survival and wellbeing) of any one person or group of people. Social reproduction theory has emerged out of the writings of capitalism’s main critic, Karl Marx (1992 [1867]; 1992 [1885] and other writings). While anthropologists have also used it to analyse pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies, social reproduction as an analytic has proven most fruitful at illuminating the fault lines of capitalist society, including those that Marx himself had overlooked. Its main uses today, then, both within and outside of anthropology, are in mounting a critique of capitalism as it manifests itself in particular fieldsites and empirical case studies.

Anthropology’s baseline for working out the logic of society has been interdependence: that is, the dependence of society’s members on each other, as the glue that keeps a very large group of people together (Martin 2021). Insofar as interdependence is taken to be established through reciprocal exchange (Mauss 2018 [1925]), however, it cannot explain the long-term and inter-generational interactions that social reproduction entails (Weiner 1980). Nor does it capture the multiplicity of transactions that do not proceed symmetrically or reciprocally. The ubiquity of hierarchies and inequalities suggests, rather, something more fundamental against which everything else in society is synchronised. Inspired by Marx’s thought, social reproduction theory traces this something to the way in which a society’s resources are produced and distributed; and it goes on to ask how this production process reproduces itself (Godelier 1977).

What follows is a brief account of the journey that anthropology and adjacent disciplines have travelled in studying social reproduction. It begins with the theory’s origins in Marx’s analysis of capitalist society as governed by a logic of accumulation. It continues with feminist scholars’ insistence on the constitutive role of unwaged domestic labour. It then arrives at the various articulations of social reproduction theory against the backdrop of contemporary crises and finance-led capitalism. The entry ends with a reference to the role of culture and ideology in the reproduction of social inequalities.

Marxian origins

The concept of ‘reproduction’ presupposes the existence of something that is being reproduced, and expresses a preoccupation with its continuity, persistence, and repetition (Burawoy 1976). This something cannot be a material entity, as such entities perish and transform. Rather, it is likely a relation; one so foundational as to form the condition for every instance that occurs next, generating the consistency of each subsequent occurrence (Balibar 1970).

Karl Marx (1992 [1867]) identified this core relation, in capitalist society, as that which pertains between ‘capital’, i.e. money and material resources for investment in the production of goods and services to be sold on the market, and ‘labour power’, i.e. the capacity of largely propertyless but legally free people to work. Although this relation is an abstraction, it can and often is embodied in people, namely in capitalists, who own and invest the means to produce, and in workers, who sell their capacity to work for a wage. The relation is foundational because it structures everyone’s behaviour to a considerable extent. Capitalists are forced by competition with other capitalists to pursue market-mediated profit lest they be pushed out of business and cease being capitalists. And workers are forced by lack of independent means of livelihood to sell their labour power for a wage with which to buy the things they need and want.

What drives capitalist society’s reproduction, according to Marx, is therefore compulsion: the actions of all members of society being carried out under the domination of something external to them. The domination is ‘structural’; that is, enforced not by people but by structures and institutions, chief among them being the market. Marx showed how everything that is produced under capitalism is produced to be sold on the market. It is where capitalists obtain the material and human resources for undertaking production, and where workers obtain their living necessities. As both capital and labour power depend on it for the most basic conditions of their existence, the market exacts pressures and incentives that regulate and synchronise the reproduction of society at large (Wood 2002).

According to Marx, for capital to always be available for production, the value that workers produce in their work must exceed the value represented in their wages. Capitalists pocket the so-called ‘surplus value’ as profit, and they reinvest it. The capitalist market operates through them towards the goal of accumulation: the creation of surplus value that, when reinvested, launches the next cycle of production. And so, each new cycle of production resets the conditions for subsequent production and accumulation. This dynamic requires not only that there be enough capital for reinvestment, but also that there be enough workers to keep production going, and to buy the product and thereby ‘realise’ its profit. Marx identified this as a contradictory dynamic because capital stands in opposition to labour. On the one hand, the lower workers’ wages are, the greater the surplus value available for accumulation. On the other, wages must be high enough for workers to continue working, consuming, and raising the next generation of workers so that production won’t come to a standstill.

This renders the reproduction of capitalist society a bumpy, crisis-ridden affair. Capitalists overproduce to undersell their competitors, partly through ever-greater automation, whose surpluses end up being destroyed or devalued. The tighter the competition among capitalists, the harder to achieve the profits of yesteryear. Hence, escalating competition and automation, which in turn reduce the demand for and value of people’s labour power (Marx 1992 [1867]: 762-794). Unemployed, underemployed, and poorly paid workers struggle to purchase the stuff they need and desire. Resources must be distributed to smooth the process of reproduction. Marx therefore discussed ‘schemes of reproduction’ in the second volume of Capital (1992 [1885]) as the allocation of resources to people and of people to resources in a way that supports the continuity of production and, perforce, of accumulation (Narotzky 1997).

Throughout his writings on capitalism, Marx insisted on the interdependence of the production, consumption, and circulation of both people and things. Yet, anthropologists drawing inspiration from Marx in their studies of non-capitalist societies have found it useful to confine ‘production’ to the technical process of creating things. Arguing that it is not the predominant logic of non-capitalist economies, they could thereby focus on the logic that governs the biological reproduction and circulation of people (Gregory 1982).

A forerunner of social reproduction theory in anthropology has been Claude Meillassoux (1972, 1981), who had applied Marxian insights to pre-capitalist societies. He characterised the mode of production of Neolithic peasant communities as the agricultural cycle. Its slow pace forged lifelong and intergenerational dependencies. At all times, the workers of one agricultural cycle were indebted for seed and food to the workers of the previous one, and they supplied seed and food to their dependents and successors. Since these communities sustained themselves on agricultural work, their elders—the creditors of seed—managed the work and product of juniors. Each household needed a workforce large enough to make optimal use of its land, so elders also managed the ‘distribution’ of the women who birthed and raised children. Their socially reproductive task was thus matching the number of working hands to productive capacities. Meillassoux (1981) claimed that a similar logic of social reproduction persisted in capitalism’s peripheries. There, miners and factory workers live and subsist on farms, exiting them when their work is in demand. This allows employers to pay them only the wages necessary to cover their actual work time and throw them back on their families for the rest.

While acknowledging Meillassoux’s contribution to our understanding of social reproduction, anthropologists have nevertheless faulted him for positing a biological rather than a social basis for women’s oppression (Donham 1999; Katz 1983; O’Laughlin 1977) and for overemphasising women’s biological reproduction at the expense of their domestic work (Collier & Yanagisako 1987; Harris & Young 1981), issues that will resurface among feminist theorists of social reproduction. They have also faulted him for analytically separating production from reproduction, thereby defying the Marxian principle that ‘as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction’ (Marx 1992 [1867]: 711) (O’Laughlin 1977; c.f. Weiss 2018).

Separating production from reproduction makes even less sense for capitalist societies, whose reproduction can be simply considered the net result of its specific production process (Cammack 2020). Yet, the insistence of an earlier generation of anthropologists to examine the reproduction of people in contradistinction to that of things bespeaks a refusal to sideline the human components of a social logic that operates ‘as a connected whole’. This refusal lingers on in contemporary social reproduction theory, which emphasises the reproduction of labour power, livelihoods, and care.

Feminist interventions

One of the conditions for capitalist society to reproduce itself is that the workers producing surplus value receive wages to sustain them and their dependents. This should allow them to continue working and to raise the next generation of workers. Marx often wrote as if the wages of workers, and the goods and services they could buy, would lead to labour power’s daily maintenance and generational renewal without further ado. Yet, women not only give birth to workers; historically, they have also been disproportionately those raising and educating them, on top of caring for other dependents, making the house liveable, preparing meals, and so forth. Such domestic labour, because it is unwaged and not directly performed for market exchange, has been taken for granted and fell out of the traditional Marxian purview.

Feminists have long objected to the devaluation of domestic labour. In the 1970s, a Wages for Housework Campaign initiated public discussion about revalorising it. Anthropologists of the period, inspired by Friedrich Engels’ 1884 book The origin of the family, private property and the state, have pursued gender issues in the reproductive process, as a feminised sphere of ‘domestic production’, distinct but no less important than waged, market-mediated production (Edholm et al. 1977; Harris & Young 1981; Sacks 1979). Anthropologists Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako (1981) conceded that the distinction between men’s production and women’s reproduction reflects empirical observation. Yet, they warned against using it as a basis for theory, since strictly separating production from reproduction risks making a universal law out of a historically specific phenomenon. The same criticism could apply to assumptions about transhistorical sexism or patriarchy which, while noting how women’s undervalued domestic work intersects with capitalism, fail to consider what in capitalism itself produces it.

A touchstone of modern social reproduction theory has been Lise Vogel’s (2013 [1979]) anchoring of women’s oppression in the reproduction of capitalism itself. Capitalist production necessitates biological processes specific to women (pregnancy, childbirth, lactation) to produce the next generation of workers. But this alone does not condemn women to subordination. Vogel explains that, while childbearing is necessary for capitalism, it is also problematic for it: reducing the childbearing woman’s capacity to work for a wage, it further requires that she be maintained during this period. One cost-cutting solution is that men be made responsible for their wives. The capitalist state, acting as an agent of accumulation, has controlled and regulated female reproduction by reinforcing a male-dominant order made up of breadwinning husbands and (temporarily) unwaged, childrearing wives. This arrangement not only devolves more power on husbands-as-providers; it also creates potential conflicts between men and women, to be addressed through gendered notions of ‘love’ and ‘sacrifice’ (Picchio 1992).

Control over women’s childbirth and domestic labour emerges, then, from capitalism’s need to produce, in an efficient way, the next generation of workers. This need is most overt where there is a shortage of labour power. A well-known account thereof is by Silvia Federici (2004), focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Population declines and the necessity for working hands had then induced the budding capitalist powers to criminalise celibacy and birth control. Women accused of such ‘reproductive crimes’ were persecuted as witches. Men were co-opted into this subjugation of women, finding in it a means of regaining some of the power they lost on being turned into propertyless workers. Women became, for them, substitutes for the lands that had been taken away from them: a basic means of livelihood, and a resource to appropriate and exploit. New cultural canons followed suit, establishing that women had to be placed under male control because they were allegedly excessively emotional and lusty or, once defeated, asexual beings that could edify the household.

Vogel (2013 [1979]) also emphasised that the socially reproductive labour of caring for household members and raising the next generation of workers was neither always nor necessarily performed by housewives. On the contrary: women’s domestic labour competes with capital’s drive to accumulation because women could be spending the same time working for a wage, directly fuelling the production of surplus. It serves accumulation well, then, to reduce the amount and cost of domestic labour and so, to free up more labour power and capital for investment in for-profit production.

Vogel specified several ways in which this is done. One is commodification: laundromats, ready-made clothing, and fast-food chains allow aspects of domestic labour to be purchased on the market. Childcare, housekeeping, and eldercare can also be made available at a price, in what Arlie Hochschild (2003) identified as the ‘commercialization of intimate life’. Devolving these tasks onto the for-profit sector also provides opportunities for capitalist entrepreneurs, fuelling profitability and accumulation. And mass production of domestic goods and services reduces their costs, enabling the lowering of wages and, perforce, of the costs of social reproduction (Picchio 1992).

Another means Vogel identified for minimising the amount and costs of domestic labour is by socialising it: public education, healthcare, and retirement make aspects of domestic labour the responsibility of the state. The corporate sector also plays a role in socialisation through institutions like occupational insurances and pensions. Taxes and corporate contributions distribute the costs of social reproduction more widely across the population. This multiplies the sites in which socially reproductive labour takes place, from the household to workplace training, parks and playgrounds, social housing, schools, social welfare programs, childcare and healthcare facilities, and so on (Katz 2001).

Finally, Vogel stipulated that the cost of domestic labour can be reduced by importing migrant labour to perform it. The socially reproductive labour of maintaining the workforce and of renewing it is thereby separated geographically: migrants are recruited from one country to serve as the workforce of another, where they are also maintained (Burawoy 1976). Migrant women from the Global South and from former-Soviet countries often do double duty for social reproduction: the breadwinners and providers of their own families through the remittances they send back, and those performing housekeeping and caretaking tasks for the families that employ them (Barber & Lem 2018).

Crisis and financialisation

Despite the multiple sites and means through which social reproduction is accomplished, social reproduction theory of the 1970s focused primarily on the household. This reflected the end of an era where public support for the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model was at its highest. Following the Great Depression and Second World War, states in the core of global capitalism assumed some public responsibility over welfare, investing in healthcare, schooling, childcare, and pensions. Sparking economic demand among (primarily white and unionised) workers, and supplying them with the means to consume, was deemed necessary for maintaining the profitability of mass production. Households were supported by more jobs, higher wages, and public-sector spending, becoming private spaces for the consumption of mass-produced objects of daily use: the domain of the housewife (Fraser 2017).

However, recent developments in capitalism have raised attention to reproductive activity that cuts through the household. The capitalism of the present, often called ‘financialised’ because finance is its main motor of accumulation, has seen the relocation of manufacturing to low-wage regions and the mass recruitment of women into the paid workforce. Firms struggling to maintain profitability squeeze labour power such that wages decline, raising the number of hours of waged labour per household needed to support a family. Jobs become precarious, with workers (now including most mothers) having to increase workloads while dealing with less predictable work schedules, shift work, and longer work hours. This dovetails with higher divorce rates and single-parent households, and with a rollback in public support for healthcare, childcare, and eldercare. A so-called ‘crisis of care’ ensues, as care work is foisted upon families just as their capacity to perform it diminishes (Bakker 2007; Bakker & Gill 2003; Fraser 2017). Care work intensifies to such an extent that it becomes the most visible manifestation of social reproduction and is sometimes erroneously conflated with it.

A new strand of social reproduction theory foregrounds lives and livelihoods under such strains. It zeroes in on the work that maintains and renews labour power, while also identifying the people who perform it as an oppressed class, capable of transformative political action. In making visible their socially reproductive labour, it links it to other categories of oppression such as gender, race, and disability, asking how they are reproduced along with the reproduction of accumulation (Bhattacharya 2017). It further insists that capital’s drive to instrumentalise labour power runs up against sentient beings that cannot be fully subsumed as workers. It holds that, in the face of pressure to speed up and short-change socially reproductive labour, the people who perform this labour—maids, eldercare workers, social workers, etc.—confront the real needs of vulnerable populations. In helping them, they may even counter the alienating tendencies of capitalism (Ferguson 2020).

These ways of blending the reproduction of capitalist society with the reproduction of its members, as well as diagnosing the burdens on care work as a crisis of social reproduction, do much to foreground society’s human components. Yet, this intuition has its limits. Since the societies analysed are capitalist societies, the reproduction of lives and livelihoods within them can hardly be distinguished from that of their economies (Smith 2018). Labour power (which includes domestic labour, care work, and those performing it) is itself subsumed by the logic of accumulation rather than standing in opposition to it (Munro 2019). And capitalist reproduction does not ‘care’ for people in any meaningful sense of the term, as it does not necessitate the reproduction of the entire population or their wellbeing. It requires only enough workers to set the next cycle of production in motion (Cammack 2020; O’Laughlin 1977; Vogel 2013 [1979]). In an era of more jobseekers than jobs, maintaining every single person as a present or future worker, let alone the sick, disabled, and elderly, cannot be a priority when following the premises of capitalist accumulation. If capitalism can only be reproduced through the reproduction of both capital and labour power, the more urgent challenge is rather maintaining capital’s profitability (Weiss 2020).

