Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Governmentality

Postsocialism

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

University of Oxford

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

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

Tax

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 23:04:37 +0000

Miranda Sheild Johansson

University College London

Initially published 14 Dec 2020

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

Abstract:

Paying tax or avoiding tax is part of everyday life across the globe. But what kinds of payments are taxes, and how do fiscal systems shape society? Taxes are often conceived of as a nexus of state-citizen relations and an intrinsic part of a social contract where they are exchanged for political representation and a level of state protection. But ethnographic evidence demonstrates that separating out taxes from other payments is not straightforward, and the motivations for paying tax, or collecting tax, are far from universal. In addition to shaping national and international economies, taxes construct social and political relations which cast citizens and communities in particular roles, such as ‘contributor’ and ‘wealth creator’, or ‘dependant’ and ‘scrounger’. As such, taxes are political tools that are wielded in processes of governance. Yet fiscal systems are also crafted from the bottom up, through taxpayer action and taxpayer logics, and gain meanings from the broader historical and cultural contexts in which they exist. In recent years, and in the context of multiple financial, environmental, and health crises across the globe, discussions about how we might build better futures have put the spotlight on taxes as a tool for redistribution. The logics that drive new tax policies and laws are embedded in specific concepts of tax justice and tax competition, as well as the relation between the sovereign state and the international community. Tax is a locus of many important themes, both academic and political. Understanding tax is crucial to understanding our societies.

Introduction

Taxes are ubiquitous in the lives of people around the globe, whether they are hailed or hated, paid or evaded; they are an unavoidable part of contemporary statecraft and everyday economic exchanges. But what kinds of payments are taxes—what is being exchanged, how do taxes gain meaning within their cultural contexts, and how do they structure our economic and social relationships? Why is inheritance tax—supposedly one of the great tools of redistribution—referred to as the ‘death tax’ in the US? Why do rural-to-urban migrants in Bolivia studiously avoid paying value-added tax (or VAT), but make great efforts to pay property tax? What is the difference between paying tithes to a church and taxes to a government? What do people expect in return for their taxes paid, and how do they justify their evasion of tax?

In the simplest terms, and in theory, taxes are a legally legitimated means by which to transfer wealth from individuals and businesses to governments, and then on to targeted areas of public provision, such as education and health, or to service national debt. Taxes are commonly levied on labour (income tax), profit (corporation tax), wealth and property (inheritance tax, wealth tax, property tax), and consumption (VAT), among other things. They are divided into direct taxes, such as income tax, which are collected directly from a person and business, and indirect taxes, such as VAT, which are collected on transactions and by intermediaries. Taxes are generally progressive (higher rates for higher incomes), or flat/regressive (the same rate for all, meaning those on lower incomes end up paying a larger share of their income if the tax is indirect).

Beyond these defining characteristics, taxes exist in political and cultural contexts where they shape social relationships and take on diverse meanings. The anthropology of tax explores these processes and ultimately how people make and unmake society through fiscal relations. This includes a focus on both the oppressive and liberating effects of tax. As a tool for oppression and subject-making, tax policies and practices have been analysed as Foucauldian disciplinary technologies that mould people into self-policing taxpayers (Hobson 2004; Likhovski 2007); they have also been scrutinised as part of hegemonic colonial systems where they are, at best, out of touch with taxpayer logics (Sheild Johansson 2018), and at worst, instruments of racist oppression (Willmott 2020). But taxes are also held as tools of redistribution in a battle against growing global inequality (Maurer 2008; Piketty 2014), the key to sovereign power in the face of dominant financial logics, and the means through which economically just and environmentally sustainable futures might be built.

In anthropology, tax has been approached in broadly three different ways: scholars have investigated fiscal systems, including politics, policy, and finance; they have studied tax collectors and the state’s desire for compliant taxpayers; and they have explored the perspective of taxpayers. These three areas of focus have all benefited from other areas of anthropological concern, such as the study of the state, citizenship, financial systems, money, bureaucracy, and law, as well as from considerable cross-disciplinary efforts. For instance, the work with and on tax collectors draws on business studies, organization studies, tax administration, and science and technology studies (Björklund Larsen 2017; Boll 2014a, 2014b; Oats & Wynter 2018). Likewise, scholarship focusing on taxpayer perspectives builds on both compliance work and social psychology (Kirchler & Braithwaite 2007).

In addition to these influences, fiscal sociology is the most apparent forerunner of anthropology of tax. In fiscal sociology, as popularised by the early twentieth century economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, taxes are recognised as having power beyond that of shaping obvious areas of influence such as policy and socio-economic relations to include the ‘spirit’, ‘cultural level’, and ‘social structure’ of a nation (Schumpeter 1918: 101, in Makovicky & Smith 2020: 4). More recently, and in the face of a growing global gap between the 1% and the 99% (the wealthy few and the majority rest), fiscal sociology has focused on how tax policies may structure race, class, and gender inequalities, as well as how they can be productively employed to battles these same inequalities (Martin & Prasad 2014).

While fiscal sociology certainly addresses many of the topics that are of import to anthropologists, it approaches tax somewhat ‘narrowly’. While it looks widely and inventively for the impact of tax, fiscal sociology often takes for granted that it is clear what kinds of payments taxes are, what kind they are not, and that all this is defined by governments (Meagher 2018). By contrast, an anthropological approach to tax tackles fiscal questions both broadly and narrowly. In a broad sense, anthropology does not work with one single definition of tax. Nor does it assume how tax works or what it means in different contexts. Its starting point tends to be that people’s definitions of tax will always be informed by a larger cultural context, including, but not limited to, other financial exchanges and the diverse ways that public goods and services can be produced (Bear & Mathur 2015; Kauppinen 2020). In other words, the meanings attached to taxes, the relationships and values they produce and are produced by, are deeply cultural. In a narrow sense, anthropology often explores how an official category of tax is defined and legitimised in a particular setting, as well as the power implications of these definitions.

The social contract and governmentality

A narrower understanding of the role of taxes in society often presupposes an origin story where tax is foundational to the social contract and the making of ‘civilised’ society, as imagined by Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes (1968 [1651]) and John Locke (1988 [1689]). In this view, citizens submit to the authority of majority rule and its associated institutions, relinquish certain rights (such as total freedom and self-determination), and pay tax to their state in return for social order, protection of themselves and their property, and political representation. In theory, paying tax within the context of a social contract marks inclusion and privilege. Its core logic involves a reciprocal relationship between states and citizens who are unified in their understanding of the aim of taxes—the creation of an agreed-upon communal world. Across time and space, expectations of what this supposed social contract should include has varied, although public infrastructure, services, and the defence of some human and social rights are often expected in return for submission to authority and taxes paid.

However, not only do these Anglo-European models of state formation provide just one story of state-society relations, they also naturalise the relationship between taxation, property rights, and political representation (Guyer 1992). This raises the question of whether the social contract and taxes have to go together at all, or whether their link is a mere ‘traveling idea’, albeit persistent and far-reaching, disconnected from ethnographic realities and with limited explanatory power (Makovicky & Smith 2020: 8). One does not have to look far to find examples where tax does not function as one side of a positive social contract. In particular, work in postcolonial societies has demonstrated the multiple and at times diverging trajectories of the historical emergence of tax use, policy models, or ideas of representation and democracy (Guyer 1992; Roitman 2005, 2007).

In her work on fiscal relations in West Africa, Kate Meagher (2018) argues that taxes in colonial Nigeria were not collected to pay for public services, but instead to cover the cost of the administration that created ‘order’ and protection for a select few. As such, the tax system hinged on an extortion logic, rather than one of a fair exchange. Another example can be found in highland Bolivia. Here, a social contract framing of taxes did not resonate with Indigenous populations because tribute and taxes were historically paid not in return for services or representation, but rather for protection of land and livelihood in a context where it was the state itself that was threatening to take these away (Sheild Johansson 2018, 2020). This resonates with the work of Mohawk sociologist Kyle Willmott, which details the resistance of First Nations peoples in Canada to the assimilationist project of tax-based citizenship by the settler state, and the preposterous offer of having to pay for one’s own subjugation (2020). In these contexts, paying tax does not confer citizenship, mark inclusion, or signal a state-citizen endeavour to bring about an agreed upon collective world. In fact, the opposite is often closer to the truth.

Beyond criticism of taxation by people who feel short-changed or oppressed by their states, high taxes and high public spending are also critiqued from a different political vantage point—that of libertarianism. From this perspective, a ‘big’ state that redistributes resources is unethical as it violates individuals’ economic freedom (Venkatesan 2020). While tax on property is perhaps the most galling to classic libertarians for whom the foundational principle of self-ownership, a kind of ‘natural’ liberty, generates unassailable rights to property (Venkatesan 2020: 143), so called ‘sin taxes’—taxes placed on goods which are deemed undesirable, or considered to have a significant cost on society, such as alcohol and sugar—have recently resulted in heated public debates in many countries about the legitimate reach of government. ‘Sin’ taxes open up questions of biopolitics, the disciplining and management of bodies and life processes by the government, and the ethics of employing taxes to do this (Venkatesan 2020: 143).

These discussions dovetail with explorations of tax and governmentality (the powerful processes by which the state makes governable subjects through the shaping of habits, aspirations, and beliefs), although the latter’s approach is driven not by libertarian ideology, but by an analytical focus on power. In this body of work, tax relations are understood as both a means through which to shape citizens into governable subjects (that is, tax relations as tools for governmentality), and the goals of broader processes of governmentality which will result in compliant taxpayers (Likhovski 2007). An early Foulcauldian analysis of tax as a disciplining technology is Alistair Preston’s ethnography of a music production company in the United Kingdom (1989). Here, accounting practices became the nexus for both surveillance and self-disciplining, with the business absorbing implicit and explicit injunctions of a tax collection authority, rendering itself legible to the state. These injuctions included complex bookkeeping systems, new financial language, and the revised organization of time. A more comprehensive claim about tax as a mode of governmentality is that the taxpayer identity is, by its very nature, not just a self-governing political subject, but one that legitimises the liberal state (Wilmott 2017: 259). The ‘taxpayer’ is a political actor and an idea, one that holds the government to account through scrutinising public investments, denouncing overspending, voting, and being invested in the government. In this sense, the taxpayer supports and morally justifies a liberal state and its associated limited public spending.

Why do people pay or evade taxes, and why does the state collect them?

Within the broader tax literature, the topic of compliance, or why people pay, is a significant area of study, often connected to political projects that aim to increase fiscal revenue. It predominantly considers compliance to be a societal good, as long as it is ethically enforced. In anthropology, questions of exchange logics are motivated not by a commitment to compliance, but by an interest in understanding how fiscal logics are culturally embedded, how they relate to ethical conversations about a ‘good’ society (Venkatesan 2020: 142), and how diverse fiscal perspectives shape economic landscapes and economic subjects. The allocation and movement of resources within societies, and the political implications of this, has always been a core topic of anthropology, with the discipline exploring theories of redistribution (Polanyi 1944, 1957), sharing (Ferguson 2015; Widlok 2017), mutual taking and demand-sharing (Bird-David 1990; Peterson 1993), payment (Maurer 2008), and systems of immediate return amongst egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities who resist accumulation and property relations (Woodburn 1982). In particular, exchange and reciprocity are classic fields of study in anthropology relating to the socio-politics of resource management (Malinowski 1922, 1935; Mauss 1954 [1925]; Lévi-Strauss 1971 [1949]). Anthropologists tend to consider reciprocity as key to a pre-capitalist social contract that created stability and society itself. In this thinking, reciprocity is not simply motivated by material interests, but also by a moral order and sense of mutual dependence.

Building on anthropology’s rich scholarship on reciprocity to look at taxes, Lotta Björklund Larsen (2018) has shown how taxpayers in Sweden approach their fiscal relationship from a perspective of reciprocity and a ‘fair share’. For instance, one of her interlocutors, a self-employed plumber called Anders, justified taking occasional jobs off the books by pointing to the frivolous spending of politicians. His tax evasion was not rooted in a rejection of taxation as such, but rather concerned with a re-balancing of the fiscal relationship, ensuring it was fair. Anders thus perceived his occasional evasion as an act that protected, rather than undermined, the moral integrity of the fiscal system. Björklund Larsen’s ethnography demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal thinking in Swedish fiscal cultures, and the imagining of the fiscal system as a moral one. The taxpayer view that fiscal exchanges must be connected to a mutually-agreed-upon moral order is also illustrated by Mireille Abelin’s work on Argentine elites who justify their tax evasion by arguing that the Argentinian state gives nothing in return. Nor, they claim, has it succeeded in becoming the ‘modern’ state, or moral order, that they wish to contribute to (Abelin 2012a: 333-7). Tax evasion, or fiscal disobedience (Roitman 2005), can thus be a political act which aims to criticise a range of state behaviours perceived as falling short of the desired moral order.

Reciprocity is one fiscal logic that may undergird tax, but as anthropologists have explored, the perceived and desired character of fiscal relations can vary widely. For instance, on the Istrian peninsula, Croatian business owners lamented the introduction of a digitised VAT system, not because they did not wish to pay, but because the immediate debiting technology built into the system took control away from them over the timing of payments and credits (Smith 2020). This, in turn, left them automatically out of pocket at the moment of transaction and then vulnerable to the whims of their buyers, large businesses who often did not settle their bills for long periods of time. The Istrian business owners lost trust in the state and rejected the VAT tax, not because they did not see a return for their taxes in terms of services, but because the state was unable or unwilling to promote a fiscal structure and a wider economy which ensured larger companies honoured their debts in a timely fashion, or looked out for the small business owner. This case also shows that technology and policy design play out in socio-economic and politicial contexts, and opposition to a particular tax may be rooted in its mechanics, as opposed to whether the exchange itself is appealing.

In peri-urban, highland Bolivia, recent rural-to-urban migrants eagerly paid property tax and commercial licence tax in order to secure living and selling space in the city and the ability to pursue a livelihood beyond the state, not in exchange for representation or public services (Sheild Johansson 2020). In Nigeria, recent fiscal expansion meant that receipts of ‘land use charge’ paid became crucial to secure fragile property claims (Goodfellow & Owen 2018 ). In this case, regular payments of land use charge produced letters issued by Lagos State declaring that a citizen was ‘a good one’; these letters, which evidenced occupancy and moral standing, could be mobilised against threats of eviction as well as occasionally used to claim relocation compensation if state-enforced eviction did happen. In the examples from Bolivia and Nigeria, utilitarian desires to ensure security and make a living were the motivating logic of paying tax, as opposed to a notion of a fair return. Notably, in Bolivia and Nigeria, taxpayers disaggregated their fiscal systems and examined the different exchanges that each tax implied, as opposed to viewing their taxes as part of one overarching moral exchange with the state.

Paying tax has also been explored as a technology through which to shore up citizenship claims by migrant workers, both in order to gain legal rights in their place of residence and to satisfy a yearning to have their labour validated as productive by their host states and fellow residents (Vicol 2020). Conversely, paying tax can be experienced as a form of forced submission and inclusion into oppressive regimes, as exemplified by the relationship between First Nations peoples in Canada and the colonial settler-state (Willmott 2020). Finally, tax scholars have argued that fiscal behaviour may not just be rooted in any particular motive or exchange logic, but that it fundamentally depends on a combination of material entities, such as bureaucratic forms and IT systems, and social actors. Studying tax relations by focusing on ‘socio-material assemblages’ foregrounds that taxation is a distributed form of action that involves multiple actors, habits, character traits, accounting systems, larger structures, such as the procedures for receiving social benefits, and even popular discourses, like that on the financial crises (Boll 2014b: 300).

A crucial point for the analysis of the fiscal policy of contemporary governments and for any deeper understanding of fiscal exchange is to appreciate the fact that a state’s motive for taxing a population is not simply one of fiscal revenue. Instead, fiscal policies are employed by governments to structure and influence the national economy and a range of social relations, including those of health and education, family finances, gender and work, property ownership, consumer habits, cross-generational sharing of wealth, and many more. In the case of the UK government, for example, it has been suggested that the income that tax brings to the treasury is secondary to its role in stimulating the economy and managing demand—through re-distribution, subsidies, and levies—as well as investing citizens in their nation-state and encouraging electoral participation (Murphy 2015: 53-65). In this way, fiscal policy can be purposefully used to create both markets and citizens.

What are taxes? Meanings, imaginaries, and values

How taxes and fiscal relationships are imagined, both as real and ideal, depends on their wider economic and cultural contexts, including other ‘tax-like’ exchanges. Research on ‘informal economies’ has offered insight into the myriad unofficial payments that populations all over the world make to state and non-state actors and which are categorised by interlocutors and scholars as ‘tax-like’, as they offer representation, infrastructure, service provision, and security, amongst other things. Some examples of these payments include bribes to local state representatives (Roitman 2007: 202-3), fees to unions who offer political representation (Lazar 2008; Sheild Johansson 2020), contributions to community organizations (Meagher 2018), and tithing to churches (Kauppinen 2020; Meagher 2018). While these payments are not made directly to the state, they are made and claimed in order to finance communal worlds. As Meagher has noted in Nigeria, these payments by ‘informal’ populations to non-state actors, as well as unoficially to state-actors, contribute considerably to the public sphere, including public sector salaries (through bribes), and security (2018), and confound the state-citizen axiom of taxation by displacing the state. They also contribute to collapsing the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors as separate spheres of economic action, by showing how state insitutions rely on both ‘informal networks’ and sources of funding to produce and deliver public services and infrastructure (Owen 2018). Lastly, they challenge a narrow definition of public goods as state-delivered resources (Bear & Mathur 2015).