Labour power took centre stage in an earlier era of industrial capitalism. But capital now bypasses its mass deployment, pursuing profit through financial channels. The household remains a nexus of social reproduction, but not only for being where labour power is maintained and renewed. Rather, it becomes a privileged site for making payments. For an increasing number of households, wages no longer cover all costs, and private debt finances things like housing, healthcare, and education. Households manage a range of regular payments, from utility bills through subscriptions to mortgage and credit card payments. Bundled together, these steady, risk-managed payment streams become assets for transactions by larger financial entities such as banks, pension funds, and institutional investors. Payments as means of sustaining family life are thus new profit opportunities for capital, replacing industry as key engines of accumulation (Adkins 2019; c.f. Federici 2014).

By no means does this ease the burden on women. They are a more vulnerable part of the workforce than men, and therefore the first to suffer from pressures upon it. And the shortage of jobs leads many more people to rely on their families for subsistence. If women are assigned most of the domestic work, they bear the brunt of this burden. Women also suffer directly through finance. Financing schemes usually target women, deemed easier than men to shame and pressure into repayment on account of their greater family and social entanglements. Women’s indebtedness thereupon strains these very relationships (Schuster 2015). The speedy and inexorable rhythm of women’s debt repayment may also attenuate the bond between mothers, preoccupied with debt servicing, and their children, whose educational trajectories orient them to long-term horizons (Newberry & Rosen 2020).

Inequality

Writing in 1979, Lise Vogel concluded that domestic labour cannot be completely removed from households: the costs of childcare and household maintenance are prohibitive while profitable day-care centres were yet to be established, making such services beyond most working-class households’ reach. But, at least in rich countries, things have since changed. With migrant labour and low wages in the care and service sectors, their costs are declining.

Recall that the relation in capitalism that, according to Marx, coordinates all others, is that between capital and labour power. It matters a great deal where a household and its members are positioned on the spectrum between them. Workers may be permanently or precariously employed. They may be high- or low-earning. And they may be propertyless or possess a home, savings, and credentials. As workers, they are all dominated by the pressures and incentives of accumulation and obliged to contribute to the production of more value than they receive. But they are also pitted against each other in a competition that allows some to benefit at the expense of others. This being the case, the focus on ‘households’ and ‘women’ for critically analysing social reproduction risks glossing over too much.

It still holds true that women’s unwaged domestic labour is among the factors that cheapens social reproduction, which in turn allows for the cheapening of waged labour. Every woman is exploited and dominated in this way. But these days, even households in capitalism’s core countries depend almost entirely on the wages of two adults to survive. Under pressure, women can and often do work harder at home, but wage declines more often lead to increases in female employment. However united women may be in their domestic labour, wages are what determines many of their possibilities. This is one major aspect of life where women’s interests are divided. The low wages and poor working conditions of housekeeping and childcare harms women who perform these services for a wage. But it allows other women to outsource this labour to others. Moreover, insufficient and inadequate employment makes education and cultivation more important for landing good jobs, and education is purchased at different qualities. This, while higher-income women who purchase housekeeping and childcare services can spend more development-enhancing time with their children. Wage levels make a huge difference, then, in the reproduction of each household’s social position (Gimenez 2018) and they serve as a wedge that divides women’s collective struggle for a better life.

This turns the provision of food and clothing, the managing of a budget, marriage and childrearing, homeownership, education, and public interventions, into ‘reproductive struggles’ (Weiss 2008) in which some have advantages over others. Social reproduction does not reproduce just any society; it reproduces a class society in which certain groups are empowered to and within their reproductive labour while others are disempowered (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995). Elite women, for instance, also devote unrecognised, unwaged labour to their families. But the goal of this labour is to ensure that their children get into the best schools and preserve their privileges (Glucksberg 2018; Kromidas 2021). Factory working men, in turn, must negotiate shift work to assume some of the unwaged reproductive labour that their working wives cannot undertake (Sabaté 2016). And racialised migrant women allow native European women to work outside their home for a wage, providing the housekeeping and childcare that rollbacks in public services have commodified (Farris 2017).

Not only households are divided according to their reproductive resources: communities and countries are, too. Geographers analyse social reproduction as reinforcing inequalities in space. Migrants are imported from low-income countries to perform domestic labour in high-income countries, while government disinvestments from welfare, healthcare, education, public space, and the environment generate spatially uneven erosion (Katz 2001). Anthropologists also foreground the role of culture and ideology in maintaining inequalities. The social relations involved in the reproduction of material life are bound up with their cultural expressions, just as culture itself is materially produced and embodied (Narotzky 1997).

Susana Narotzky (2021) demonstrates this in her ethnography of Ferrol, Spain. Its young adults express ambivalence regarding their parents: grateful for their material support, yet resentful of their privileges. Narotzky traces this ambivalence to different scales of social reproduction. The Spanish state, acting as an agent in the reproduction of finance-led accumulation, cuts back on pensions and restructures industry, squeezing the livelihoods of the old as well as the young. This intensifies the dependence of family members on each other, forcing them to pool resources. Still, pension cutbacks are promoted through a discourse of intergenerational fairness, as if different generations were vying for scarce resources. More generally, state policies are represented ideologically as aiming for sustainability, as if designed to ensure social reproduction in the very sense (the survival and wellbeing of the population) that they ultimately undermine.

Institutions like the church, the army, and above all schools, play important roles in social reproduction. These include instilling in their members the proper cultural knowhow and attitudes to preserve the social inequalities that accumulation generates (Althusser 2001 [1970]). Schools turn the favourable circumstances into which children are born into catalysts of success. Sent to a better school, these children’s upbringing prepares them to do well and gain confidence in their studies, making it easier for them to overcome obstacles that the less-prepared trip up on. Better school performance paves the path towards more valuable credentials and higher paying jobs. And higher wages allow for living in better school districts, where such advantages are bestowed upon the next generation (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron 1977).

In contrast, disadvantaged children might gain favour among their circles by rebelling against school authorities and rejecting the paths marked out for them. But in so doing, they end up replicating in the workplace and on the streets the very disadvantages into which they were born (Bourgois 1995; Willis 1981a). In reflecting on his ethnography of how this happens in an industrial town in England, Paul Willis (1981b) explained that the reproduction of capitalist society occurs at a very high level of abstraction. While exacting material and social pressures, this process still allows each member of society to inhabit the role they inherit differently. In the terrain of culture and experience, space opens up for ethnographic research to illuminate struggles for and within social reproduction, particularly as they occur in sites that a narrow focus on market transactions neglects.

Conclusion

Social reproduction is a concept that exposes tensions between society’s logic of accumulation on the one hand, and the survival and wellbeing of the people subject to it on the other. An invaluable tool for anthropology, it points to capitalist society and the process of accumulation to which it is beholden as the main driving force in the dynamics of any chosen fieldsite and the struggles of those who occupy it. It defies, therefore, any bounding in space and time of ethnographic observations, making capitalism a key reference point. At the same time, capitalism cannot be accessed through interviews and observation alone, since ‘a mode of production does not tend to reveal itself directly in any spontaneous and intimate experience of those agents who reproduce it by their activity’ (Godelier 1977: 24).

This presents a special challenge for anthropology. While ethnographic study, with its on-the-ground focus, has the unique capacity to bring to light obscured aspects of social reproduction, anthropologists also bear a responsibility to conduct their fieldwork informed by an understanding of capitalist accumulation. Only then can they look beyond reported speech and observed occurrences to the structures that animate them. This introduces new research foci and widens the ethnographic imagination. Understanding practices and institutions in terms of social reproduction means seeing them less as isolated things and more as forces, agencies, and bridgeheads of power: facilitating some occurrences and preventing others (Smith 1999: 11).

Once trained to see social reproduction, it becomes impossible to unsee it. Plights and fortunes in any fieldsite invoke analogous instances elsewhere, making sense with respect to a broader logic. This has, in the first instance, a sobering effect. As Tania Li (2008) describes of her experiences studying poverty-reduction programs of development agencies in Indonesia, it bars one from being taken in by technical solutions to immediate problems which, in their blindness to social reproduction, are helpless against the persistence of misery. But one must also keep in mind—as Susana Narotzky (1997) reminds us—that it is not the objective of society to reproduce itself, and to theorise as if this were a foregone conclusion is to preclude the viability of ruptures and radical change. Social reproduction is therefore not the endpoint of inquiry. It is rather the beginning of an engaged anthropology; one that asks not only about the forces that reproduce inequality and domination, but also about how they are changing, and about how they can change still (Li 2008).

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Note on contributor

Hadas Weiss is a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research deals with social and ideological aspects of contemporary capitalism as manifested in Israel, Germany, and Spain. She has published in anthropology and interdisciplinary journals and is the author of We have never been middle class: how social mobility misleads us (2019, Verso).

Dr. Hadas Weiss, Humboldt University, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany. hadaspweiss@gmail.com

Postsocialism

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 20:02:06 +0000

Dominic Martin

University of Oxford

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21postsocialism

Abstract:

The collapse of the socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union drastically changed the lives of millions of people and offered a new and exciting field of research possibilities. ‘Postsocialism’ emerged as an interim term to describe the lives of people who had formerly lived under socialism. Some scholars of postsocialism assumed a quick transition for these societies to neoliberal forms of government and economy. However, postsocialism did not simply follow on from socialism, and socialism did not simply go away. Key postsocialist works indicate that postsocialist forms of being were established well before socialism’s political demise. Similarly, some of socialism’s material forms and social norms continued and have proved to have a resilient afterlife. The confident assertion that socialism’s fall signals the ‘end of history’ has been challenged by philosophy and by events. This entry surveys the roots of postsocialism as an anthropological concept, and interrogates the concerns as to its long-term viability as an organising category for the study of societies becoming more diverse as they distance themselves from their socialist pasts. However, the former socialist societies have provided a range of rich anthropological research opportunities for scholars and continue to afford unique insights into key areas of ethnographic and theoretical interest. One possible future for what is still called postsocialism might be its amalgamation with postcolonialism, as a new hybrid area of scholarship, focused upon societies whose histories and ideologies challenge the hegemonic narrative of neoliberal modernity.

Introduction

The crisis and collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the last decades of the twentieth century unraveled the political, economic and social structure that governed the lives of more than a quarter of a billion people. A whole civilization and ideology was laid prostrate for dissection and enquiry (Benjamin 2003: 391). For Western scholars, this offered a cornucopia of new fieldwork openings and access to hitherto unavailable, sometimes unimaginable, sources, as well as the chance to collaborate with institutions and scholars from behind what had been termed the ‘Iron Curtain’. For social anthropology, the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe signalled a potential period of ethnographic innovation and theoretical renewal through tapping a relatively unexplored geographic area, comparable to the Amazonian and Melanesian heyday of the previous two decades and of Africanist anthropology before that. In the absence of any more apposite consensual designation, postsocialism emerged as the default descriptor that gathered together what has come to comprise an extensive and significant body of writing and research. Postsocialism reflected the unmaking of a whole world system and the refashioning of ordinary life in the teeth of global modernity, across a geographic and sociological landscape stretching from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan, from the Arctic Circle to the border of Afghanistan, and encompassing a diversity of social identities from nuclear engineers to nomadic hunters.

Anthropologists working in this field seized the rare, perhaps unique, opportunity, exploring the then-current and developing theories and fields of anthropological interest: ontology and time (Buck-Morss 2000, Bernstein 2019); personhood and identity (Yurchak 2006, Kharkhordin 1999); environmental precarity (Brown 2013, Petryna 2013); economy, exchange, and property (Humphrey 2002, Verdery 2003, Hann 2002, Morris 2016); ethics, power, and sovereignty (Hemment 2015, Ledeneva 2006, Glaeser 2011, Dunn 2004, Zigon 2010); modernity and globalisation (Pomerantsev 2014, Collier 2011, Shevchenko 2009); religion and spirituality (Rodgers 2009, Lindquist 2005, Luehrmann 2011, Caldwell 2004, Wanner 2007, Pedersen 2011); borders and migration (Reeves 2014, Pelkmans 2017, Bloch 2017); race and gender (Dzenovska 2018, Ghodsee 2018); and emotion and affect (Oushakine 2009, Pesmen 2000, Lemon 2018); that is, most of the topics and theoretical ‘turns’ that have exercised the discipline since the 1990s.

However, from its very inception, postsocialism was regarded as a flawed, albeit necessary, yet always temporary resort for scholars. It provided a category home for a range of scholarship across a very wide field of research that was dynamic and, although united by some degree of common ideological and political history, ephemeral and fissile almost by definition from the moment of socialism’s collapse. Thirty years on from that commencement, the assumptions and aporias that attended postsocialism’s conceptual initiation have long been overtaken by time and history. A generation has passed, and the rising generation has no experience, and little memory, of actually existing socialism. The binary oppositions of the Cold War have been replaced by a polymorphous, fragmented relationship between the West and the former socialist societies and polities, whose postsocialist complexions range from the actually or aspirationally neoliberal (Latvia, Croatia) to so called ‘illiberal democratic’ (Poland, Hungary) to the still resolutely Brezhnevite; that is, tied to ossified late Communist political forms (Belarus, Turkmenistan).

‘The end of history’ (see below) has come and gone. Socialism still persists in various incarnations as a powerful political and economic challenge to late capitalism and liberalism. The span of this entry does not encompass the vigorous or moribund socialisms that remain: China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the strident Neo-Leninism of North Korea, the various hybrids that flourish or fail in what used to be called the ‘Third World’: Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba. Despite its deficiencies, postsocialism as a concept continues to have purchase and meaning for anthropology, albeit as an increasingly retrospective, historical category, which refers to an interim period that is passing—and may indeed have passed—but which has borne witness to and analysed momentous changes. Postsocialism provides a context that increasingly interdigitates with other ‘post’ epistemologies, including post-industrialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, and, perhaps particularly, post-colonialism. From wars in the Balkans, in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, in South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh in the Southern Caucasus, to the emergence of revived Russian nationalism under Putin, the anticipated transition from ‘stagnant’ (Bacon & Sandle 2002: 2) collectivism to a neoliberal dawn has yet to come to fruition for many in the former Soviet space. Premised theoretically on an assumption of a quick and easy transition to the freedom and prosperity of the market economy, postsocialist transformations in actuality happen within ongoing conflicts, both collective and individual. They often set the advocates of economic and political neoliberalism against a reluctant population whose security (both economic and social), imaginaries, and very identities remained inextricably linked to the previously existing socialist order. Postsocialist anthropological work has, over the past thirty years, provided ethnographical and theoretical substance to the argument that the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in the Western modernising tradition that its supposed defeat at the same time calls into question the whole Western narrative of triumphant liberal capitalism (Fukuyama 1992: 48). In order to analyse or even simply to characterise postsocialism within the restrictions of an encyclopaedia entry, this entry focuses primarily upon subjectivity within the former Soviet space, for two reasons. First, subjectivity can be considered the paramount concern of socialism. Karl Marx, at the very outset, emphasised the priority of social being over consciousness (1978: 4). Boris Groys dismisses the suggestion that economics or politics were the essence of socialism (2009: xx); rather, he asserts that ‘The Soviet Union understood itself literally as a state governed by philosophy alone’ (33). Hence, second: the focus on the Soviet Union and its successors. The Soviet Union was the source and origin of the socialist project, and as it moved through its Cold War high point towards its decline, after perestroika (the Soviet political and economic restructuring of the 1980s), it is arguable that it had taken the project of making socialism further than any other society before or since (Groys 2009: xviii).