While these tax-like payments may not always be made with the aim of supplanting taxes, they make up a universe of monetary transfers within which taxes exist and therefore function as a contextual evaluation of official taxes (Kauppinen 2020: 39). One such payment that has been explored anthropologically is tithes in Ghana (Kauppinen 2020). The tithe payers’ assessments of the ethics of the fiscal exchange with the state was profoundly shaped by their perception of their reciprocal relationship with God, who offered divine favour and eternal life, and led them to expect the state to deliver ‘decent lives’ in a broad sense.

The vitality of these ‘tax-like’ payments begs the question: is there analytical purchase in blurring the boundary between taxes, as defined by governments, and the collective pooling of resources beyond the state? Recent work on a Catalonian anti-capitalist cooperative explores this possibility (Bäumer Escobar 2020). The cooperative was set up to create an alternative economic space, with its own banking system, currency, distribution network, and exchange of goods and services. It also supported tax evasion by allowing members to use the cooperative’s tax registration number when conducting business. In this way, self-employed people could exchange a hefty minimum tax payment to the state for a far lower fee to the cooperative. Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar introduces the concept of ‘fiscal commons’ to talk about the common pooling of resources beyond the purview of the state, arguing for the recognition of multiple and interconnected fiscal systems.

What kind of payment a tax is, and what kind of activity should be taxable, is in part a question of values. The indeterminacy of values (Guyer 2004), and the inherent problem of commensuration in tax systems—that is, the problem with making different activities and values equivalent with one another—is explored in Matti Eräsaari’s study on Helsinki timebanks (2020). In the Helsinki timebanks, time was accumulated and exchanged. Here, one hour of work of any sort was ‘worth’ one ‘while’, and the local marketplace was constituted by ‘whiles’. Thereby, labour was demonetised and re-valued through the measure of time. In a move to formalise the timebanks, the Finnish government demanded the whiles be converted to a taxable form (such as labour or traditional currency) and calculated according to what the associated professional service might cost on the labour market, arguing that by exchanging whiles of professional services, the timebank members were in fact evading tax. This example demonstrates that what and who is deemed as taxable is a question of negotiation—when does a favour in return for a favour become a job ‘off the books’? It also reveals that governments need fixed values in order to tax, such as a currency, and a common mode of commensuration, such as a market, to manage a fiscal system.

Tax policy, tax payment, and tax evasion are all acts that create and reflect state-society relations, financial flows, and imaginaries of them. As Viviana Zelizer (1994) has shown in relation to household budgets, people experience money differently depending on where it comes from and where it is going—money is ‘earmarked.’ In the same way, larger flows of money are named and variably understood, with different moral and social elements attached to them. For instance, direct and indirect taxation produce very different sets of relationships and responses. Paying ‘sin’ taxes, such as VAT on alcohol, tobacco, or sugar might be experienced as very different from paying income tax, which is a tax on a person’s labour. The taxes paid by a small business, a so-called ‘wealth creator’, may be viewed as a different money flow from the income tax paid by a health worker in the public sector (whose wages can be construed as being paid for by the taxpayer).

Inheritance tax is another emotive example of how taxes are experienced as more than just flows of money. While inheritance has been shown to be a key driver for wealth inequalities (Piketty 2014), and clearly counters societal aims of meritocracy, it is often referred to in the United States as the ‘death tax’ (Yanagisako 2018: 5). This is because it is experienced as a levy on the moment of death, rather than the wealth itself. Its critics also claim that inheritance tax intervenes inappropriately in the unity of the family (Hegel 1991 [1821]: 178, in Beckert 2008: 254). For instance, at a moment of death, a house, which may already be experienced by the deceased’s family members as their home, is suddenly ‘in transfer’, taxed, and then re-ascribed as belonging to the heir/s, or lost if the tax bill cannot be paid. In this way, inheritence tax individualises property relations. While all these taxes are just movements of money, plusses and minuses on a ledger, the money flows are experienced through broader values such as productivity, bodily autonomy, work, and kinship—as Zelizer (1994) argues, the notions of provenance and acts of earmarking matter.

Fiscal landscapes are not just imagined by taxpayers, but also by collectors, both the policy-makers and the enforcing officers. Tax collection depends on legibility, and as tax collectors often navigate partially blind through fiscal landscapes, with much of the informal economy hidden from them, they need to construct representations which allow them to act (Boll 2014a). The constructions of these representations, which are both utilitarian and ideological, matter to how these collectors then conduct their jobs, such as which buinsess sectors they choose to investigate (Boll 2014a). This in turn shapes fiscal behavior by creating a greater opportunity to evade tax within certain sectors (Kirchler & Braithwaite 2007).

Debt and credit

Imaginaries and value-inflected meanings of taxes gain character through their roles in relationships of debt and credit. Talking about taxes in terms of credit and debt, benefits, and the broader national economy, tends to invoke moral acts and positionalities. For instance, public employees may be cast as indebted to private sector taxpayers. Similarly, benefit recipients might be viewed as receiving a credit from the taxpayer (private and public sector ones), while in a monarchy, the royal family could be said to owe their standing to the taxpayer, as they are funded by ‘taxpayer money’, a morally charged flow of money which signals a demand for frugality and virtuous spending (Willmott 2017: 256). At first glance, relations of credit and debt appear to be the opposite of reciprocity as they are about the prolonged absence, or the deferring, of exchange. But are these exchange relations really materially different to those that get labelled as reciprocal, such as paid income tax for access to public health service, or is this difference a product of power and imagination? Self-employed day labourers may argue that it is in fact they who are owed, due to their provision of cheap labour or their continued payment of VAT, a regressive tax. Alternatively, large business owners often use the logic that they produce wealth and jobs and therefore should not be excessively taxed. In their mind, in fact, the government or society owes them. One does not have to think long to realise that debt and credit are not natural, clear-cut categories but instead defined through government policy and enforced through law. The designation of debt, therefore, requires power-laden stories to make clear who owes whom (Graeber 2011).

As well as creditors and debtors often being interchangeable, it is not obvious that one position is desirable and the other undesirable. Whether and what kind of debt is cast as ‘bad’ depends on the social context. As Janet Roitman argues, there is socially sanctioned wealth that has its roots in debt, while other types of debt are just seen as a negative economic indicator (2003: 212). Additionally, the notion that the debtor is the subjugated and the creditor the one in power is simplistic. As Marcel Mauss (1954 [1925]) showed almost a century ago, the ability to borrow can be a sign of being enmeshed in social relations and of holding a certain status. Moreover, debt is often linked to investment—a wealth generator with positive connotations. Since debt and credit are thus social categories, rather than purely financial ones, the study of tax tracks how some actors in a fiscal relationship come to be marked as debtors and others as creditors, as well as investigating the moral baggage, and political impact, of this.

These discussions about the moral character of debt can equally be applied to the debt relations of nations. While the popular debate in many countries indicates that national public debt is currently viewed as a failure of proper budgeting, this has not always been the case; at times, state endebtedness has enjoyed the reputation as a positive cornerstone of society. In the wake of the British ‘Financial Revolution’ in the late seventeenth century, when the Bank of England was established and public debt was first created through the issuing of government bonds, the ‘national debt was not only positively valued but celebrated’ (Daunton 2001: 119, in Abelin 2012b: 76). Public debt gave birth to public credit, which allowed investment in society, and agreed upon ‘goods’. Taxes were fundamental to international debt relations, as they paid the interest of public debt, not because they financed public goods directly (Brantlinger 1996). Public and political attitudes to national debt have thus shifted through history, and the labelling of debt relations in moral terms always need to be examined as partially political acts.