Surveying postsocialist anthropological thought as it has developed, this entry will first discuss the emergence of particular forms of postsocialist subjecthood within an epoch often periodised as ‘late socialism’, and the spectres that persisted beyond communism’s widely proclaimed demise. Next, this emergent postsocialism will be analysed by considering some of the issues and ideologies that were contested in the ‘end of history’ debate. Finally, details of four case studies of the postsocialist self will be examined. In summary, this entry will claim that although socialism as a hegemonic political system may have ceased in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the socialist project continues and the socialist present remains. In this sense, the countries of the former Soviet Union remain postsocialist until today; the socialist project remains as a palimpsest upon which is scripted contemporary political and social orders (Martin 2008). Socialism persists as the penumbra under which particular subjectivities and forms of being-in-the-world continue to emerge and develop. The anthropology of postsocialism has excavated this landscape, which is simultaneously a site of mourning, haunted by the spectres of communism, and a vibrant post-hybrid engendering new perspectives, challenges, and solutions within the narrative(s) of modernity. Derrida’s neologistic concept of ‘hauntology’ is useful to deploy as a tool to frame and analyse these phenomena (1994: 63). Hauntology means that ghostly presence by means of which the past returns or persists. Hauntology captures how the time(s) of postsocialism are a heterogeneous multiplicity, a ‘heterochrony’ that cannot be adequately described with reference to dualisms like presence/absence or before/after (see Ssorin-Chaikov 2006 & 2017).

Spectres of the (post)socialist subject

The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union happened, to some degree, like Ernest Hemingway once famously described the process of going bankrupt: ‘Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly’ (1954: 136). There is an uncanny echo of this sense in the title of Alexei Yurchak’s ethnography of the sensibilities of Leningrad’s young communist activists (so-called komsomoltsy) and of its avant-garde on the threshold of the collapse. In Everything was forever, until it was no more (2005), Yurchak describes a rolling crisis of language and knowledge that came about in the last days of the Soviet Union which indicated that the epistemic conditions of socialism were progressively running aground. He argued that the ossified, hyper-normalised, and highly citational nature of late Soviet culture caused its participants to focus, following J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, on the performative dimension of language rather than on its constative dimension. Life under late Soviet communism was marked by a decoupling of language and reality. Yurchak calls this, in Austin’s terms, a ‘performative shift’ which applies to the years that followed the death of Stalin, the time of Khrushchev’s so-called ‘Thaw’ (ottepel’), and the ‘Stagnation’ (zastoi) of the Brezhnev period, when the teleological imperative of the development of socialism was undermined, and effectively sidelined, by a focus upon the achievements of the present and the struggle against its binary capitalist nemesis. From then on, it was more important ideologically to match the consumer economies of the West than to pursue the ultimate goal of true communism. Here begins the ironic self-referential and essentially postsocialist posture adopted by the intelligentsia which Yurchak identifies as vnye (simultaneously inside and outside of the epistemic regime of state socialism). He also highlights the habitus of obshchenie, a self-reflexive group solidarity, a determined coming-together that produced a common inter-subjective sociality. This narcissistic condition is even more explicitly demonstrated and excavated in the case of East Germany by Andreas Glaeser (2011) who argues that as the 1980s went on, socialism’s claims to superior insight lost their credibility at an accelerating pace. The unfulfilled promise to know better than its Cold War adversary played a significant role in socialism's demise.

Although there had been a small but significant body of Western ethnographic research undertaken in actual socialist societies prior to 1989 (Caroline Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective [1983] and Katherine Verdery's National ideology under socialism [1991] are two notable examples), in the first wave of postsocialist scholarship, the construction of a specific socialist subjectivity became an early important, indeed necessary, theme that was taken up principally by historians. Stephen Kotkin (1995) Yuri Slezkine (2000), Igal Halfin (2007), Katerina Clark (2011), and Vladislav Zubok (2009), all reflect on aspects of the creation of a particular form of subjectivity and social consciousness. Kotkin in particular, in Magnetic mountain, his magisterial micro-history of the crucible of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan—the trans-Ural steel city of Magnitogorsk—emphasises the emergence of the Komsomol, a consciousness-creating Soviet youth movement, custodian of the ideals of Leninism, within whose ranks zealots would learn to think and to ‘speak Bolshevik’ (1996: 236). Sheila Fitzpatrick designates this new social identity as ‘Homo Sovieticus’ (2000: 32).

This exemplary personage, whilst indicating the ethical task of [self-]creating a heroic class-conscious subject fit to forge and inhabit the communist utopia, also later acquired a parodic dimension that it gained in the Brezhnev era from Soviet satirist Alexander Zinoviev (1986). Zinoviev uses the epithet from the perspective of the metropolitan intelligentsia to poke fun at the so-called sovok, the once idealistic but by then somewhat lumpen, somewhat credulous, former ‘shock worker’ who had constituted the vanguard of the proletariat and peasantry in the period of High Stalinism. Sovok becomes during late socialism a slang term for a slavish kind of Soviet philistinism, emblematic of the low-brow, plebeian values of the ‘working class’, often used alongside a term for rude and uncultured collective bydlo, a herd of cattle. This stereotype was forever immortalised by another satirist, George Orwell (1951) in the character of Boxer, the honest, honourable, but stolid and gullible shire horse that labours for no reward in Animal farm. Like the debasement over time of the revolutionary ideal in Orwell’s parable, so by the time of the so-called ‘stagnation’ under Brezhnev — which according to Yurchak is when the ‘performative shift’ begins to hollow out the discourse of socialism — the symbolism of the Soviet New Man has become ironic while sovok has become the self-deprecating signifier for these stereotypically pejorative traits of Soviet personhood and already threadbare, discredited Soviet values (it is a play on words: sovok also means ‘dustpan’).

A powerful ethnographically informed perspective on the Stalinist ideal of Homo Sovieticus is presented by Jochen Hellbeck (2006) who reads the diary of a zealous young Komsomol activist, labouring under the guilty secret of his bourgeois origins in late 1930’s Moscow, to illustrate the self-transformative and self-awakening power of Soviet revolutionary ideology. The rigour with which the young zealot approaches the task of fashioning a Stalinist self reflects the ‘dream’ of socialism:

…a Soviet dream, the contours of which the party ideologist Nikolai Bukharin delineated in implicit rivalry with the individualist American dream. In [this] Soviet dream, socialism turned soulless workers, oppressed by capitalist exploitation, “into collective creators and organizers, into people who work on themselves, into conscious producers of their own fate”, into real architects of their own future. (Hellbeck 2006: 6)

This maximalist Soviet prometheanism gives rise to a fundamental anthropological problem, as a result of which anthropologists of postsocialism have been necessarily as interested in the histories of high Stalinist ideology as they have in the ethnographic details of everyday existence in Siberia or Silesia. Until Soviet socialism, humans had arguably never engaged in such a self-reflexive, self-conscious, and theoretically informed attempt to make themselves anew on such a scale. Scholars of postsocialism have thereby been constantly haunted by the question: to what extent did such an experiment in all-embracing collective self-making succeed, and what were its unintended consequences and legacies? Andreas Glaeser has provided an acute analysis of this process of subject formation as it applied under the East German experience of socialism:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the party’s understanding boiled down to the hope that if only everyone would internalize the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, while sincerely acting in accordance with them, socialism would realize itself in an ever more perfect way (2011: 61).

Given the headlong quality of the momentous events of 1989 and the period immediately after, it is unsurprising that the earliest phase of wider postsocialist scholarship reflected an element of what has come to be called ‘transitology’ (Hann 2002, Sachs 1990) – an assumption that former socialist societies would progress towards forms of liberal capitalism without exception or regard for the social cost. This approach and indeed this phase of scholarship has been criticised by later scholars for projecting its Western-oriented assumptions, its Manichean perspective upon the shortcomings of a ‘defeated’ ideology, and its supposed deviations from ‘human nature’. Transitology has been justifiably accused of suffering from the same kinds of teleological assumptions which it levelled at socialism (Hann 2002, Dunlop 1993, Derrida 1994). By contrast, the first wave of postsocialist anthropological writing (Hann 2002, Humphrey 2002, Verdery 2003) held a focus on what late socialism was, and how individuals, communities, and institutions reacted and evolved in the khaos (chaos) of its deconstruction and refashioning. Indeed it is with some justification that Chris Hann (2002) claimed that ‘…anthropology provide[s] the necessary corrective to the deficits of ‘transitology’. (Hann 2002: 1) This critical integrity has continued as postsocialist scholarship in its more mature phase has excavated the mundane building blocks with which the total anthropological project of forging a new human type in Soviet modernity was assembled.

Stephen Collier, in one of the most important works of postsocialist anthropology, Post-Soviet social (2011), has shown how the continuities and ruptures in the (post)socialist subject, including its various incarnations mentioned here (Homo Sovieticus/sovok/vnye), are imbricated within the infrastructures that were built to realise the socialist utopia. He details the policy of structural adjustment (‘shock therapy’), which had profound implications for postsocialist countries’ economies, including the effective abolition of the mechanisms of planned production, controlled prices, and collective property, all of which seemed easily dismantled—at least to some Western observers (Verdery 2003). But Collier’s analysis focuses on the different schools of neoliberalism and shows how the shock therapists’ initial attempt to deconstruct socialist institutions of industrial coordination, social welfare, and urban planning was thwarted in part by the obdurate material legacies of socialism. Leading architect of the shock approach, American economist Jeffrey Sachs, argued for the ‘reallocation….of resources in the economy’ (Collier 2011: xii). These so-called ‘resources’ effectively comprised the communities, social institutions, industrial and financial processes, factories, and human networks that made up the fabric of collective life across nascent postsocialist society. Collier’s focus upon the Soviet-era communal heating system that sustains the industrial city of Belaya Kalitva, which stubbornly resisted desocialisation, provides an example of a postsocialist assemblage that persists from the socialist past and impels socialist values and material structures into the period of assumed transition and beyond. Collier asserts that the ‘surprising’ (2011: 22) persistence of the systems and the material infrastructure of socialism require them to be questioned or analysed, in order to parse the ‘social’ that inhabits the heart of postsocialism. He concludes that later neoliberal reforms in the 2000s (inspired by the work of another US economist, James Buchanan) did not reject the basic value-orientations of Soviet social modernity. Rather, they aimed to find a new balance between economic efficiency and social welfare, between the mechanisms of enterprise and choice and the substantive constraints imposed by socialism’s continuing legacy of social norms and material forms.

We see how the legacies of the sovok/Homo Sovieticus and Soviet social modernity converge (often to tragic effect) in the collapse of the highly structured collectivism of socialism that is the direct fall-out from ‘shock therapy’. This crisis has been documented in a rich seam of ethnographies that examine homelessness and destitution (Höjdestrand 2009); despair and loss among veterans of the Afghan War and their families (Oushakine 2009); premature mortality and the crisis of masculinity (Parsons 2014). The crisis of masculinity exposes a gendered postsocialist afterlife of the Soviet ideal: the Stakhanovite masculine toilers, glorying in their physicality and embodying the ideals of collective solidarity, found themselves without a role in the fast-moving, fluid 1990’s, other than as so-called sportsmeny, providing hired muscle for the burgeoning mafia (Humphrey 2002). Premature mortality amongst men of working age reached epidemic proportions: much of the attrition was down to abuse of alcohol. What had been valued in the sovok foundered in an atmosphere where anything goes (bespredel). This Russian word is generally linked with the climate of khaos in the early 1990s. It literally means ‘without boundaries’, and designates the spirit of abandon and lawlessness that prevailed in those days.

As Michelle Parsons describes in her ethnography Dying unneeded, men’s risk-taking was not sufficiently counterbalanced by any order. When the Soviet state fell, men turned to drink to experience a lost sense of social belonging, as well as a sense of power to push against what bound them. Unfortunately, not much bound them. Responsibilities that ordinarily served to limit excessive drinking were diminished. Men pushed further and further before finding limits. Working class men suddenly rendered unneeded by the state were most at risk, especially if they were also unneeded at home. Women fared better, according to Parsons, since their sense of neededness was more diffuse and included, importantly, being able to hold their families together in times of hardship. This very quality of resilience re-emerges in Alexia Bloch’s (2017) later postsocialist ethnography of female migrant entrepreneurs discussed below. More broadly, Jeremy Morris (2016) has documented the ways in which working class individuals of both sexes, their families, and communities, through a process of bricolage and a continuing memory of the social ‘dowry’ of collectivism—what Morris memorably describes as ‘…their own social resources held in common and emerging from a shared (and proud) past’ (2016: 11)—confronted this unpredictability and insecurity of daily life. They found ways to make postsocialist existence if not ‘comfortable’, then ‘habitable’. Similarly, Elizabeth Dunn (2004) has chronicled how factory workers in postsocialist Poland, manufacturing baby food for a US-based global conglomerate, found strategies to resist being ‘privatised’ in their subjectivities as well as economically. These Polish workers were denied coeval status by their new neoliberal colonisers much in the same way that previous anthropological hegemons imposed the ‘ethnographic present’ (Fabian 1984: 81) on assumed ‘others’.

The end of which history?

In the late summer of 1989, in the tumultuous months leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published his celebrated article ‘The end of history?’, later expanded into the volume The end of history and the last man (1992). He argued that a consensus across the world now agreed upon the supremacy of liberal democracy as a system of government. It had overcome rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently and pointedly, communism. In addition, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy embodied the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government, and as such constituted the ‘end of history’. That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was free from such fundamental internal contradictions. Notwithstanding current injustices or social problems present in Western democracies like the United States, these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. Underpinning his argument, Fukuyama drew extensively upon the emigré Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s exegesis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of history, in particular his ‘dialectic of the master and the slave’ set out in the Phenomenology of spirit (1977). Fukuyama further invoked Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘last man’, the inheritor of the world beyond the end of history who embodies but cannot realise Hegel’s master’s urge to dominate and achieve recognition and renown. Again reflecting his reading of Kojève, Fukuyama asserts that this ‘last man’ is none other than the neoliberal subject, living in the boring but prosperous liberal democratic societies that have seen off Marxist tyranny, whose epigones will occasionally lapse into religious and nationalist retrogressions and fundamentalisms, only to find out again that, indeed, ‘there is no alternative’ to liberal democracy.