Global flows

In the face of powerful global financial markets and growing economic inequalities, both within and between countries, cross-disciplinary conversations about how we organise and how we should organise our economies have become increasingly poignant (Ferguson & Li 2018; Haskel & Westlake 2018; Piketty 2014). As a powerful tool for redistribution, tax plays a central role in these conversations. A series of recent events have brought international attention to systemic failures of contemporary capitalism, and the inadequacies of fiscal systems to redress them. Amongst them are the bailouts of large banks by taxpayers after the 2008 financial crisis; the public scrutiny of large multinationals such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google in 2012 and 2013 who had to defend their unfeasibly low tax bills and creative accounting in televised hearings; and the 2016 leak of the Panama Papers, which exposed the tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance of high-net individuals. These events laid bare the extent to which the wealthy evade taxes, and the complicity of much fiscal policy that in the last four decades have protected financial markets through deregulation and the cutting of multiple taxes (Piketty 2014, 2019; Stiglitz 2012). Indeed, governments have long been instrumental in the making of offshore tax havens. For instance, British colonial authorities, backed by London money markets and the British civil service, created the first offshore tax havens in the Pacific in the early 1970s (Rawlings 2004: 340).

Tax is one obvious technique by which governments may intervene in global financial flows, ensure wealth redistribution, and close loopholes to battle the ‘paper games’ of the very rich. But while fiscal complicity between governments and the rich has often been the norm, fiscal intervention, and policing tax behaviour, is also not so simple in the twenty-first century. The fundamental problem with taxing our way to more just economies is that taxes are levied by national governments, whilst capital moves swiftly beyond borders. Concerns about how national governments can feasibly tackle large scale ‘tax avoidance’, ‘tax havens’, international ‘tax competition’, and the fear that these phenomena would erode governments’ abilities to reallocate resources for public benefit are not new. But digitalised, contemporary capitalism make these challenges even more significant.

To respond to the demand by nations to share taxing rights, whilst also protecting businesses and organizations from being doubly taxed, international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been tasked with developing global approaches to tax policy (Mugler 2019: 381-2). The OECD’s work, such as the Harmful Tax Competition initiative, which attempted to name-and-shame, peer pressure, and ‘blacklist’ tax havens—including small, postcolonial non-OECD states—into compliance with international norms, has became a fruitful object for anthropological investigations (Grinberg 2016; Maurer 2008; Mugler 2019; Rawlings 2007). This work asks questions about the making of ‘soft law’ (non-binding norms, agreements, and standards of practice), the relationship between private arbitration, international norm-making, fiscal sovereignty, and democracy. It also explores how international tax experts negotiate new rules and regulations for an increasingly digitalised economy (Mugler 2019). As part of analysing and implementing new tax rules, these international experts need to accommodate the demands of structurally privileged actors that shape the international tax debate, such as tax professionals working in multinational enterprises. Yet they are also tasked with curbing such privileges in an increasingly politicised field and under the scrutiny of the international community. While tax debates have long focused on the relationship betweent the nation-state and its citizens, this emerging work asks the important question: what do people owe each other beyond the state?

Conclusion: an anthropology of tax

Tax plays a powerful role in organising national economies and shaping social relationships. Fiscal systems also shape peoples’ perceptions regarding who contributes to society; where wealth is created; the place of the state in the lives of people; the place of people within money flows; and the moralities of profit, debt, and sharing. The anthropology of tax has only recently consolidated as a field of study and all these themes offer fertile avenues of further exploration. This line of research will produce both a deeper understanding of tax itself and a chance to use tax as a lens through which to explore wider state-society relations. As an ethnographic object, tax involves the explorations of multiple scales, from the individual taxpayer’s perspective, and the logics of policy makers, to the functioning of large financial systems. As such, the discipline of anthropology uniquely brings these different scales of fiscal life into the same conversation, enabling us to understand tax as a simultaneously personal, political, economic, and ethical aspect of our social lives.

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Note on contributor

Miranda Sheild Johansson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL Anthropology and holds a PhD in anthropology from The London School of Economics. Her work explores the dynamics of fiscal systems and the sociality of tax, with a particular emphasis on the Andean region. Miranda is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the anthropology of tax.

Dr Miranda Sheild Johansson, UCL Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW, 07540 581 975, m.johansson@ucl.ac.uk

Neoliberalism

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 20:02:25 +0000

Natalie Morningstar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 26 Oct 2020

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

Abstract:

‘Neoliberalism’ is a widely used term that travelled from economic philosophy into policymaking, and from policymaking into critical social scientific discourse in the late twentieth century. It refers to a form of capitalism ascendant since the 1970s but informed by post-war economic philosophical ideas. In practice, it is characterised by the retrenchment of the welfare state and an increased role of the state in preserving market competition. Anthropologists have critically engaged with neoliberalism. They have at times used the word as a neutral description of an economic doctrine or set of related policies, and at others as a normative description of their negative effects. This entry starts by exploring the benefits and drawbacks of two different ways of theorising neoliberalism. First, it examines contributions that have treated neoliberalism as a world system, and the influence of Marxist concepts on this approach. Second, this entry presents work that frames neoliberalism less as a unified system and more as a flexible mode of governing, and the influence of the work of Michel Foucault on this body of literature. Third, it addresses how the intersections between these two approaches have been productive for anthropologists. In order to demonstrate as much, this entry highlights insights about the effects of neoliberalism on the state and on labour. It concludes by setting out ongoing debates about the use of neoliberalism and related concepts proposed to think critically about contemporary capitalism.

Introduction

As an economic philosophical movement, neoliberalism refers to the form of liberalism resurgent after the Second World War. Its contemporary use was consolidated by the inaugural 1947 gathering of the Mont Pèlerin Society, organised by Friedrich Hayek, and attended by prominent economists and thinkers such as Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Karl Popper (Harvey 2007, Coleman 2013, Mirowski & Plehwe 2015, Slobodian 2018). While there was disagreement amongst attendees about the precise form that this ‘new’ liberalism should take, most were critical of the rise of the welfare state and Keynesian economic doctrine, which encouraged state intervention and spending to boost economic growth (Slobodian 2018: 6). These approaches had gained momentum in response to the Great Depression and declining faith in classical liberalism, which relied on the assumption that the market was capable of regulating itself, a conceit troubled by economic crisis (Coleman 2013: 82).

Those committed to Hayek’s vision felt that to avoid repeating historical failures, a different relationship between state and market should be engineered. Unlike in classical liberalism, the market would be treated not as a natural and separate sphere but ‘as the principle, form, and model’ for the state (Foucault 2010: 117). Like Keynesians, neoliberal thinkers supported state intervention, but with the purpose of preserving market competition, which was thought to index a healthy liberal democracy (Lemke 2001: 193). This new liberalism was thought to be the road to a stable post-war international economic order: in theory, it recognised the necessity of state intervention without compromising individual liberty (Slobodian 2018: 128).

The economic ideals put forth by early proponents of neoliberalism were consciously taken up by policymakers and states in the 1970s and 1980s in response to ‘stagflation’, a period of high inflation and unemployment. These variants of neoliberal policymaking were tailor-made to different social settings, but they tended to protect individual liberty and private property rights, encourage free trade, involve a decline in social provisions, and increase the political influence of the private and financial sectors (Harvey 2007: 3; Gershon 2011: 538). Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Augusto Pinochet, and Deng Xioaping are frequently cited as neoliberal policymakers par excellence (Harvey 2007). Yet where these policies and policymakers were dubbed ‘neoliberal’, it was most often by critics using the term negatively and normatively (Boas & Gans-Morse 2009). These critics often argued the above policy shifts were the root causes of various patterned and detrimental social effects in the late twentieth century. The results of the policies born of neoliberal reform that these critics highlighted include rising inequality, a decline in welfare support, heightened labour precarity, a power shift toward financial institutions, increasingly speculative financial practices, and a punitive displacement of social responsibility from the state onto the citizen-subject (Harvey 2007; Wacquant 2008, 2009; Standing 2011, 2012).

This normative use of the concept of neoliberalism quickly gained traction in the social sciences. Throughout the late twentieth century, and particularly in the early twenty-first, anthropologists used the term to critique the dominance of market-led policymaking and the decline in social welfare (Kipnis 2007: 383). These critics saw the policy consensus of the 70s and 80s as sufficiently successful that it had come to influence everyday life on a global scale. By the turn of the century, for many of these anthropologists, neoliberalism was aptly described as a ‘new world order’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000: 291). Such theorists were frequently influenced by Marxist concepts, and often focused on neoliberalism as a political economic structure or ideology. Others argued that neoliberalism was best understood not as a unified political economic or cultural system, but as a flexible mode of governing (Ong 2007). The latter theorists frequently made use of the work of Michel Foucault—particularly his work on governmentality and the subject—to examine the ways in which neoliberal policies can produce unexpected outcomes.