In Specters of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida delivered a spirited rebuttal of Fukuyama’s ‘neo-evangelistic’ theorising, and the ‘obscene euphoria’ with which it was lionised by neoliberal capitalist politicians, media, and academia (74). Derrida critiques Fukuyama’s sleight-of-hand wherein he conflates the empirical actuality of history with the ideal assumptions that construct the telos of economic and political neoliberalism, granting to himself, as it were, the dialectical best of both worlds. Derrida continues that the whole problem with the Fukuyama/Kojève ‘simplified – and highly Christianized’ (1994: 77) version of the ‘end of history’ is the way it thinks of time/history, namely in a positivist sense as a succession of present moments, counted one after the other on the rosary of ‘homogenous empty time’ (Benjamin 2003: 397). This made for bad metaphysics as it leaves no room for ‘the event’, for those unsettling intimations of the future that are woven into the present.

The liberal democratic triumph of the ‘end of history’, which, according to Derrida, dismisses the possibility of the ‘event’, already has had its effective comeuppance since Fukuyama delivered his ‘secretly worried’ polemic, both from outside shocks (9/11, the ‘War on Terror’, global climate crisis, COVID-19), and from internal earthquakes (the financial crash of 2008, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter); a ‘triumph that has never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic, and in sum bereaved’ (Derrida 1993: 85). An equally suitable or even better candidate for Kojève’s ‘last man’ might rather be the postsocialist subject himself, whose overlapping incarnations were outlined in the first section; he who is heir to the ‘dowry’ of socialism, who, depending on perspective, could be both sovok (a self-satisfied philistine consumer) and live vnye (an intellectual creating niches of freedom in a eternally fixed system).

Alexei Yurchak observed (along with others, such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia) the emergence of an aberrant postsocialist subjectivity in the last Soviet generation, a postsocialist subject who took form within and lived under the socialist regime, the postsocialism within socialism, so to speak:

During late socialism, especially in the 1970's and early 1980's, it became increasingly common among some groups of the last Soviet generation, especially children from intelligentsia families, but also some from working class backgrounds, to give up more sophisticated professional careers for occupations that offered more free time. The more extreme and telling examples of such jobs included boiler room technician (kochegar), warehouse watchman (storozh), freight train loader (gruzchik), and street sweeper (dvornik). These jobs kept them busy for only two or three night shifts a week, leaving them plenty of free time for obshchenie and for pursuing other interests. One's obligations were minimised because the work was undemanding, because it was organised in long shifts with breaks in between, and because one was spared the need to attend meetings, parades, and other public events (since only people with stronger institutional affiliations were, required to attend such events through their jobs). (2005: 151-153)

Yurchak’s postsocialist subject, for whom ‘Everything was forever’ and who could express individuality whilst having sloughed off economic necessity, seems more faithfully to resemble the posthistorical figure foreseen by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kojève than Fukuyama’s impostor. It is this antiheroic figure that is given the task of forging the postsocialist future, always already secretly preparing and prepared for the event ‘Until it was no more’. That future is not simply a future that is a version of the here and now, but rather a future that develops the forces active in the here and now to conclusion; not a mere future present, but rather a future modality of the living present. It is for this reason that it is impossible to dissociate socialism from postsocialism: they cannot be conceptualised simply as ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Four exemplars of the postsocialist subject

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fieldwork in the former socialist societies remains a vibrant and popular option for a new generation of anthropologists, and a more authentically future-oriented form of postsocialist ethnography is beginning to emerge. Rather than rehearsing the triumphalist teleological vision of defeated, subaltern societies expected to ape and aim at catching up with Western neoliberal capitalism, these works provide views into the rear-view mirror of subjects and societies either confidently accelerating away from their experience of socialism, or, more likely, shifting in the direction of a distinctive version of modernity. In the first wave of postsocialist anthropological excitement, all of the themes and interests listed at the start of this entry have been addressed in ethnographic monographs. All of this work reflects a particular perspective, which is filtered through the prism of socialist experience, identity, and history. This final section will focus on four recent anthropological works that continue to accrete meaning into and give flesh to the concept of postsocialism as history goes forward. These texts highlight social phenomena that have distinctively postsocialist contours; either absent in other social contexts or more visible or more progressed in postsocialist societies. The key index of this postsocialist substance in each case is that the solution paving the road forward to modernity is stalked by the ghostly presence of an ideology that refuses to die.

Several anthropologists of postsocialism have undertaken work in areas related to the ethical formation of postsocialist subjectivity. Working under the broad influence of Michel Foucault’s theorising of neoliberal governmentality, they have pursued the basic thesis that with the collapse of socialism and the retreat of its welfare state, individuals have been forced, incited, and invited to govern themselves in new ways. Often, these biopolitical technologies or discourses come from the West, but not always. One example of this approach is Tomas Matza’s (2018) exploration of the rise of psychotherapeutic practices in Russia in contradistinction to the previously established psychological and ethical framing of Soviet upbringing. This development straddles the collapse of socialism. It dates back to the time of perestroika when economic stagnation prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to call for educators and institutions to attend to the ‘human factor of production’ (Matza 2018: 78). In response, reformers promoted a shift from ‘averaged’ to ‘personality-oriented’ education, and a ‘more democratic and child-centred approach’. Emotions became a relevant area of educational concern, initiating the psychologisation of upbringing, which had previously been conceived of in moral terms under the tutelage of Anton Makarenko, the father of Stalinist pedagogy who developed the disciplinary techniques that promoted the formation of Homo Sovieticus (Kharkhordin 1998). This change was not essentially about individual children achieving success or wellbeing; the late-socialist reformers had in mind a form of success that was ultimately to be measured in collective terms. The acknowledgement of an individual interior life that ought to be nurtured for its own sake had always been contested under socialism, just as had the notion of ‘private’ life. A generation later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Matza found during his fieldwork in Putin-era St. Petersburg that a distinction had emerged between two different psychotherapeutic approaches: one oriented towards adolescent dysfunction and pathology, another much more targeted upon wellbeing. He established that depathologising forms of care that focused on well-being were generally much more available to the better-off. Rather than pathology, these forms of psychotherapy promoted highly market-oriented and gendered concepts of personal success and advancement. Matza observes that biopolitics (techniques used to govern populations as living beings) often relies on moralising and draws subjects into state aims by constituting them as caring subjects. This observation reinforces the notion that ethical projects are not antithetical to neoliberalism; on the contrary, they are central to it.

The physical environment that socialism created and inhabited played a significant role in the formation of subjecthood on both sides of the fracture and collapse of socialist societies. This was particularly pertinent in Hungary, long regarded as the most Western-oriented and prosperous of the so-called ‘satellites’ of the Soviet Union in the period of late socialism. Here, as elsewhere across that social landscape, planners understood that materiality and political ideologies were linked, and that transformative powers might inhere in material forms. The aesthetics of domestic environments, the shape, texture, and ambience of their materiality, provide the locus for Krisztina Fehéreváry’s (2013) exploration of the reciprocal relationships between ideology (of the state, market, or particular groups), things (residential housing, furnishings, and aesthetic styles), and people (especially people’s embodied experience). She elucidates how radical changes to people’s lived environments and their experience of those environments transforms or challenges the sociopolitical ideologies with which they are aligned. She particularly highlights how, in the sphere of interior design and domestic aesthetics in Hungary but also more widely across both the East and West, the trend towards using ‘natural’ materials—of, effectively, bringing ’nature’ inside—gained powerful affective appeal with the end of the Cold War and its corollary, the demise of the socialist welfare state. She observes that the superiority ascribed to ‘natural’ materials—granite countertops, rich hardwoods, stone-like tile backsplashes, and leather furnishings—aids in discrediting modernist projects and generates the cosmologies that have replaced them. These cosmologies valorise the moral project of being in harmony with the natural world and at the same time allow for the naturalisation of the free market as arbiter of human value. The search for ‘quality’ in material goods that are more healthy and durable, i.e., more ‘natural’, is inextricably linked to the production of inequality. Drawing upon the Peircean concept of ‘qualisigns’, she traces the decline of the Cold War style of ‘socialist modern’, characterised by angular, modernist design, lightweight furnishings, light colours, and man-made materials, once emblematic of the triumphantly modernist communist future and defined by qualisigns of ‘lightness’ and ‘cleanness’, into a debased parody she defines as ‘socialist generic’. In Hungary, this style’s defining products—shoddy, factory-made, and mass-produced apartments and furnishings—became aligned with and reinforced the affective experience of alienation from an impersonal and oppressive bureaucratic state, whose physical identifiers echoed the same tropes of stagnation that permeated the socialist space. Man-made materials that had once exemplified the promise of abundance for all came to exemplify the regime’s hubristic attempts to dominate nature. Egalitarianism became discredited in part because it had become conflated in everyday practice with standardisation and uniformity. Likewise, rational and efficient became synonymous with cheap and austere. People sensed that the contempt for nature reflected in the communist domestic aesthetic presaged some deeper malaise. According to Fehéreváry, the cataclysm of Chernobyl is affectively anticipated in this domestic parable (Fehéreváry 2012: 627).

Dace Dzenovska’s ethnography (2018) of postsocialist Latvia lights up the dark underside of what neoliberal acceptance might mean for former socialist populations. The country at the edge of the European Union remained haunted by the afterlife of the Soviet Union’s internal borders and nationalities policies, yet it reluctantly ingested public tolerance and liberal political values. Learning to navigate the paradox of Europeanness imposes the imperative to profess and institutionalise the values of inclusion and openness while at the same time practicing—and also institutionalising—exclusion and closure. Having become a European Union frontier state, Latvia is required to reorient its border vision from protecting its national territory to protecting all of Europe. This responsibility includes being concerned not only with border control and geopolitics, but also with migration control, which had barely registered on Latvian public and political agendas prior to Europeanisation. Latvia’s history as a former Soviet state with a sizeable and contested ethnic Russian population, migrants from Soviet times, easily outranks in popular affective and institutional priority the imperative to police the posthistorical perimeter of the longed-for European homeland. Latvians experienced the condition of being ‘not quite European’. In order to meet the normative attitudinal standards that will permit them to take their place among the liberal subjects of the European project, Latvians need to purge their racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic inclinations, supported and scrutinised by ‘tolerance’ workers, employed by the state.

So far, so liberal. Yet the migration officials and border guards who are Dzenovska’s interlocutors are better at learning the repressive elements of Europe’s migration regime; that is, securing the border, and keeping ‘barbarians’ (Dzenovska 2018: 206) at the gate, rather than embracing the redemptive elements like tolerance and compassion. History hasn’t ended in Latvia. Caught between its Soviet past and its European future, the tension between openness and closure is not to be simply mapped onto a discursive juxtaposition between liberalism and illiberalism and, subsequently, spatially onto Western and Eastern Europe. Latvians experience a deferred, disappointed, and elusive present: aspiring to be Europeans, longing to shed their hated socialist past, as they see it, as vassals of their gigantic next door neighbour to the East, yet haunted by postsocialist instincts and reflexes.

Alexia Bloch’s account (2017) of the entrepreneurial, familial, and intimate lives of migrant women who navigate the physical, emotional, and financial routes running from the former Soviet borderlands of Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and Southern Russia into Turkey, illustrates the formation of a powerfully gendered but specifically postsocialist prototype of neoliberal subjecthood. These women, often the primary breadwinners of their extended families, support remittance economic relations with their home communities, often leaving children to be cared for by older family members in ‘other mother’ arrangements, reminiscent of similar economic migrant women in Third World settings. Their relations with husbands at home are often characterised by role-reversal, with women in the active, dominant role, with dependent stay-at-home husbands whose absence of status and sometimes of any significant role provides a ghostly echo of the marginalised men, washed up on the shores of the socialist ideal in the time of khaos, described by Parsons and others. Bloch analyses practices and postures that complicate liberal narratives that assume a trajectory from an ‘oppressive’ state socialism to the ‘opportunities’ offered by global capitalism. Socialist paradigms and forms of governance are not immediately or evenly displaced, and people who lived under state socialism continue to reflect on a sense of a derailed socialist modernity. Some of Bloch’s older interlocutors lament being inserted into a global service economy where ideals of socialist labour have no meaning, and they no longer have any social protections in the form of pensions, overtime, sick leave, or mechanisms for gender equity. Often, whilst successful, even thriving, businesswomen, they harbour a residual shame at their involvement in tainted ‘bourgeois’ buying and selling, frowned upon in socialist morality. One such troubled respondent confessed that to be a trader was to be a fallen socialist of sorts (Bloch 2017: 71). In contrast, some younger women consider their work and life in Turkey as exciting, urbane, and an escape from the confining socialist structures and gender ideals of the past. This latter group exemplify ideals of glamour, romance, and sexuality made available through the freedom offered by mobility. This freedom affords new structures of feeling, including new forms of romance, courtship, and ‘companionate’ marriage. These structures include so-called ‘modern’ forms of intimacy, including concubinage and the online sex industry. These women speak of having more power from the position of an illicit relationship than they would in a ‘real marriage’. Bloch ruefully reflects back on the prevalence in the early postsocialist years of women turning to international marriage services to look for husbands because they had struggled in their home communities of Belarus and Russia to find husbands who would be financially stable, sober, and not abusive, but also to find husbands who would provide for them both materially and emotionally. The practices and new structures of feeling observed by Bloch run counter to the commonly held view of the traffic of women as victims across borders. They confound the growing concern for ‘security’ at borders and afford more nuanced understandings of the links between global capitalism and women's (and men's) migration.

Conclusion

Postsocialism did not simply follow on from socialism, and socialism did not simply go away. Key postsocialist works indicate that postsocialist forms of being were established well before socialism’s political demise. Similarly, some of socialism’s material forms and social norms continued and have proved to have a resilient afterlife. The span of recent postsocialist anthropological scholarship described above does not indicate a concept in decline or even in retreat as yet. To shoehorn postsocialism into the narrow rubric of area studies would test the category’s limits on simple geographic grounds alone. The ethnographic fields detailed here have been located in Europe, but might easily have included Central Asia (Pelkmans 2017, Reeves 2014) or Mongolia (Empson 2011, Pedersen 2011). In any event, notwithstanding their physical locus, all of these sites are traversed by global forces, for example, the European Union funding that stipulates Latvian ‘tolerance’; the self-improvement therapies and wellbeing philosophy imported from the US to the adolescent psychology clinics of St. Petersburg; the global assemblages of Dunn’s Polish baby food standards; Buchanan’s public fiscal theory that restructures Belaya Kalitva’s social infrastructure; Bloch’s young women’s ideals of ‘plastic sexuality without complexes’. It is clear that diverse theoretical concerns, gathered under the postsocialist moniker, such as ontology, knowledge formation, personhood, materiality, sovereignty, borders, migration, gender, globalism and modernity, are not exclusive to former socialist societies. Connections, not simply legitimising but also enriching, could and should be made to other organising ‘post-’ categories in anthropology. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery (2009) have proposed the conflation of postsocialism with postcolonial studies to create a single overarching category: the post-Cold War (see also Kwon 2010). They suggest that just as postcoloniality has become a critical perspective on the colonial present, so postsocialism could become a similarly critical standpoint on the continuing social and spatial effects of Cold War power and knowledge (such as in the remaking of markets, property rights, democratic institutions, workplaces, consumption, families, gender/sexual relations, or communities).