While the distinction between Marxist and Foucauldian approaches is important, it should be noted that it is rare to find anthropologists of neoliberalism that are not indebted to the insights of both thinkers. Most anthropologists mentioned do not strictly belong to one school or another, but instead they tend to draw on a combination of Marxist, Foucauldian, and other concepts. Indeed, while there have been various categorizations of the anthropological literature on neoliberalism that distinguish between Marxist and Foucauldian approaches (Kipnis 2007, Ferguson 2010), others distinguish between approaches to neoliberalism as culture versus system, even where both draw on Marxist concepts (Hilgers 2011), or offer the work of other theorists, like Bourdieu, as an alternative (Wacquant 2010). Nevertheless, the first two sections of this entry discuss Marxist and Foucauldian approaches separately. The third section then explores how the intersections between these two approaches have yielded some of anthropology’s most distinctive contributions to the analysis of neoliberalism. Examining two areas in particular—the state and labour—this entry explores a key anthropological insight: while neoliberal logics often seem overly dominant, they never manage to govern people’s lives fully. The entry concludes with a discussion of enduring disagreements regarding the usefulness of neoliberalism in anthropology, as well as the benefits of considering related critical theories of contemporary capitalism.

Neoliberalism as world system

The rise of neoliberal reform at the end of the twentieth century coincided with seismic geopolitical and intellectual shifts. The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the spread of liberal democracy and market capitalism, meant that for many, the modernist ideological battles of the twentieth century were replaced with a sense of all-encompassing governance. This shift was encapsulated most famously—and controversially—by Francis Fukuyama’s declaration, in 1992, of the ‘end of history’ and liberalism as the final stage of social progress. Around this time, there was also a proliferation of ethnographies of globalization (e.g. Appadurai 1990, Hannerz 1996 [cited in Ortner 2011]) and ‘the capitalist world system’ (Marcus 1995: 97). This body of work sought to produce social analysis ‘sensitive to its context of historical political economy’ (Marcus 1986: 167), to situate diverse ‘lifeworlds’ in the ‘world system’ that may by turns facilitate and constrain them (Marcus 1995: 98). This work demonstrated that ‘local’ experiences of everything from family life to religious beliefs to labour could be understood in terms of ‘global’ political economic systems like capitalism (Marcus 1995). As Marcus argued, the ‘world system’ thesis ‘developed explicitly within genres of Marxist anthropology’ (1995: 97). Like Marxism, it was devoted to the idea that political and economic forces and events constrain our interlocutors’ thoughts and actions in a structured sense.

However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, neoliberalism came to replace ‘globalization’ as the most relevant ‘world system’ within which to understand a variety of ethnographic cases. This was not just a shift in terminology. Increasingly, anthropologists became pessimistic about the exclusionary effects of globalization and capitalism in their fieldsites around the world (Ortner 2011). Neoliberalism was the word used to critically spotlight these effects. Often, in doing so, these theorists made use of a variety of Marxist tools and concepts. Some of these anthropologists focused on neoliberalism as a policy project with material effects, especially the accumulation of wealth in the upper class. Others framed it as a culture, or set of ideological values and discourses.

Geographer David Harvey is perhaps the most vocal proponent of a class-based theorisation of neoliberalism. For Harvey (2007, 2016), neoliberalism is a globally-dominant policy project designed to intensify the accumulation of wealth in the upper class. It is characterised primarily by ‘deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision’ (Harvey 2007: 3). This policy project draws on a number of discourses and values, which echo those of significance to the neoliberal architects and engineers discussed above: for instance, the ‘assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market’ (Harvey 2007: 7). Yet at base, it is best understood as a practical political tool for wealth accumulation. As Harvey notes, the ‘increasing social inequality’ is observable in national income distribution. After neoliberal reform in the US, for instance, ‘the ratio of the median compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOs increased from just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000’ (Harvey 2007: 16).

Anthropologists of neoliberalism have turned to their fieldsites to demonstrate how neoliberal values and policies marginalise vulnerable populations along class lines. The work of Loïc Wacquant (2012) is exemplary. While Wacquant is also influenced by other thinkers—especially Pierre Bourdieu’s work on bureaucracy and the state—he is indebted to the Marxist theorisation of neoliberalism as a form of class struggle, or what he calls a ‘revolution from above’ (2010: 211). Wacquant’s work focuses on issues of class and race for the urban poor in the US and France (2008), as well as on the relationship between the neoliberal retrenchment of the welfare state and mass incarceration (2009, 2010). Like Harvey, Wacquant argues that neoliberalism works to the disadvantage of ‘those trapped at the bottom of the polarizing class structure’, often with particularly severe consequences for those who also suffer racial injustice (2009: xv). He pays attention to what Harvey would also identify as key features of neoliberal reform: ‘the social and urban retrenchment of the state’ and ‘the imposition of precarious wage labor’ (Wacquant 2009: vx) in increasingly underserviced urban neighbourhoods (Wacquant 2008: 25). Building on Harvey, he argues that the retrenchment of social welfare is only one-half of the neoliberal picture. It isn’t just that the urban poor have suffered decades of decreasing social and labour security, but also that the carceral system has been mobilised to discipline and contain those suffering the worst effects of social insecurity (2010: 216).

Other anthropologists have turned their attention to the role of neoliberal values and discourses accompanying the rising material inequality discussed above. The work of Jean and John Comaroff (1999, 2000) is a case in point. For these anthropologists, neoliberalism is best understood as a global ‘culture’, a patterned way of relating to oneself and others that draws on both ‘ideology and practice’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000: 305). Based on ethnographic research in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, they demonstrate how increasing labour precarity as a result of neoliberal reform was accompanied by a marked rise in anxiety about the illegitimate accumulation of wealth. The latter manifested in what they call ‘occult economies’, systems of exchange that deploy ‘magical means for material ends’ to gain access to wealth as if by ‘enchantment’ (1999: 279). Their ethnographic examples are diverse, ranging from witchcraft accusations, to pyramid schemes, ritual killings, and the illicit sale of body parts, observed in Africa, Latin American, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Asia. According to the authors, all involve efforts to ‘multiply available techniques of producing value, fair or foul’ (2000: 316) and to isolate causes for the uneven distribution of resources. The Comaroffs thus see these as instances of a global backlash against a contradiction at the heart of neoliberal capitalism: ‘the culture of neoliberalism’ (2000: 304) relies on a newly positive moral value attached to speculation, gambling, and risk, and with it comes a sense that inordinate sums of wealth can be accumulated without effort. Yet for many, this belief is at odds with real material inequality. Neoliberalism thus ‘appears both to include and to marginalize in unanticipated ways’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000: 298). Occult economies, then, can be understood as expressions of both hope in and disappointment with the promises of neoliberal capitalism.

Despite their differences in approach, there are important convergences across the aforementioned analyses of neoliberalism. All share the conviction that neoliberalism is the dominant world system. Along with other Marxist critics of neoliberalism (e.g. Brenner & Theodore 2002), they frame it as the root of systemic forms of global inequality, which are thought to be less the result of individual choice or responsibility than of a fundamentally unequal distribution of political power and resources (Hilgers 2011, see also Harvey 2007: 16). If Harvey and Wacquant focus on the material and institutional effects of neoliberalism as a political economic project, the Comaroffs focus on the relationship between material inequality and the beliefs and values that accompany neoliberal reform. In both cases, the influence of Marxism is clear: the power of political economic structures and institutions is linked to the dominance of certain ideological beliefs and values, and both are seen to have global reach. What this body of work is particularly good at, then, is situating a range of ethnographic examples within a set of predictable forces, events, and constraints which are often presumed to chiefly oppress citizen-subjects. Nevertheless, what should also emerge from the aforementioned body of work is that neoliberalism can play an expansive explanatory role. Some anthropologists thus began to question whether neoliberalism was as coherent and constraining a system as the above analyses sometimes imply. To do so, many turned to the work of Michel Foucault.

Neoliberalism as mode of governing

Foucault’s work has been compelling for anthropologists of neoliberalism who have sought to capture nuances they see as missing from the world system approach. One of the key concepts that appears in Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism is governmentality. Governmentality, for Foucault, is a double-edged concept. It refers to both the rationalities and to the practical techniques used to guide the conduct of oneself and of others (Lemke 2001: 201). Governmentality is the process through which influence is exerted over political subjects, which are not just oppressed ‘docile bodies’ but also reflective selves, who may be aware of and participate in being governed (Lemke 2001: 203). Crucially, both governmentality and the subject are unstable concepts that depend on one another; different techniques of governmentality produce different kinds of subjects. Anthropologists have therefore been attracted to Foucault’s theory of governmentality and the subject because they make space for contingency. Rather than presuppose a single political economic structure, or a field of class-based struggle, within which to understand a variety of ethnographic examples, Foucauldian analysis leaves the specific characteristics and effects of government open-ended. As a result, Foucauldian approaches tend to treat neoliberalism not as a system or structure but as a set of context-specific practices that are vulnerable to recapture by different political projects and actors. Foucauldian theorists often emphasise that neoliberalism does not explain everything, that it does not look the same everywhere, and that not all subjects respond to it in expected ways.

Those who have relied on the concept of governmentality frequently focus on how neoliberal policies can paradoxically make space for non-neoliberal ideals and outcomes. James Ferguson’s work on anti-poverty programs in Southern Africa (2007, 2015) demonstrates this clearly. Ferguson focuses on the South African Basic Income Grant (BIG), a universal direct payment granted to all South Africans to alleviate the most severe effects of poverty and labour insecurity. At first glance, Ferguson points out, we might be inclined to see this type of assistance as appealing to ‘recognizably neoliberal elements’, such as ‘the valorization of market efficiency, individual choice, and autonomy; themes of entrepreneurship; and skepticism about the state as a service provider’ (2010: 174). But upon closer inspection, one discovers that these direct payments are also ‘pro-poor’ (Ferguson 2010: 174). What emerges in this case, then, is that basic income grants are one of several instances in which ideals ‘we can readily identify as neoliberal are being put to work in the service of apparently pro-poor and pro-welfare political arguments’ (Ferguson 2010: 176). Approaching neoliberalism as a flexible mode of governing thus allows one to appreciate how ‘devices of government that were invented to serve one purpose have often enough ended up […] being harnessed to another’ (Ferguson 2010: 174).

If Ferguson demonstrates how neoliberalism can aid and abet non-neoliberal policies and values, other Foucauldian anthropologists of neoliberalism have pointed to instances in which neoliberalism collides with explicitly non-neoliberal policy projects to contradictory effect. A key instance of this is Stephen Collier’s (2011) work on neoliberal reform in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Collier is critical of the assumption that neoliberal doctrine ‘is opposed to social welfare and to the public ends of government’ (2011: 1). To correct this, he examines the surprising alignment between neoliberal reform and Soviet socialism. He finds that contrary to expectation, neoliberal policymakers were not ‘blind to the need for social protection’ (2011: 3), nor did they attempt to retrench the social state. Rather, neoliberal reform was mobilised to retain ‘the social welfare norms established by Soviet socialism’ (2011: 3). Collier examines how neoliberal policies were applied to durable Soviet infrastructure—comprised of pipes, homes, urban centres, bureaucratic and budgetary practices—all of which endured and were extended through neoliberal reform. He is careful to qualify that his work is not ‘an apologia for neoliberalism’ (2011: 249). Instead, he draws on Foucault’s theory of governmentality to emphasise the in-built ‘flexibility of many elements of neoliberal reforms’ (2011: 248) often overlooked in critical approaches to neoliberalism. In this sense, Collier joins a group of scholars who have examined how neoliberal reform has intersected with communism and socialism to produce ‘exceptions’ (Ong 2006) to neoliberalism as we know it.

Still other anthropologists have framed neoliberalism as a process of subject formation to point to the ways in which subjects might meet neoliberal modes of governing with a variety of responses, ranging from resistance, to compliance, to indifference. As they demonstrate, even as a subject might be incited to uphold one neoliberal value, he or she might also participate in reproducing other decidedly non-neoliberal beliefs and practices. This is evident in Andrew Kipnis’s work on discourse about suzhi, or ‘human quality’, in China (2007: 383). As Kipnis notes, suzhi is an important political concept mobilised for a variety of purposes, ranging from justifying educational reforms to legitimising the authority of political figures (2007: 388). It is used to denote features of a person ‘that result from both nature and nurture’, such as dress and educational attainment, and that designate their worthiness as political subjects (Kipnis 2007: 388). As anthropologists of China have argued, one area in which the effects of suzhi are particularly evident is in the pressure placed on parents to raise high-quality children in a competitive educational market (Anagnost 2004, Kuan 2015). From one perspective, then, suzhi discourse seems to be a clear instance of an effort to produce ‘responsible and governable but alienated neoliberal subjects’, with the ‘hyper-disciplined, over-achieving only child’ being a prime example of this (Kipnis 2007: 386). However, as Kipnis argues, closer attention to suzhi discourse demonstrates that it draws on other non-neoliberal schools of thought, including nationalism, Marxism, and Confucianism (2007: 395). Moreover, suzhi discourse has come to have a certain linguistic authoritarianism about it, so that ‘improving the suzhi of the Chinese population’ became a ‘sacred slogan’ beyond reproach (Kipnis 2007: 393). Yet people often use the language of suzhi disingenuously, as political cover, to soften or occlude unpopular opinions while making public expression possible (Kipnis 2007: 393). Two important conclusions follow: suzhi is a mode of governing that overlaps with aspects of neoliberalism as we conventionally think about it, but which also captures other political and philosophical projects (Kipnis 2007: 394). Moreover, neither discourse about suzhi nor neoliberal values exert complete influence over citizen-subjects, who might draw on one or both disingenuously.

As the above examples attest, Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism have allowed anthropologists to suspend assumptions about what the world system looks like in order to better examine its unanticipated effects on governance and the political subject. On the whole, then, these authors have a different vision of how to engage critically with neoliberalism. Unlike the Marxist critics discussed earlier, Foucauldian critics tend to be less interested in decrying or generalising the deficiencies of neoliberalism than in probing its context-specific inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions for alternatives (Ferguson 2011). Neither is more or less anthropological, or more or less critical, but they have different strengths and rely on different assumptions. If world system approaches to neoliberalism are good at contextualising diverse ethnographic examples in systemic political economic and ideological frameworks, Foucauldian approaches try not to assume there is a fixed context within which to understand ethnographic cases, and are therefore sometimes better at asking where neoliberal policies and values can incorporate contradictions. However, many compelling contributions to the anthropology of neoliberalism have drawn on aspects of both Marxist and Foucauldian theory, as the next section demonstrates.

Ethnographies of the state and labour

While many of the above anthropologists have profited from leading with either Marxist or Foucauldian theory, it is common to find scholars drawing on a mix of the concepts discussed, often in conjunction with the work of other thinkers. Though they have faced criticism, as discussed in the final section, these accounts are generative in that they balance the recognition that neoliberalism can be flexible along with the striking, patterned inequalities that have been entrenched in the wake of neoliberal reform. Many of these contributions have married Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and subjectivity with a Marxist reading of class. In so doing they have enhanced our understanding of everyday political subjects’ experience of the state and labour. These examples are hardly exhaustive. Anthropologists have also offered generative accounts of the impact of neoliberal reform on areas as diverse as gender (Schild 2000), kinship (Shever 2008), gentrification (Potuoğlu-Cook 2006, Herzfeld 2010), forms of self-management (Urciuoli 2008), voluntarism and affect (Muehlebach 2012), and the division between the public and private spheres (Bear 2011, 2015). However, the following examples are particularly helpful for demonstrating the usefulness of setting Marxist and Foucauldian concepts in conversation.

Philip Bourgois’ and Jeffrey Schonberg’s (2009) Righteous dopefiend is a clear example of where class and subjectivity can be used in consort to understand the effects of neoliberal reform. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork with homeless individuals who inject drugs in San Francisco, the book situates drug addiction in the context of the gentrification of the housing market, the decline of stable wage labour, and the retreat of social services (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009: 16). They offer an account of their interlocutors’ troubled relationships with their families and the state, which, in the absence of a social safety net, increasingly takes the shape of a network of temporary healthcare providers and members of law enforcement. The book sets forth the claim that substance abuse is thus at once ‘structural and personal’ (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009: 16). To demonstrate this, Bourgois and Schonberg draw on a class-concept written about by Marx: the lumpen proletariat. The lumpen proletariat, for Marx, are ‘the historical fall-out of large-scale, long-term transformations in the organization of the economy’ (18). Bourgois and Schonberg suggest that we can understand becoming ‘lumpenized’ as an experience of becoming a type of marginalised subject (2009: 19). In so doing, they bring a different emphasis to their reading of Foucault than those authors discussed in the previous section. To bridge between Marx and Foucault, they also draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s work to argue that the state is better understood as a shifting network of institutions and actors, rather than a network of elite actors operating in their own class-based interests. Their argument would thus be unorthodox for those who consider the world system and governmentality approaches as at odds. Yet allowing these concepts to speak to one another enables the authors to show how neoliberal reforms have meant that the state is more harshly disciplinary on the poor, in ways that aggravate class-based and race-based distinctions. Though not completely constraining, processes of subject formation emerge as more punitive for classes deemed unworthy of personal and political concern.