Yet if there is one defining comparative ethnographic feature of postsocialism that this entry has highlighted, it is the looping temporality of the postsocialist subject. If the postcolonial/Third World societies were once placed in the evolutionary chronotropes of backwardness, in stereotyped stages of society and the teleologies of modernisation theory which in turn interpolated postcolonial subjects as without history and without agency (Chakrabarty 2000), then it can be argued that the postsocialist subject demonstrates something different but parallel vis-a-vis the times of modernity. When Yurchak describes the disaffected youth of Leningrad as ‘being vnye’ (outside-inside) he is showing them to be postsocialist subjects, not late-socialist subjects. They are postsocialist but live in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e., in positivist political science terms, they lived in ‘developed socialism’). They were already being postsocialist but still during ‘socialism’. How is that possible? It isn’t, if you understand postsocialism and socialism as related to each other as ‘after’ relates to ‘before’. The nested temporality of postsocialism within socialism, which hatched when the socialist state eventually withered away, exemplifies concretely how people orient towards and, over decades if not centuries, silently prepare the groundwork for futures beyond immediate conceptual comprehension. Familiarity with this phenomenon has left scholars of postsocialism well placed to spot analogies between these events and the possible signs of the emergence of postliberal societies and subjectivities (see Boyer & Yurchak 2010, Dzenovska & Kurtović 2018)

What was unique about socialist societies was that they were founded upon ideology that took human nature and anthropology itself as a problem. That reflexive ideology proposed an answer to this problem, which percolated down through Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin from Hegel, to insist that human behaviour and subjectivity were and are plastic and mutable, albeit framed within a historical dialectic. Beyond socialism’s demise, real or simply alleged, the tension created by that dialectic persists within the current neoliberal world order. Notwithstanding its questionable adequacy as an organising trope, innovative anthropology focussed upon lives led under the shrinking shadow of socialist organisation, ideology, and experience, and societies still haunted by communism’s ghosts, continues to be written under the name of postsocialism.

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Note on contributor

Dominic Martin is an anthropologist of Russia and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. His work concerns the relationship between postsocialist life and the transformations of economy, society, and sovereignty that followed the end of the Cold War in Russia’s Asia-Pacific borderlands.

Dominic Martin, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography 51/53 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE Dominic.martin@compas.ox.ac.uk

Buddhism

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 18:37:09 +0000

Joanna Cook Hildegard Diemberger

University College London & University of Cambridge

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21buddhism

Abstract:

Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world and provides rich ethnographic accounts of the religion as lived in diverse social contexts. Anthropological studies have evolved from early taxonomic work to the study of continuities and reinterpretations of socially embedded Buddhist traditions. Today, they encompass broad considerations of politics, economics, ethics, and belief. This entry considers the biography of the Buddha before examining the tenets, organisation, and spread of Buddhism. It then provides an overview of the development of the anthropology of Buddhism and key areas of focus, paying particular attention to processes of religious reform and reconstruction, political and economic relationships, and transformations in social and ethical life.

Introduction

Buddhism is commonly understood as the set of teachings and practices inspired by the South Asian spiritual master Gautama Siddhartha, who lived during the fifth century BCE. It aims at liberation from the suffering of worldly existence and the cycle of rebirth known as Samsara, and the attainment of Nirvana, a state of ultimate salvation, notably the release from greed (raga), aversion (dvesha), and ignorance (moha). Initiated as a universal and ethical religious path, Buddhism acquired significant popularity by proposing a middle way between extreme asceticism and the rigid household and social status-centred Hindu ritualism of the time. Considered to be one of the ‘world religions’, Buddhism has attracted a great deal of attention not only in the countries where it has been practised for centuries but also across the world, becoming a focus of investigation for many academic disciplines including social and cultural anthropology.

Defining Buddhism, however, has proved to be a challenge. Are diverse local instantiations of religious practice in geographically distant regions all part of a larger religion? Debates on this question highlight the tension between the multiplicity of Buddhist traditions and the belief that these embody a unique spiritual legacy that is recognisable across all geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries. From one perspective, ‘Buddhism’ may be deconstructed to uncover a multitude of practices in diverse places at different times, revealing a variegated and historically complex phenomenon. From a different point of view, we might identify the continuous historical links that join different branches of Buddhism around the world, pointing to the traits that are shared by those who self-identify as Buddhist (see, for example, Bechert, Lamotte & Gombrich 1984).

The following sections will provide a brief overview of the biography of the Buddha and his connection to sacred relics and places, the tenets of Buddhism, Buddhist social organisation, the spread of Buddhism, and definitions of Buddhism as a ‘world religion’. It then turns to the anthropology of Buddhism.

In some senses, anthropological studies of Buddhism answered the questions of earlier orientalist scholarship, or at least put them to bed. Much early scholarship had portrayed Buddhism as a timeless, textual, rational, ascetic, non-violent, and apolitical religion. In contrast, anthropologists and Buddhist scholars show that Buddhism is better understood as lived and embedded in social practices. They tend to highlight both the continuities and constant reinterpretations of Buddhism as a set of socially located traditions. Early anthropological studies were concerned with understanding Buddhism through taxonomic frameworks. Stanley Tambiah (1970), for example, identified three principal focuses of Thai Buddhism, namely merit-making (kammatic Buddhism), rituals of protection (apotropaic Buddhism) and practices of mental purification (nibbanic Buddhism). Geoffrey Samuel (1983) distinguished ‘clerical’ and ‘shamanic’ orientations in Tibetan Buddhism, reflecting debates about the nature of Buddhism occurring in the Buddhist world. Subsequent work has provided us with rich ethnographic accounts. Some of these show how Buddhism changes over time, by studying reformist Buddhist movements, processes of religious reconstruction, the globalisation of Buddhist lineages, or the deeply political nature of Buddhist history and practice. Others investigate how Buddhist thought is lived concretely, investigating the relationship between Buddhism and violence, the relationship between the living and the dead, practices of power and protection, and the value of wealth creation in religious communities. Recent work has explored lay religious practice as well as the lives of monastic communities, Buddhist gender relations and environmentalism, meditation and self-cultivation, as well as the development of scientific and therapeutic framings of Buddhist practices.

In search of Buddha’s life

The biographies of the Buddha were only written down approximately four centuries after his passing. According to these narratives, the Buddha was born as Gautama Siddharta in the fifth to fourth century BCE in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, close to the northern Indian border. His father was a local ruler who tried to protect him from everyday reality. However, Gautama experienced dissatisfaction with the suffering of human existence following an encounter with an old, an ill, and a dead human being. He left his royal life, abandoning his wife and child, to devote himself to the pursuit of spiritual liberation. After trying different routes, he achieved enlightenment and liberation from suffering in Bodhgaya (in what is now the state of Bihar in India). He gave his first sermon in the Deer Park in Sarnath, near Banaras, in which he preached the basic tenets of Buddhism known as the Four Noble Truths (see below). He subsequently assembled around him a large number of disciples. In Rajagrha (modern Rajgir), with the support of a local ruler, he is said to have gathered together this congregation of disciples in a more formal way, establishing what is considered to have been the first monastic institution. He eventually died, literally ‘passed into Nirvana’, in Kusinagar, in what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, at the age of eighty-four, leaving behind his bodily relics and his teachings, which became objects of worship for later generations.

The narrative of Buddha’s life eventually became a ‘paradigm’ (Tambiah 1984) that inspired both the actual deeds and the biographical narratives of subsequent Buddhist masters across the Buddhist world. Biographical writing was and continues to be very important in many Buddhist traditions (see e.g. Gyatso 1998). Biographical narratives are also closely connected to relics and sacred places that have continued to be central to Buddhist devotion up to the present day. The Buddha’s relics were divided into eight upon his death and were later widely distributed by the Indian Emperor Asoka. Pilgrimage to pay respect to these relics became the focus of Buddhist religious practices in a multitude of sites across Asia (Strong 2004). The recently much-expanded Famen temple in China, for example, houses the finger bone of the Buddha, while the Fo Guang Shan Memorial Center in Taiwan houses his tooth. The key sites of Buddha’s life in India, abandoned after having been important pilgrimage destinations for many centuries, were rediscovered, and archaeologically investigated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see e.g. Allen 2003 for an overview). The pilgrimage site of Lumbini, the Deer Park in Sarnath, and the re-established cosmopolitan university of Nalanda in the vicinity of the ancient city of Rajagrha, for example, have increasingly become the focus of globalised Buddhist communities and sites of intense international pilgrimage in recent years (see Cook 2018). The Mahabodhi Temple Complex in Bodh Gaya received UNESCO World Heritage status in 2002 and now attracts hundreds of thousands of Buddhist pilgrims each year (Geary 2017).

The Three Jewels of Buddhism

Despite the diversity of Buddhist teachings and practices around the world, some Buddhist concepts are seen as foundational and can be recognised across all traditions. The Buddha, the Dharma (i.e. his teaching), and the Sangha (i.e. the monastic community) are known as the ‘Three Jewels of Buddhism’ (triratna) in which every Buddhist takes refuge not only when first entering the Buddhist Path towards Enlightenment but also at the beginning of Buddhist rituals. The Four Noble Truths, the core of Buddha’s First Sermon in the Deer Park in Sarnath, are also pivotal to any Buddhist tradition: first, life is suffering; second, suffering is rooted in attachment and craving (trsna); third, by uprooting this attachment in all its forms, liberation from suffering can be achieved; fourth, liberation can be obtained in practice by following an eightfold path involving right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. In Buddhist salvation teaching (soteriology), all phenomena are marked by three characteristics: suffering (mentioned above), the fact that there is no ‘self’, and the impermanence and imperfection of all things. In spite of these teachings, people become attached to impermanent things, ignoring the truth that everything is conditioned and subject to change, and as such suffering is perpetuated. Underpinning all this is the idea that all sentient beings are caught up in a cycle of rebirth (Samsara) maintained by their deeds (karma) until they obtain liberation from Samsara and achieve Nirvana – a concept that indicates both ‘emptiness’ and ‘liberation’, exceeds human grasp, and has been the focus of intense doctrinal debates. Through the cultivation of morality, meditation, and wisdom, Buddhists seek to gain experiential insight into the three characteristics of all phenomena, which ultimately leads to the cessation of rebirth and freedom from the cycle of conditioned existence. Debates about the nature of Samsara and Nirvana, the self and the world, the interconnectedness of all phenomena, attachment, the temporality and the scope of liberation, ways of knowing, emptiness, and other soteriological and epistemological issues have marked Buddhist traditions throughout their history.^[1]

Social organisation

In Buddhist teaching, all beings may attain enlightenment, but the ability to do so will be informed by current incarnation, commitment to liberation, and past karma. This is most clearly highlighted in the common distinction between those who have given priority to their spiritual goal (monastics and, in a different way, ascetics) and those who are constrained by their worldly commitments (the laity). For this reason, Buddhist teaching informs both renunciate forms of religion, practised by adepts devoted to complete liberation from worldly concerns, and lay forms of religion appealing to a wide range of people steeped in their worldly existence and participating through patronage and devotional practices to Buddhist spiritual endeavours. Through the accumulation of good actions, both groups improve their reincarnation prospects and those of the people with whom they are or were connected. In the early days of Buddhism, merchants were particularly attracted by a vision that, in contrast to pre-existing religious beliefs and practices, offered a more flexible and merit-oriented approach to spirituality and to all the ritual needs of human life. Buddhism’s universal message had the potential to transcend transmitted and engrained social distinctions. This made it particularly attractive to people who were entrepreneurial and benefitted materially and spiritually from patronage practices (despite the apparent contradictions related to the recommended disengagement from worldly matters). In fact, historians of Buddhism generally link the emergence of Buddhism and other salvific religions addressing liberation from human suffering during the same period to the rise of urban centres and trade networks (Bailey & Mabbett 2003). These provided both the range of human experiences and the material support that enabled the monastic community to thrive (see Schopen 2004). Promoting virtuous behaviour and the acceptance of spiritual hierarchy, Buddhism was also embraced by a wide range of rulers who used it as a moral framework, the foundation for legal systems, and as a tool of governance. The figure of the Buddhist ruler as Dharmaraja (Dharma king) and Cakravartin (Ruler of the World) and the tension between renunciation and worldly power inspired works such as Tambiah’s World conqueror and world renouncer (1976), which explored the relationship between Buddhism and polity in Thailand, arguing that they were and still are profoundly interconnected. The tension between renunciation and worldly life also attracted later anthropologists and historians in different historic and ethnographic settings (see, for example, Ruegg 1995 on India and Tibet).

The spread of Buddhism

Since the time of the Buddha, and the early Buddhist masters that followed him, contrasting views have shaped the way in which Buddhist traditions developed in different places. Buddhists have positioned themselves in relation to each other and negotiated their relationship to pre-existing religious practices and beliefs. Whilst diverse Buddhist traditions developed in very different contexts with distinctive features and modes of transmission, the feeling that Buddha’s message could travel across boundaries and be recognised by human beings of all sorts is certainly very ancient and perceived as being intrinsic to Buddhism by adherents in geographically distant places. Most strikingly, traveling texts and relics as well as pilgrimage routes to Buddhist sites have been central to a web of relations that developed across Asia. Sites of pilgrimage and meditation were nodes within networks that brought together a wide range of people speaking a kaleidoscope of languages, reflected in a rich and multifarious textual production. It is not surprising, therefore, that over the centuries translators and translations played an extremely important role in the way Buddhist traditions evolved, diversified, and were sometimes contested. At the same time, Buddhism had a huge impact on book production and communication technologies, and it is in the Buddhist context of Tang China that printing was first discovered at the turn of the eighth century (Barrett 2008). Translations, editions, and publications of Buddhist texts were (and still are) recognised as some of the greatest deeds enabled by the patronage of devout followers from all walks of life (Diemberger 2014; Diemberger, Ehrhard & Kornicki 2016). Buddhist attitudes also informed the way in which digital technologies were enthusiastically adopted by a wide range of communities (Diemberger & Hugh-Jones 2014). Especially in places where Buddhist scriptures suffered periods of suppression and destruction, the retrieval of surviving manuscripts and prints triggered the mobilisation of communities in this endeavour. As they embraced new tools and skills that facilitated textual reproduction and distribution, people combined the morality and rituality associated with books with the new mediums.

Early ‘international’ scholarship

The English term ‘Buddhism’ (developed in parallel to the French Bouddhisme and the German Buddhismus) emerged as a unifying abstraction relatively recently – in contrast to a range of vernacular terms such as the Sanskrit dharma, the Pali dhamma, and the Tibetan chos, which indicate ‘the law/doctrine’ (see also Lopez 1998). The term ‘Buddhism’ only became fashionable in the nineteenth century (initially in the context of the Royal Asiatic Society and other learned and spiritual associations) and describes, broadly speaking, a body of scriptures, religious practices, and communities of adepts that were originally inspired by the teaching of Gautama Siddhartha. The formulation of this term reflected the growing fascination of colonial civil servants, explorers, and scholars with this ancient religion. This interest led archaeologists, art historians, philologists, and linguists to embark on a huge enterprise of rediscovering Buddhist civilization in India and its ramifications across Asia. In the late nineteenth century, Buddhism began to be identified and assembled as a ‘world religion’ by European philologists. Scholars identified various strands of religious practice in Central, South, South East, and East Asia as part of a religion that was comparable with the Abrahamic ‘world religions’ of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity (Masuzawa 2005), with each world religion categorised as a roughly comparable kind of social phenomenon that related to a corresponding ‘civilisation’ in a similar way. But Buddhism did not emerge solely as a result of philological pursuit. Reform movements of the time were central to an on-going process of ‘intercultural mimesis’ (Hallisey 2014: 94) in which international representations of Buddhism and modernist Buddhist movements echoed and informed each other (Masuzawa 2005: 308), reflecting parallel debates about moral propriety and religious validity. What these developments highlight is that non-Buddhist scholars and practising Buddhists shared a concern to delineate ‘true’ or ‘pure’ Buddhism, and that their very different agendas informed each other.

Until the 1960s, studies of Buddhism tended to focus on a distant past. Philologists, art historians, and archaeologists brought together fragments from a remote Buddhist era in the reconstruction of ancient Buddhist civilizations (see e.g. Frauwallner 2010 [1956]). Scholars sometimes saw contemporary Buddhist societies at best as a source of subsidiary information on what used to be, and at worst as corruptions of what Buddhism should be.^[2] Languages of living Buddhist societies, such as Tibetan ones, were initially considered worthy of scholarly attention more because of the value of the Tibetan translations of Buddhist texts lost in their land of origin than for what they expressed in terms of Tibetan culture. Even when scholars started to look more carefully at living Buddhist societies and cultures, they combined dominant assumptions from their own culture with the Buddhist sense of authoritativeness of texts and tended to give priority to the written word handed down over generations. This is reflected, for example, in the emphasis given to textual research in international scholarship in Buddhist Studies. This approach often implied an idealised past set in contrast to a necessarily deficient present; erudite elites as a source of information were set in contrast to the wider seemingly ignorant population; wise elders were set in contrast to unknowing younger generations, etc. The understanding of Buddhism formed by European scholars and that of Buddhist scholastic elites coincided and combined in privileging a rationalistic approach that seemed to contrast sharply with local popular practices (a point that was critically discussed by Southwold [1983] in his study of Buddhism in a Sinhalese village).

Whilst international scholars of Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had developed their interest in Buddhist civilisations against the background of competing colonial powers, after WWII the geopolitical stage transformed radically with the process of decolonisation and the emergence of new nation-states. Gradually, new voices and new approaches emerged. By the 1970s new, more globalised scholarly networks became established, such as the International Association for Buddhist Studies and the International Association for Tibetan Studies, alongside earlier learned societies. Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978), which argued for a critical engagement with implicit cultural biases and colonial legacies, promoted a profound rethinking of Oriental Studies over the following decades. At the same time, the diaspora that originated from the suppression of Buddhism in communist countries as well as the revival that followed the transformation or collapse of communist regimes in Asia brought to the fore a wide range of new materials and new perspectives as well as the voices of scholars coming from the relevant regions. The increasing international access to countries where Buddhism was practised (Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Korea), or had been practised in the recent past and was being revived after a period of suppression (Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Buryatia), offered new opportunities for investigation and engagement. Anthropologists (largely from ‘Western’ countries but joined by an increasing numbers of scholars from Asia) began to analyse transformations in Buddhism within and in response to a colonially-structured modernity through an explicit engagement with contemporary postcolonial modernities.

The anthropology of Buddhism: early approaches

The relationship between precept and practice was a central focus for early anthropologists, who identified significant differences between local practices and liberation from Samsara according to Buddha’s teaching. In contrast to the Orientalist representation of Buddhism as rational, ascetic, renunciatory, and apolitical, anthropological studies revealed the complex ways in which Buddhism intersected with local political, economic, and social realities. Early anthropologists proposed idealised taxonomies to account for the diversity of practice that they witnessed. According to David Gellner (1990), early anthropological taxonomies fell into three broad camps: a ‘modernist’ approach in which true Buddhism is the ‘normative’ religion of elites, but most popular religion is informed by degraded elements of Buddhist teachings and practices (e.g. Terwiel 1975); an ‘anthropological’ approach that recognised elite and popular religion as being inseparable but distinct elements of a whole (Tambiah 1970; Spiro 1970), which, though apparently contradictory, must be understood in relation to each other; and a ‘populist’ approach that privileges the perspective of village Buddhism whilst being deeply critical of elite urbanite Buddhism and its claim to represent true Buddhism (Southwold 1983). Making sense of the diversity of practices and the seeming contradictions between them led anthropologists and scholars of Buddhism to variously interpret Buddhism as ‘syncretistic’, implying the amalgamation of different traditions (Terwiel 1975), as an accretive tradition that sits alongside other traditions (Gombrich 1971), as a total system containing different ‘modes’ of religion (Spiro 1982 [1970]), and as a holistic system that contained contrastive focuses (Tambiah 1970).

In the 1980s anthropologists, working in collaboration with scholars of other disciplines, began to argue that ‘Buddhism’ itself was not a stable category. Rich ethnographies, some of which came from areas that had only recently become accessible to outsiders, highlighted the great variety of Buddhist experiences. Critical approaches to the study of Buddhism opened up new avenues for investigation and scholarly engagement. The focus of attention shifted towards understanding reform movements, the proliferation of hybrid practices, and processes of reconstruction after suppression by secularist regimes. For example, Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere’s important work (1988) on Sri Lanka revealed how modernist and reformist forms of Buddhism emphasised subjective religious experience, formulated a new set of values for Sri Lanka’s Sinhala bourgeoisie, and expressed an ethno-national political struggle in Buddhist terms. In this time, significant anthropological works examined the relationship between one of the two main branches of Buddhism, called Mahayana Buddhism, and shamanism (Mumford 1989; Samuel 1993; Ortner 1978). For example, Stan Royal Mumford (1989) drew on Mikhail Bakhtin to argue that Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions mutually shape one another without relying on any overarching single system. In the 1990s, ritual complexity in Mahayana contexts became the focus of sustained anthropological attention. For instance, David Gellner’s (1992) ethnography of Newar Buddhism in Nepal examined the complexity of Newar ritual practice and Hindu-Buddhist relations, revealing the contested socio-religious hierarchies and identities of the Kathmandu Valley. This work shows how the Newar caste system has been shaped by Buddhist and Hindus religious hierarchies, and how this has created the grounds for negotiation and contestation.

Over time, an increasing number of anthropologists have engaged with Buddhist settings, bringing to bear wider epistemological and methodological debates within and across disciplinary boundaries. The focus of attention, often informed by wider cultural and geo-political processes, has produced a wide range of ethnographic engagements too diverse to cover in this entry, which will give just a few examples.

Religious change, contestation, and propagation

The debate about what counts as ‘Buddhist’ and how best to understand religious diversity has not just raged in international academia. Debates about the correct Buddhist path, for whom it is appropriate, and questions of authenticity and moral efficacy were pressing concerns for many Buddhists themselves. For example, since the 1990s Thailand has witnessed an efflorescence of competing forms of religiosity. Reformist Buddhists have argued that Buddhism and Buddhist practices are compatible with scientific empiricism and provide an alternative method for inquiring into and understanding the nature of suffering. During the same period, a proliferation of alternative practices has occurred, such as an unprecedented interest in protective tattoos and amulets, an increasing commitment to charismatic monks and merit-making activities, and an increase in popular spirit-medium cults informed by mass media and religious commodification (McDaniel 2011; Pattana 2005a; Tanabe 1991). Reformist Buddhists interpret such practices as ‘non-Buddhist’ while other Buddhists engage constructively with them as they multiply at an extraordinary rate.

Interactions across the Buddhist world and beyond have long been the focus of anthropological studies. In addition to significant work on Buddhist missionary and social welfare work in an era of globalisation (see Learman 2005; Queen and King 1996), anthropologists have charted the spread of globalised Buddhist movements and exchanges (see Chandler 2004). For example, Sarah Levine and David Gellner (2005) show that the recent introduction of Theravada Buddhism to Nepal has led to a revivalism that has invigorated Newar ethnic identity. These changes have influenced nationalist politics, expanded feminist Buddhist movements, and reformed lay expectations of religious organisation through an emphasis on the universal accessibility of teachings. International influence and globalisation are reflected in the worldwide spread of Tibetan Buddhism. They reveal how a particular Buddhist tradition adapts to new contexts. Thus Tibetan Buddhist practices and organisational structures are resignified in the diaspora (Lopes 2015), as seen, for example, in the Buddhist consecration of sacred sites in California.

Politics, violence, illness, and death

Tensions and paradoxes between the religious and the secular have attracted significant anthropological attention for some time (Bubandt & van Beek 2011). Anthropologists have examined the relationship between Buddhism and politics in countries in Asia (see Frydenlund 2016; Kawanami 2016) and the links between Buddhism, politics, nationalism, and the state (Frydenlund 2017; Madsen 2007; Raghavan 2016; Seneviratne 1999; Walton 2016).

Buddhists have revived their traditions after suppression in communist states and they have re-invented and re-purposed their ritual practices in new settings, often negotiating a difficult tension between secular state structures and religious authority. For example, historical political upheaval has led to significant connections between politics and religion for contemporary monks in Mongolia (Humphrey & Hürelbaatar 2013). In post-Maoist China, former communist comrades have taken up Buddhism (Fisher 2014), and monks in Southwest China negotiate transnational influences, the indifference of the state, and local revival efforts (Borchert 2017). In northeast Tibet, Geluk monastic revival and development are embedded in localised relationships, priorities, and values, beyond either resistance to or accommodation of state policies (Caple 2019). Jane Caple argues that relationships here are shaped in terms of virtue, rather than power and influence, revealing that people’s actions are not fully explained by state pressure.

The link between Buddhism and politics has extended into an anthropological consideration of violence in Buddhist contexts. A conflict between the Buddhist norms of non-violence and Buddhist support for state violence, monastic involvement in civil violence and Buddhist intersectarian violence, reflect the complicated relationship between religious nationalism and violence in diverse Buddhist contexts (Jerryson & Juergensmeyer 2010). For example, Iselin Freydunlund (2017) shows that a ‘positive Orientalist’ stereotype of peaceful Buddhists is incorporated into militant nationalist movements in Sri Lanka (see also Tikhonov & Brekke 2013). More broadly, anthropologists have traced the links between Buddhism, politics, and social movements. The cult of sacred mountains in Mongolia, for example, has been sponsored and reframed by the country’s president to support a nationalist agenda, one that can be considered ‘cosmopolitical’ for the way that it engages non-human actors in the political arena (Sneath 2014: 458-72). Furthermore, sacred landscapes and the rituals associated with them have been instrumental in the development of various forms of ‘green’ Buddhism intersecting with modernist environmentalism (see, for example, Miller, Smyer Yu & van Veer 2014). The relationship between social issues and Buddhism also plays out with respect to intense air pollution in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Here, Buddhist environmentalists engage critically with toxic air and its effects on all sentient beings, effectively incorporating concerns around air pollution into Mongolian religious and ritual life (Abrahms-Kavunenko 2019). Such works reveal how Buddhist ideas about purification, revitalisation, and enlightenment interact with pressing issues such as climate change, urban development, and nationalism.

Such ideas are linked to the theme of the impermanence of human life, which has been at the heart of Buddhism since its inception and significantly informs its healing practices and death rituals. In addition to engaging with a wide range of healing traditions across the Buddhist world (for example, the Tibetan sowa rigpa), attention has been given to the deployment of Buddhist concepts and re-purposing of rituals in light of new individual and public health challenges, as reflected in emerging scholarship in the COVID-19 pandemic (see Kuyakanon in press). Anthropological work has highlighted the particular focus on death, funerals, and the relationship between the living and the dead in Buddhist reflection and rituality. For example, highly complex funeral cultures in Southeast Asia and China mediate the relationship between the living and the dead, enabling ritual participants to cultivate religious merit and transforming the status of the dead (Ladwig & Williams 2012). Concerns with death are also reflected in public debates about the status and location of the dead in Japan, where new Buddhist funerary practices have developed in response to political and economic change (Rowe 2011). The politics of memory and representations of violence informed Thailand’s pro-democracy movement in the 1990s and its aftermath, as reflected in Alan Klima’s (2002) ethnography of funeral gambling and Buddhist meditation on death. Comparatively, the enduring relevance of a nineteenth-century monk and a ghost and the protective media associated with them in contemporary Thailand are described by Justin McDaniel (2011) as ‘cultural repertoires’, engagement with which supports Thai Buddhists as they navigate their lives.

Buddhist economics, monastic life, and gender

Anthropologists have analysed Buddhist historical and ethnographic materials through careful attention to economic practice. For example, they have shown that wearing protective amulets is intended to ensure educational success, protection from disease, and business prosperity. Many Buddhist practitioners in Japan engage with Buddhism in order to receive practical benefits, as highlighted by Ian Reader and George Tanabe’s (1998) examination of the economic and commercial aspects of religious practice. In Thailand, the Dhammakaya temple’s wealth and fundraising practices sparked extensive debate about the nature of authentic Buddhism and religious authority (Scott 2009). Rachelle Scott situates these debates in the context of the re-evaluations of wealth, global capitalism, and Asian values spurred by the Asian economic crisis. She shows that merit-making and meditation have been coupled with personal and social prosperity. Buddhist values of gifting and charity are central to renumeration for religious services, creating links between economics, death, and ritual (Sihlé et al. 2015). Are Buddhist alms donations best understood as attempting to avoid the debts of reciprocity (Strenski 1983)? Or does alms-giving create relationships of positive reciprocity between the monastic community and laity (Carrithers 1984)? These longstanding anthropological debates take on new significance in contemporary contexts. For example, the Buddhist values of gifting and charity inform the donation of human tissue in Sri Lanka, which Bob Simpson (2004) analyses to critique Euro-American framings of bioethics.

Anthropologists have provided detailed accounts of monastic life and the relationship between monastics and laity. For example, religious authority and truth in Tibetan monasticism are informed by the relationship between diverse traditions and communities (Mills 2003), and life within Himalayan Buddhist nunneries is informed by gendered hierarchies and concerns over subsistence (Gutschow 2004; Grimshaw 1992). In different ways, Kim Gutschow and Anna Grimshaw reveal that gender and sexuality inform ritual and social power. Lay-monastic relations also have powerful affective dimensions, as seen in Jeffrey Samuels’ (2010) rich ethnographic account of the constitutive role that emotions play in Sri Lankan social life and religious practice. Comparatively, contemporary debates about the role of temple Buddhism in Japanese society are informed by the ways in which Buddhism is approached by both laity and clerics and the economic realities that shape ritual practices, as explored by Stephen Covell (2005) in his study of the rhetoric of renunciation and the practices of clerical marriage and householding in contemporary Japanese Buddhism. Relationships between monastics and laity are also a central theme in anthropological research on gender. Anthropologists (along with historians and scholars of Buddhism) have devoted increasing attention to debates about gender and Buddhism, exploring the tension between a Buddhist ‘soteriological inclusiveness’ (Sponberg 1992), by which gender distinctions are inconsequential for enlightenment, and the apparent female exclusion and subordination that is often encountered in texts and living practices across Buddhist societies (Gyatso & Havnevik 2005; Soucy 2015). An increasing body of literature shows that women have engaged with Buddhist spiritual projects in a variety of ways (often misrecognised by historical sources), sometimes becoming spiritual masters in their own right, more often through patronage structures and merit-making activities. Through examinations of gendered sacred spaces (Makeley 1999: 343-66; Huber 1994: 350-71), the lives of female spiritual masters (Diemberger 2007; Seeger 2018) and the current Bhikkhuni/Bhikshuni debate (the bid to introduce full-ordination for women; Levine & Gellner 2005; Lekshe Tsomo 2008; Jampa Tsedroen 2008), anthropologists have shown that women participate in a wide range of Buddhist enterprises: not only the construction of temples and reproduction of scriptures projects, but also various forms of engaged Buddhism and charity work.