Anthropologists have also drawn on theories of class and governmentality to examine the effects of neoliberal reform on the labour market. Aihwa Ong’s work is canonical. Like other Foucauldian anthropologists, Ong approaches neoliberalism less as a coherent ideology or structure than as a novel mode of governing that relies heavily on technical expertise, efficiency, and individual responsibility (2007: 3). Crucially, then, neoliberalism is a highly ‘mobile technology’, or rational tool, of governance and can operate in conjunction with other non-neoliberal policies, techniques, and ideals (2007: 3). To demonstrate as much, Ong trains her ethnographic eye on labour and citizenship in the Asia-Pacific region, in which ‘neoliberalism itself is not the general characteristic of technologies of governing’ (2007: 3). She echoes Collier’s observation that neoliberal reform has therefore had unanticipated effects, such as the preservation of social state infrastructure. Yet she also demonstrates that neoliberalism can produce exclusions. By redrawing the lines of who counts as valuable citizens and workers, it ‘marks out excludable subjects who are denied protections’ and ‘the benefits of capitalist development’ (Ong 2007: 6, 4). One clear example of this is the ethnicised and class-based divides that are thrown into relief by the outsourcing of knowledge-based jobs from American to Asian markets. As Ong notes, ‘labour arbitrage involves shifting well-paying jobs across borders’, delinking traits associated with the American middle-class and ‘reterritorializing such features in skilled actors’ in, for instance, Asia’s burgeoning urban knowledge hubs (2007: 157, 158). Meanwhile the ascendant middle- and upper-classes targeted to take up these jobs rely on ‘foreign domestic workers’ often confined to conditions of ‘neoslavery’ (196). Populations deemed to be comprised of valuable labourers are thereby conferred the rights and protections previously granted by citizenship, even as devalued labouring populations are left increasingly vulnerable. Ong thus draws on the concepts of governmentality and the subject, as well as class, to demonstrate how neoliberalism might intersect with explicitly non-neoliberal ideals and policies, even as it also throws into relief the patterned inequalities of ‘global capitalism’ (2007: 7).

After neoliberalism?

By this point, it should be clear that anthropologists have theorised neoliberalism in a variety of ways. Precisely because neoliberalism has been so analytically productive, it has also been subject to intense debate. Written between the lines of the approaches discussed above are often more fundamental theoretical assumptions about the nature of political power and the purpose of social analysis. This final section therefore traces recent debates regarding the on-going usefulness of neoliberalism, as well as the merits of alternative concepts proposed to critique contemporary capitalism.

Most critics of the anthropological uses of neoliberalism have raised concerns that the concept is both nonspecific and also explains too much. The target of critique in these debates is often the world system approach. Like the concepts 'world system', or 'modernity', some argue neoliberalism has occasionally functioned as ‘a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself, or as a kind of shorthand for the world economy and its inequalities’ (Ferguson 2010: 171). One of the key issues Collier (2012) sees is that analysts sometimes assume that a given world system exists at the outset, so that they at once conjure and prove the system they seek to defend as an analytic framework. In other words, it is because neoliberalism is theorised in ways that are often more ‘prescriptive’ than ‘descriptive’ that it is vulnerable to imprecision (Ganti 2014). Proponents have responded by arguing that when carefully executed, the world system approach can have descriptive power: it can account for the patterned effects of neoliberal reform without overlooking nuances and exceptions (Brenner et al. 2010). And though the world system approach has received the brunt of criticism, Foucauldian governmentality approaches have also been critiqued. For some, this is because the concept of governmentality can be used in ways that are expansive enough to echo the world system approach (Collier 2012: 193). For others, the issue is that neoliberal governmentality is conceptually nebulous. As Wacquant (2012) argues, if neoliberalism is framed as mobile and capable of undergoing mutations, it is difficult to pin down, and can seem to exist ‘everywhere and nowhere at the same time’ (70). Regardless of differences of conviction, what is at stake in these debates is both whether anthropologists are accurately describing our interlocutors’ experience of political power, and whether their critical tools are empirically rigorous.

Doubts about the analytic usefulness of neoliberalism have yielded a variety of responses. Some have attempted to tease apart the various ‘uses’ (Ferguson 2010) or ‘approaches’ (Hilgers 2011) to neoliberalism to provide conceptual clarity. Others have proposed that we do away with neoliberalism altogether, as it has become so expansive that its meaning is no longer clear and its uses contradictory (e.g. Laidlaw & Mair in Eriksen et al. 2015: 912, 917). Indeed, even contributors sympathetic to the on-going relevance of neoliberalism have raised concerns about its usefulness (Ferguson 2010: 171; Comaroff 2011: 142). Those who continue to use it do so because they feel there are patterned phenomena to which it can be said to refer, and because they are committed to a moral and political project invested in the reduction of inequality and a reinvigoration of collectivist ideals (Eriksen & Martin in Eriksen et al. 2015: 914, 920). Others point to the importance of neoliberalism as a tool for comparison (Ganti 2014: 100). These disagreements may come down to ideological differences, even where one or the other side presents itself as more empirically rigorous or critically sharp (Venkatesan in Eriksen et al. 2015: 911).

Though many insist that any pronouncement of the death knell of neoliberalism is at best premature (Harvey 2009, Peck et al. 2012, Aalbers 2013), alternative terms have been proposed to critique contemporary capitalism. Nikolas Rose (1993) has insisted that ‘advanced liberalism’ is a better description of the patterns often described as neoliberal. For Rose, ‘advanced liberalism’ refers to the consummation of neoliberal principles through the governance of autonomous subjects by a network of experts, one that is less a new form of liberalism than an accelerated instance of liberalism’s classic principles (see also Rose et al. 2006). For Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), the 2008 recession has given way to a novel period she calls ‘late liberalism’. If neoliberalism is ‘a series of struggles across an uneven social terrain’ that produces forms of life and death exclusion, ‘late liberalism’ refers to the more specific ‘shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it responds to a series of legitimacy crises in the wake of anticolonial, new social movements, and new Islamic movements’ (Povinelli 2011: 17, 25). Others have focused less on the relationship between neoliberalism and liberalism, and more on the changes neoliberal reform has brought about in the relationship between markets and bureaucratic institutions. Marilyn Strathern (2000) and Cris Shore and Susan Wright (1999), for instance, have argued that one of the hallmarks of neoliberal restructuring has been a rapid increase in ‘audit culture’: bureaucratic mechanisms for measuring social progress, profit, and efficiency. Consequently, institutions—like universities—are increasingly treated more like corporations than public resources (Shore 2010).

Conclusion

Neoliberalism is a concept with multiple faces. It can refer to economic and philosophical ideals, policy projects, and the effects of either of the former. Anthropologists have drawn on Marxist theory to frame neoliberalism as a political economic or ideological world system within which we can understand diverse ethnographic cases. For those inspired by Foucault, neoliberalism is best understood as a flexible mode of governing with unexpected effects. Along the way, the intersection between these two camps has yielded significant insight into interlocutors’ experience of the state and labour, as well as productive disagreement on the appropriate relationship between empiricism and critique. Some of the most generative contributions anthropologists have made to the literature on neoliberalism have accounted for both the patterned inequalities neoliberal reform exacerbates, and the flexibility of neoliberal policies and ideals. If neoliberalism has at times been a messy term, it has also been immensely productive and has allowed anthropologists to participate in an interdisciplinary and public debate about how best to describe, engage with, and critique our contemporary political and economic moment.

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Note on contributor

Natalie Morningstar is an anthropologist with an interest in social movements, capitalism, and political economic transition. She has conducted research on art, activism, and collectivist social organization in post-recession Dublin. Her future research examines the rise of ethnonationalism and populism, and the putative crisis of trust in Euro-American liberal democracies.

Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ncm40@cam.ac.uk

Metrics

Felix Stein — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:44:52 +0000

Marlee Tichenor

University of Edinburgh

Initially published 14 Oct 2020

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

Abstract:

Numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life seem to govern our existence more and more. Particularly since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of quantification for governance has grown, and anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to the ramifications of metrics, or numeric representation that translates assumed realities into numbers (Rottenburg & Merry 2015: 2). They study whether and how the production, synthesis, analysis, and use of metrics is tied to the rise and decentralization of audit and accountability in contemporary capitalism. This entry will first provide a theoretical framework for the anthropology of metrics, drawing on science and technology studies and the history of science. Then, it will discuss how anthropologists have analysed the social impact of enumerative practices. Looking at the practices and infrastructures that produce metrics and that metrics in turn produce, this entry will highlight the importance of colonial legacies for shaping what is ‘knowable’ in the realms of global governance, economics, and health. Finally, the entry will point to tensions at the heart of contemporary critiques of metrics: in our ‘post-truth’ world, these critiques cannot reject the usefulness of truthfully describing and estimating human phenomena. However, these critiques foreground the idea that metrics are always just one form of evidence among many.