Transforming spiritual technologies

Anthropologists have mapped an increasing lay interest in morally transformative technologies, such as dharma study, ascetic discipline, and pilgrimage. Of these, lay meditation may be the greatest single change to have occurred in Theravada Buddhism since the Second World War (Gombrich & Obeyesekere 1988: 237). Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented lay meditation movement grew rapidly in Theravada Buddhist countries. Whereas previously, very few monastics practiced meditation and it was considered to be an inappropriate practice for laity, reformist meditation monks propagated vipassana meditation to monastics and laity alike. Early anthropological work in Thailand showed that meditation was promoted as a ‘rational’ and ‘authentic’ practice, informed by ideas about scientific rationality and personal responsibility (Van Esterik 1977). More recently, Joanna Cook’s (2010) ethnography of a meditation monastery in Thailand reveals that meditation impacts community organisation, social relationships, and gender hierarchy. She shows that, through meditative discipline, monastics gain experiential insight into the Buddhist truths of impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Comparatively, in Myanmar, the meditation movement transformed lay people’s responses to the totalitarian regime and posed a challenge to the military dictatorship (Jordt 2007). Distinctive practices of self-cultivation and their relationship to new Buddhist organisations are also reflected in the Taiwanese Fo Guang Shan, who hold short-term monastic retreats for lay people who want to commit themselves to periods of intensive cultivation (Laidlaw & Mair 2019). In Europe and America, Buddhism has increasingly been framed in a universal and psychological register, and meditation is increasingly interpreted as a method for psychological development. For example, mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, has become the basis for psychological interventions in non-Buddhist contexts, verified through rigorous scientific testing. Participants in mindfulness-based therapeutic interventions cultivate metacognitive awareness in order to support their mental health (Cook 2015). Comparatively, understandings of mindfulness in Asia are linked to local constructions of emotion and selfhood (Cassaniti 2018).

Conclusion

This entry has identified some key themes that have attracted anthropological attention in the study of Buddhism. On the one hand, anthropological exploration has challenged the idea that Buddhism constitutes a somewhat homogenous ‘world religion’. Since the 1960s, there has been significant scholarship on the different forms that Buddhism takes and its place in social life. And, since the 1990s, anthropological works have been characterised by a multiplicity of approaches and themes to reflect the diversity, transformation, and debate that marks the Buddhist world. As part of this work, anthropologists have challenged the tenet that Buddhism is best studied by focusing on texts alone. Instead, they have highlighted the importance of living settings and an engagement with Buddhist texts in context. At the same time, anthropology’s ethnographic and comparative approach to the religion has shown that Buddhist practices are being brought together in a world increasingly shaped by digital communication – at times creating feelings of a global monastic community, not too dissimilar to feelings of a global community (ummah) in Islamic contexts.

Buddhist ethnographic and historical materials have also enriched wider anthropological debates. Most importantly, non-Buddhist anthropologists have increasingly collaborated with scholars from Buddhist contexts and from other disciplines. Anthropological work has thus increasingly been produced in dialogue and collaboration with a polyphony of voices, political movements, and religious communities in Buddhist countries. As such, enriched and re-shaped by multiple vantage points, scholarly engagement has scrutinised the assumptions that have underpinned the very idea of an anthropology of Buddhism as a project – reflecting a critical shift from an ‘anthropology of’ to an ‘anthropology with’ as a collaborative endeavour.

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Note on contributors

Joanna Cook is a Reader in Anthropology at University College London. Her current research focuses on mindfulness, mental health, and governance in the UK. She is the author of Meditation in modern Buddhism: renunciation and change in Thai monastic life (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of Unsettling anthropologies of care (Anthropology and Humanism, 2020), The state we’re in: reflecting on democracy’s troubles (Berghan Books, 2016), Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) and Southeast Asian perspectives on power (Routledge, 2012).

Dr Joanna Cook, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. joanna.cook@ucl.ac.uk

Hildegard Diemberger is Research Director of Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Trained as a social anthropologist and Tibetologist at Vienna University, she has published numerous books and articles on the anthropology and the history of Tibet and the Himalaya as well as on the Tibetan-Mongolian interface, including the monograph When a woman becomes a religious dynasty: the Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2007), the edited volume Tibetan printing – comparisons, continuities and change (Brill, 2016), the exhibition catalogue Buddha’s word – the life of books in Tibet and beyond, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2013-2014), and the English translation of two manuscripts on the Buddhist history of Tibet, the dBa’ bzhed and the Shel dkar chos ‘byung (Austrian Academy of Science 1996, 2000).

Dr Hildegard Diemberger, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. hgmd2@cam.ac.uk

[1] See, for example, Keown 2013 for a brief overview; Schopen 2014 for discussions related to practical issues of early Buddhist monastic life; Gombrich 2009 on the development of early teachings; and Frauwallner 2010 [1956] for an overview of the classical philosophical debates.

[2] See, for example, the work of Austine Waddell, Giuseppe Tucci, and other prominent orientalists.

Sharia

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 18:13:03 +0000

Morgan Clarke

University of Oxford

Initially published 29 Nov 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20sharia

Abstract:

Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could, in theory, encompass all of life. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a good life more generally. Sharia ideas and discourses have been hugely important historically across the parts of the world touched by Islam. Despite their marginalization under colonial modernization projects, they remain intensely vibrant and relevant today. In the wake of the widespread failings of postcolonial secular states, sharia has become widely seen as an alternative and challenge to civil law and the liberal tradition. The violence of some of the most extreme contemporary Islamist movements has, however, contributed to an intensely negative stereotyping of sharia in the West.

Such extreme instances need to be placed in the context not only of recent and deeper history, but also the immense diversity of approaches to Islam and sharia that the world’s nearly two billion Muslims adopt today. Anthropology has made an invaluable contribution to such efforts. One key topic has been gender, and the place of sharia norms in family law. The relationship between sharia and other sets of norms has been a central case of legal pluralism within legal anthropology. Medical and economic anthropology have explored sharia’s role in responses to the challenges of new global technologies such as assisted reproduction and novel financial instruments. More broadly, as part of the wider anthropology of Islam, anthropologists have helped document the various ways in which sharia norms form part of the texture of Muslim life across the world.

Introduction

Sharia is a key concept within Islam and our contemporary world more generally. Originally an Arabic word (sharī‘a) from a root which could refer to both law and ‘a way’, it has often been translated into English as ‘Islamic law’. The sharia tradition does indeed include rules and processes dealing with financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce, for example. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could in theory encompass all of life, laying down right, and wrong, ways of doing almost everything. One will then be judged as to one’s actions by God on Judgment Day, according to the standards He has prescribed, in the Quran and through the example of the Prophet. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a good life, in ways analogous to its Abrahamic relatives the Jewish halakha and Catholic moral theology.

Sharia ideas and discourses have been hugely important historically across the parts of the world touched by Islam, even if the extent of their practical application (which has varied) has never been as comprehensive as theory might allow. They also remain intensely vibrant and relevant today – both to questions of personal conduct, and those as to the nature of society and how it should be governed. In most of the Muslim world, colonial and postcolonial modernity brought a restriction of sharia’s role in the life of the state and its replacement by European-style civil law (or English common law). In the wake of the widespread failings of postcolonial secular states and an ‘Islamic revival’ in response, the call to restore the sharia, as a crucial part of an ‘Islamic state’ even, has become common. Sharia has come to be seen widely as an oppositional force, a challenge to secular law, and thus also a challenge to the particular system of rights and freedoms associated with the liberal tradition. The violence of the most extreme contemporary Islamist movements, such as ISIS or Boko Haram, has contributed to an already intensely negative stereotyping of sharia, focused on harsh criminal punishments and patriarchal gender norms. In a continuation of Orientalist ideas, sharia has been widely depicted by its critics as antithetical to modernity.

Such extreme instances need to be placed properly in the context not only of recent and deeper history, but also the immense diversity of approaches to Islam and sharia that the world’s nearly two billion Muslims adopt today. Unhelpful and unrealistic stereotypes about sharia need to be challenged. What sharia actually means to Muslims in practice needs to be documented. Anthropology has made an invaluable contribution to such efforts. One key topic has been gender, and the place of sharia norms in family law. The relationship between sharia and other sets of norms, in Muslim-majority and minority contexts, has been a central case of legal pluralism within legal anthropology. And medical and economic anthropology have explored sharia’s role in responses to the challenges of new global technologies such as assisted reproduction and novel financial instruments. More broadly, as part of the wider anthropology of Islam, anthropologists have helped document the various ways in which sharia norms form part of the texture of Muslim life across the world.

Sharia discourse is a complex and rich tradition. Given the sheer breadth and sophistication of this body of intellectual history, let alone the linguistic and other skills required to grapple with it, Islamic legal studies can be a forbiddingly technical discipline. But, fortunately, non-specialists can draw on widely available and accessible guides, such as Wael Hallaq’s (2009a) very substantial account, Shari‘a: theory, practice, transformations (also available in abridged form, An introduction to Islamic law [2009b]). Earlier generations of anthropologists might have left such issues to the specialists. But Talal Asad’s (1986) emphatic assertion that Islam is a discursive tradition helped inaugurate a new focus on the place of Islamic discourse, including sharia discourse, in Muslim practice – ‘a new anthropology of Islam’ (Bowen 2012). Some have worried about the dangers of going too far in this regard. That would include over-emphasising the place of religious rules in what it means to be Muslim. Even if sharia currently looms large in both Muslim and non-Muslim imaginaries of Islam, we must not forget the breadth and richness of the Islamic tradition beyond it (Ahmed 2016: 113-29).^[1]

Sharia discourse and history

Some rules are explicitly stated in the Quran, the holy text of God’s word dictated to the Prophet Muhammad in seventh century (CE) Arabia. One verse (5:6), for example, tells Muslims how they should wash before prayers: ‘You who are faithful, when you stand up for prayers, wash your faces and hands to the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles.’ There is room for varying interpretation even here – which direction should you wash or wipe, for example? In deciding how correctly to interpret such verses, and how to formulate rules for conduct where they are not so explicitly stated, Muslims can draw on a wider range of sources: the Quran as a whole; the Sunna – the example of the Prophet, as transmitted in the Hadith, or the accounts of what he said and did (and for the Shia, also the example of the divinely guided Imams who came after him); the consensus of the Muslim community; and forms of human reasoning. This is a complex undertaking, a human science in its own right, called fiqh, which has resulted in much debate and controversy, and a vast body of legal literature and theory. Those discussions are carried on in all the languages of Islam, even if many of their shared terms (like fiqh) are originally Arabic.

Sharia and fiqh are tightly linked concepts. But while the word sharia points to God’s divine law, fiqh – which attempts to discover that law – is a human undertaking, whose content has changed and developed over time. After the Prophet’s death (in 632 CE), religious knowledge became gradually more organised, a domain of expertise on the part of increasingly professional scholars (‘ulamā’, sing. ‘alim). From around the ninth century CE, ‘schools of law’ (madhāhib, sing. madhhab) emerged around the thought and teaching of famous predecessors. Four Sunni schools have survived: Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafi‘i. Some are more associated with some parts of the world than others (the Maliki tradition is especially prevalent in North Africa, for instance). The Twelver Shi‘i tradition can be considered a parallel such school.

Scholarly expertise in the sharia is in part an act of religious devotion. But it also has a practical role to play. A jurist (i.e., an Islamic legal scholar) can provide guidance to non-experts, in formal terms as a non-binding legal opinion (fatwā). In this case the scholar would be acting as a muftī (one who gives fatwas) (see Masud et al. 1996). Or, they could arbitrate in disputes, working towards an authoritative and binding resolution or judgement, as a judge (qādī, hākim) (Masud et al. 2005). This could be as an independent scholar, or it could be in the service or with the backing of the state.

The relationship between the scholarly class and the state has varied across time and space. Sharia has often been characterised as a ‘jurist’s law’, in the sense that it is the scholarly class who define the law rather than the state, even if the ruler is in theory bound by God’s law, too. Despite a hackneyed – and historically inaccurate – notion that, unlike Christianity, Islam admits no separation between religion and state, the ulama have very often worked independently of it (Lapidus 1996). Recent scholarship has, however, argued for closer attention to the transformations wrought by the Mongol invasions of the Near East in the thirteenth century. In particular, the Ottoman dynasty adopted the Hanafi school of law as its official one – coexisting with, but privileged over, others (Burak 2013). This led to a closer entangling of sharia and its scholars with state administration over the vast sweep of the Ottoman Empire, alongside other forms of secular and customary law.

Academic studies of sharia’s history have concentrated on the Near East. But sharia concepts and ideas have spread far wider, throughout the worlds touched by Islam – indeed they have arguably been vital to the formation of this wider Muslim ecumene. That did not necessarily take the form of domination. People living under modernity have become so used to the idea of law as the instrument of power and social control that they tend to forget that legal forms are also enabling. Financial instruments have been crucial to the history of global trade – and sharia has in this form played an important role in world history (e.g. Lydon 2009 on trans-Saharan trade and Bishara 2017 on the Indian Ocean). Sharia norms underpinned a vision of civilised life that spanned the world and inspired at its frontiers (Scheele 2012). They also constituted a widespread framework of property relations and social reproduction (Goody 1990: 361-82; Mundy 2013).

The encounter with European colonialism and ideas of modernity brought a dramatic rupture in this history (Hallaq 2009: 396-442). In the Near East, even before colonial occupation, ideas and institutions of education and law began to change in response to the challenges of rising European power. Technical sciences became increasingly prestigious. By the nineteenth century, sharia was more and more replaced in the administrative life of the Ottoman state by European-style civil law. Sharia discourse itself was subject to new forms of rationalization, such as codification. Similar changes occurred elsewhere, often as a colonial imposition, such as in the Dutch East Indies or British-ruled India. Generally, sharia’s purview has become heavily limited in terms of jurisdiction, often restricted to personal status, i.e. family law. As Asad (2003) has said, this would be best seen not as due to this part of sharia being especially sacred, but rather as integral to the project of secular modernity to restrict ‘religion’ to the private sphere. It has further been argued that, in the process, sharia has been not just restricted but fundamentally transformed, into a sort of ersatz ‘Islamic law’ (e.g. Hussin 2016 on British interventions in Malaya, Egypt, and India). Where sharia had been bound up in an organic, society-wide complex of education, moral exhortation, dispute resolution, and administration, the ties that unified that world of discourse have now been largely broken.

Sharia ethnography and modernity

This transition from pre-modernization sharia to state-centred law has been captured in an enduring classic of sharia ethnography, Brinkley Messick’s The calligraphic state (1992). Messick had the good ethnographic fortune that highland Yemen, at the edges of the Ottoman Empire and not subject to European colonialism, had gone through this process of legal modernization within living memory. His fieldwork in the 1970s-80s took place at ‘the end of an era of reed pens and personal seals, of handwritten books and professional copyists, of lesson circles in mosques and knowledge recited from memory, of court judgments on lengthy scrolls and scribes toiling behind slant-topped desks’ (Messick 1992: 1). This ‘calligraphic’ culture constituted a distinct form of textual domination, a political economy of knowledge rooted in a tradition of learning, which began with memorization of the Quran and depended on personalised forms of authority. Sharia discourse had an open texture, which state codification foreclosed – symbolised, following Messick’s central metaphor, by impersonal print.

In keeping with the more holistic scope of pre-modernization sharia, Messick gives an account of the knowledge economy that not only covers the work of Islamic religious professionals as both muftis and judges, but also the traditional forms of Islamic education within which they were formed (see also Mottahedeh’s [1985] evocative book on Iran, and Eickelman 1985 on Morocco). He also attends closely to the textual forms that they produced. This combination of textual analysis and ethnographic insight, taken still further in a second, resolutely historical ethnography of sharia in Yemen, has won the appreciation of Islamic studies specialists, even if ‘the anthropologist as reader’ remains a somewhat unfamiliar figure, as Messick laments (2018: 33). This level of dialogue between anthropology and Islamic legal studies is, however, hard to reproduce, and not just because of the exceptional standards Messick’s work has set. Ethnography of contemporary sharia has to wrestle with the obvious ruptures that modernity has wrought. Although many governments (and would-be governments) across the world now claim not just to be ‘Islamic’ but to be restoring the sharia to its proper place, arguably the tradition they lay claim to is an invented one (Eickelman & Piscatori 2004: 22-45). Pre-modern sharia depended on modes of authority, power, and governmentality that are not those of the modern state. An authentically Islamic state in the modern mode may thus be ‘impossible’, in Hallaq’s (2012) widely cited, if polemical, terms. Contemporary state institutions that claim some tie to the sharia – as many family law systems across the Muslim world do, for instance – are actually fundamentally different from their predecessors.

Anthropologists would wish neither to dismiss contemporary Muslim claims to authenticity, nor to espouse naively essentialist notions of Islam. They have instead documented the ways in which such claims to authenticity can be constructed in conjunction with, as well as in opposition to, the rhetoric of modernity (Deeb 2006), and the new forms of authority that mass literacy, mass higher education and mass media entail (Eickelman & Anderson 2003; Eickelman & Piscatori 2004). There are contemporary Islamic states and Islamization projects and one can conduct ethnographies of them (e.g. Feener 2013; Salomon 2016). Conversely, something of the openness and personalised authority of the pre-modern tradition still endures, even in new digital forms (Clarke 2010). Nevertheless, despite the importance of a grounding in the discursive tradition for understanding the ways in which sharia is invoked today, there is a clear danger in simply mapping the terms and concerns of classical sharia onto contemporary forms of post-modernisation ‘Islamic law’, arguably very different as we have seen (Dupret 2007).

Islamic family law and legal pluralism

One of the earliest legal anthropological studies of a Muslim court, Lawrence Rosen’s (1989) study of a provincial court in Morocco, perhaps overreached in this regard. Rosen sees law as a window onto culture, and presents the work of a judge in a low-level family law court implementing a reformed codification of Islamic legal norms as representative of Islamic legal culture generally (see Mundy’s [1991] still-instructive review). The problems with such cultural generalization notwithstanding, this helped pave the way for others to show the diversity and complexity of contemporary Islamic family law, in ways that problematise any ready essentialization.

Family law is obviously gendered, and Islamic family law – as generally understood at least – is clearly patriarchal (for global and historical surveys, see An-Na‘im 2002; Tucker 2008). According to Islamic family law, marriage is, among things, a contract granting rights to sex and fertility in exchange for a dower, or bridal gift (mahr), and maintenance (nafaqa) from the husband to the wife. A man can in theory have up to four wives where a woman can only be married to one man. A husband has an absolute right to divorce, effected by his simply pronouncing it (talaq, often translated ‘repudiation’). A wife’s right is limited: she must either persuade her husband to divorce her, even in return for a consideration (khul‘), or persuade a judge that an annulment or judicial separation be effected. Women generally receive a smaller portion of an inheritance than men.

These rules vary in their details between the different Sunni and Shi‘i schools of law, and are, like any aspect of sharia, much debated within them. The case can be made for more gender-equal visions of God’s intentions. Modernising governments in the twentieth century reformed family laws by stitching together more progressive rulings from different schools, trying to rule out polygamy or make judicial divorce against a husband’s wishes easier, for instance – although bringing women and ‘the family’ under state law arguably hardened patriarchy in other ways (Hallaq 2009: 443-99). This process of reform continues (Welchman 2007). Feminist scholarship and activism has argued that it needs to go still further, critiquing the largely male body of scholarship that has dominated the interpretation of the sharia to date (Mir-Hosseini 1999, 2006).

Anthropologists have contributed extensively to the understanding of how such systems work in practice. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an anthropologist and activist, has provided pioneering ethnographic studies, and also made a compelling film with Kim Longinotto, Divorce Iranian style (1998), which remains one of the best ways into the subject. Her book Marriage on trial (1993) compares 1980s Shi‘i Iran, where family law had been re-Islamised after the Islamic Revolution, with Morocco, which had a more secular, reformed family legal system, based on the rules of Maliki fiqh. Although both family legal systems were nominally inspired by Islamic law, marriage dynamics play out within their constraints in very different ways, reflecting differences between Shi‘i and Maliki fiqh, aspects of local culture, and differences in the local economies – the relative access of men and women to paid labour, for example. Although post-revolutionary Iran’s system was nominally more ‘Islamic’, that did not translate into women having a necessarily worse position. In both cases, women are adept at using the resources that the system does allow them to pursue their claims.

Mir-Hosseini’s work has been joined by many others, with hundreds of articles and books across various disciplines and a number of full-length ethnographies by anthropologists of similar courts and tribunals in, for example, Kenya (Hirsch 1998), Malaysia (Peletz 2002, 2020; Daniels 2017), Indonesia (Bowen 2003), Zanzibar (Stiles 2009), Israel (Shahar 2015), Lebanon (Clarke 2018) and India (Lemons 2019), as well as less formal ‘sharia councils’ in the West (Bowen 2016 on the UK). These studies problematise simplistic stereotypes by revealing the sheer diversity in sharia discourse, as well as the shared principles that unite it, and the complexities of putting sharia into action as law (see e.g. Sonneveld & Stiles 2019 on how a single form of Islamic legal divorce, khul‘, has been interpreted very differently in different contexts). Sharia never exists in a vacuum; its social life is always shaped by a dialectic with other cultural, linguistic, and normative forms. A shared concern, however – one which Rosen (1989) picked out – is the emphasis placed on trying to repair damaged social relations, over and above pronouncing judgement. Away from the ideal of law, these studies illustrate the pragmatic strategies of the actors within the courts: wives, husbands, lawyers, court officials, and judges.

Those varied ethnographies are of settings with very different legal systems and political concerns, where sharia discourse, whether honoured or stigmatised, recognised by the state or ignored, is only one of a number of competing legal and normative systems – a key example of legal pluralism (Shahar 2008; see also Erie 2016 on China). Negotiating between such different normative systems is an important part of the legal process for litigants and defendants. But it can also be part of a wider conversation about the nature of a polity. Michael Peletz (2002) has shown how Malaysia’s sharia courts are bound up in projects of a distinctive Malaysian Islamic modernity. John Bowen (2003) has framed discussions about the relations between customary law (adat), sharia, and state law in Indonesia as an ‘anthropology of public reasoning’, to be compared with discussions of value pluralism elsewhere – as in his subsequent study of the place of Islam and sharia norms in France (Bowen 2011). There, and elsewhere, sharia can be a foil for thinking about what it means for a state to be secular as much as religious (Asad 2003; Agrama 2012; Lemons 2019). It is also a key frame of reference for notions of civility and citizenship, not just the relation between citizens and state, but also between different communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, in Muslim-majority and minority settings (Hefner 2000; Modood et al. 2006; Modood 2010; Hefner & Bagir 2021).

Global assemblages

Peletz (2013) has characterised Malaysia’s contemporary sharia courts as an eclectic ‘global assemblage’, where sharia discourse is joined with the discourses of civil and common law, corporate ‘e-governance’ and Japanese management and auditing practices. Sharia is itself globally distributed through networks of scholarship, funding, and training, with important nodes in the Middle East – not least the Arabian Peninsula and Iran – South and South-East Asia, and the West. The notion of sharia as a mobile global form that is localised in combination with others is a fertile one more broadly. Rights discourse, for instance, has become a globally recognised way of demanding recognition – one that has parallel forms in the sharia tradition, but is now invoked alongside and in contrast with it, linked to Western notions of human rights and individualism (Osanloo 2006). Sharia norms of food sourcing and preparation – ‘halal’ – have become part of global capitalist enterprise, where religious rules intersect with those of food hygiene and new notions of risk (Fischer 2011; Tayob 2016). An entire Islamic banking sector has arisen catering for new markets for religiously sanctioned versions of contemporary financial instruments (Maurer 2002; Rudnyckyj 2019).

‘Islamic bioethics’ is another such contemporary assemblage of sharia and other forms of knowledge-power, which speaks to the ways in which sharia discourse has managed to keep up with the present pace of technological and social change (Clarke et al. 2015). Islamic legal scholars have been challenged on the rights and wrongs of biomedical innovations such as assisted reproduction and organ transplantation, in ways that bring together medical and Islamic legal knowledge in novel constellations. Sherine Hamdy (2012) has shown in exemplary detail how fatwas on the end of life and organ transplantation are produced in a dialectic with medical authority in the context of a public health and ecological disaster in Egypt. Simultaneously, the same scholars are also having to define the creation of life in response to the globalization of assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation, as Marcia Inhorn (e.g. 2003) has tirelessly documented. Sharia discourse has thus seen its own complicated debates about the ‘new kinship’ relations that result. Is it religiously permitted to use donor gametes, for instance? Does the possibility of having more than one wife diminish fears that the use of donor eggs resembles adultery? Who then should be considered the mother: the provider of genetic material or the woman who bears the foetus? What are the consequences for family life given sharia norms on gendered modesty except with close relatives? (See, for example, Clarke 2009; Naef 2017)

In these cases, Islamic legal opinions are often not as restrictive as common stereotypes about religious rules being ‘strict’ might suggest. On the contrary, sharia discourse can also be enabling, by allowing someone to undertake a course of action with religious sanction, as well as a source of comfort and help to those faced with crucial life decisions and crises. Sharia can be the inspiration for state regulation in these morally challenging domains. But it can also be a resource for personal ethical life. Indeed its personal ethical role has arguably increased under modernity, given the restriction of the place of sharia in state law (see Messick 1996 on shifting patterns in the types of questions put to muftis).

Sharia and the anthropology of ethics

Islamic examples have thus unsurprisingly been central to the burgeoning new anthropology of ethics, which has emphasised not just socially imposed obligation, but also the ways in which people actively try to make themselves good and virtuous.^[2] Sharia norms can form part of such projects of the virtuous self. Saba Mahmood’s (2005) well-known discussion of Muslim piety among women in Cairo turns on, among other things, the way in which the fulfilment of religious obligations such as prayer or wearing a headscarf is seen to help cultivate desired virtues such as steadfastness and modesty (see also e.g. Deeb 2006). This reimagining of religious duties as a means to religious and moral fulfilment, rather than solely as constraint, has transformed the possibilities for understanding and representing what obligations like wearing modest dress might actually mean to Muslims. The insights of this new anthropology of virtue have also been helpful in revisiting some of the classic themes of Islamic legal studies. Hussein Agrama (2010) has shown how the mufti’s role can be seen not just as Islamic legal interpretation, but as a pedagogical intervention in the ethical lives of those consulting him (or, more rarely, her). Islamic scholars who work as judges in sharia courts can find themselves caught between this ethos of pedagogy and their duty to apply the impersonal rules of legal bureaucracy (Clarke 2012). Ideas of virtue and its cultivation also inflect the processes of Islamic legal scholarship and interpretation, where it is thought that a virtuous scholar is more able to interpret God’s law correctly than a less virtuous one (Nakissa 2014).

Despite the salience of sharia rules in everyday religious life for many Muslims, influential voices in the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Islam (Schielke 2009; Lambek 2010) have nevertheless warned against over-emphasising religious rules. One concern is ethnographic, that not all Muslims live such coherent and observant religious lives. Another is theoretical, perhaps even aesthetic, that rules per se are too flat and restrictive an ethical form to be allowed to dominate our moral imaginations. The image of the rule-obsessed ‘Salafi’ Muslim has become an archetype (among many Muslims as well as non-Muslims) of unrealistic and oppressive sharia-mindedness, although the reality of Salafi practice would bear much closer ethnographic examination (Fadil & Fernando 2015; see e.g. Inge 2016). My own position is that rule-following is an indispensable technology of the virtuous self, as well as of social coordination, but one with its own characteristic possibilities, complexities, and limitations. The use of rules would thus benefit from more nuanced analysis than it has been given in the anthropology of ethics so far (Clarke 2015). Sharia would seem an excellent place to start, as an almost-paradigmatic example of a rule-focused approach to living well, but one that can and should be seen in comparative perspective – alongside Jewish halakha, Christian casuistry, Hindu law, or secular codes of civility, for example (Clarke & Corran 2021).

Conclusion

Sharia is a prominent theme in today’s global public sphere, a source of norms that structure people’s lives in various ways across the world and an important part of religious practice for many (but not all) Muslims. Anthropologists have contributed much to challenging the lazy and often damaging stereotypes that surround it, in terms of documenting and analysing the very different ways in which sharia can be understood, invoked and practiced. Sharia also has much to offer as a topic for anthropological thought more widely, as an important legal tradition that challenges state-centric notions of law and as a quintessentially legalistic way of approaching moral and religious righteousness. Sharia indeed problematises and fractures the modern liberal distinction between law and ethics in ways that open up fundamental questions for social theory, as indeed for the world at large (Asad 2003; Hefner 2016).

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Note on contributor

Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Islam and new kinship: reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009) and Islam and law in Lebanon: sharia within and without the state (Cambridge, 2018).

School of Anthropology, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford. OX2 6PE morgan.clarke@anthro.ox.ac.uk

[1] See also Schielke, S. 2018. Islam. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/islam).

[2] See Laidlaw, J. 2017. Ethics/morality. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ethics-morality).