Introduction

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of quantification for governance has gained momentum, and anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to the ramifications of numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life. As historians and philosophers of science and technology have made clear, statistics, and the rendering of the world into numbers, have long played a fundamental role in the rise of the modern nation-state (Foucault 1973; Porter 1990; Hacking 1990; Desrosières 1998; Scott 1998). For example, quantification practices co-created the notion that ‘populations’ existed and could be governed from above (Foucault 1973; Scott 1998). Thus, numbers have long contributed to giving meaning to various aspects of modern and contemporary life. What is new in recent decades, however, is that the increased use of metrics has led to ‘new forms of global governmentality’ (Shore & Wright 2015: 22). This means that our lives are increasingly governed by numbers and numerical surveillance – not only those used by nation-states, which have long used numbers as a means of governing from above, but also by non-state forces. In this way, these metrics increasingly define what it means, for example, for educational or health institutions to be effective or for individuals to be healthy and happy.

Metrics, or the standard means of measuring or evaluating processes and phenomena for the purpose of governance, are the ‘translation of (assumed) realities into numbers’ (Rottenburg & Merry 2015: 2). Their production, synthesis, analysis, and use are tightly tied to the rise of audit and accountability in contemporary capitalism, where governing practices such as assessing corporate sales performance or student achievements become more decentralised (Power 1999; Strathern 2000). These numerical representations are often presented as objective truth, yet they are produced through technical and social practices that are always at least partially specific. Most statisticians and data scientists producing quantified data and syntheses of, say, ‘gross national products’ or ‘burdens of disease’ know that there are many reasons for why these simplified metrics are not perfectly objective. This can be due to a human element of designing and implementing surveys, unclear or distorted categories in which data are placed, missing data, changing statistical equations, and statistical uncertainty. However, because these subjective components can be neatly packed away when metrics travel, the power they have in determining national budgets, international funding flows, social justice claims, and so on, is considerable.

The metrics discussed here are not merely numbers, which have multiple points of historical and geographical origin. Instead, they are the indices, indicators, statistics, and biometric standards used on the part of governments, international and non-governmental organizations, private companies, and governance scholars. They are meant to be replicable and universal, creating comparability between different countries, economies, corporate entities, or populations. According to Vincanne Adams (2016), these metrics were born out of a desire in the West to aspire to the universal, as well as out of the rise of statistics that occurred simultaneously with the ascent of the modern nation-state, serving ‘as the invented conceptual counterpart to the hubris of the age of imperialism’ (Adams 2016: 20). The anthropology of metrics investigates the politics of evidence, analysing why certain numerical forms, whether crime rates or funding flows, are taken as legitimate over other (less numerical) forms. It also pays close attention to the ways that counting practices and their associated categories can produce the very phenomena that they are supposed to measure. This can occur when sorting and separating phenomena into categories that come with built-in theories about the world – like degrees of ‘development’ or economic prosperity. Here, specific notions of what makes a good life are suggested and perpetuated by acts of measurement. The proliferation of indicators and rankings is thereby ‘creating new forms of power and governance, and new kinds of subjectivity^[1] (Shore & Wright 2015: 22), as institutions and individuals are assumed to be appropriate entities for external audit and governance through numbers. This includes how universities in the United Kingdom, for example, are now ranked specifically by the quantified impact of research by the Research Excellence Framework, which has material effects on their funding and the focus of their activities (Stein 2018).

Some authors have included the ways that numbers and counting practices have wide and varied symbolic and practical meanings in different cultures within an ‘anthropology of numbers’ (Crump 1990). Most of the anthropology of metrics, however, focuses specifically on the use of numbers, statistics, and counting technologies in the practice of governing, at different scales of human experience. This entry will first provide a theoretical framework for the anthropology of metrics, which stands in conversation with science and technology studies (STS). Anthropologists of metrics both contribute to the larger interdisciplinary STS conversation and speak beyond it by using their discipline’s particular methodologies, including ethnography and participant-observation. They investigate infrastructures and practices of measurement and they pay close attention to how these impact the lived experiences of both practitioners and targets of technologies of measurement. For example, numerical surveillance on the cellular level – like counting the quantity of virus in a given amount of bodily fluid – has become a language that some living with HIV/AIDS in Miami, Florida use to describe their ‘suffering, personal triumph, and achievement’ and to define their personal experience of risk (Sangaramoorthy 2012: 293). Next, the entry discusses engagements with metrics within the field itself, tracing histories of the impact of numbers and outlining key contributions such as anthropologists’ analysis of how metrics in the realms of global governance, economics, and health shape our lived experience and institutions.

Finally, the entry will point to anthropologists’ ambivalence toward metrics. Although the focus of this entry is on the anthropology of metrics, that is, with metrics and their efects as central objects of study, anthropology is also done with metrics. Applied anthropology in business and development, for example, makes use of both quantitative and qualitative methods. A further ambivalence arises with the conflict between qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding the world around us. It is reflected in critiques of metrics that argue for the importance of stories over numbers (Moats 2016) or for situated knowledges^[2] over a singular, objective truth (Haraway 1988). Yet, we exist in a world where scientific expertise in general and statistics in particular are being cast by some world leaders as suspect, and where ‘alternative facts’ – an ingenious rebranding of ‘lies and falsehoods’ – become more widely disseminated as official accounts of the effects of climate change, of the origins of gun violence in the US context, or of reasonable public health approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this ‘post-truth’ world, an anthropology of metrics calls for nuance. It does not make the case to end all metrics, but wants to understand them better so that they may actually enrich our lives.

Social sciences of metrology

The anthropology of metrics is situated within a larger social scientific critique of quantification and enumeration. The history and philosophy of science has long attended to the ways that the sciences have aspired to and produce objective representations of world phenomena, situating the development of these practices in particular historical moments and as resulting from a specific trajectory of theoretical thinking. Metrics are part of the effort to create ‘objective’ representations of the world. Lorraine Daston and others categorise three types of objectivity: mechanical, where objectivity suppresses the ‘human propensity to judge and aestheticize’; aperspectival, where objectivity eliminates idiosyncrasies; and ontological, where objectivity brings about a ‘fit between theory and the world’ (1992: 597). Quantification aspires to all three forms of objectivity, producing a rule-bound, un-self-interested, true representation of the world.

Quantification is an exemplary practice of the production of objectivity, as it replaces arbitrariness, idiosyncracy, and judgment by explicit rules (Porter 1992: 633). Quantification is thus in part a ‘technology of distance’, meant to remove all forms of subjectivity. It creates international communities with a common language, and can be used by politicians and institutions to garner the trust of the populations they serve (Porter 1995: ix). The rise of the power of statistics was therefore tied to the rise of the modern nation-state, and by the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, statistics came to be perceived as the premier means of producing general knowledge for the populace and as a fundamental tool for addressing corruption within the democratic political system (Porter 1995; Merry 2011).

In the rise of the nation-state, statistics were particularly important for producing the concept of population upon which new forms of power could be exerted, as can be seen in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. This new form of power was based on new forms of thinking about life and disease in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Foucault argues that, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the power of a sovereign ruler shifted from the simple power to kill someone (the power over death), to aiming at making populations grow (i.e. exerting power over life). Biopower was born, as a form of power that regulates the individual body and populations at large. According to Foucault, it became the main mode of sovereign power: controlling sexuality, economic life, and personal health, for example, often through the use of statistics. As a result, people’s subjectivities, or the way that they understand themselves in the world and live their lives, began to change. They started to conceive of their bodies as if they were machines, and began adhering to better eating and exercise habits, for example. New intellectual disciplines, like sociology and epidemiology, contributed to these emerging forms of controlling the body. Better knowledge of life and health were also indispensable for the development of capitalism, as the institutions of power that control health are also those that condition bodies to function in the machinery of production (1978: 141). For example, the ‘ideal worker’ became a self-disciplined and regulated self, produced and maintained by social scientific and medical texts about the moral value of productivity and the responsibility of the individual to stay healthy.

Within the context of the medical sciences, the growing influence of physicians was key for developing statistical thinking and ideas of what counts as ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’. Opening up corpses, for example, was pivotal for the production of biopower, as it allowed for a direct comparison between bodies, which in turn facilitated the development of statistical averages against which individuals could be compared (Lock & Nguyen 2010). This comparability and the practice of making things commensurate are central to the work that numbers and metrics do, by putting diverse phenomena into the same category in order to start counting. Importantly, that which may seem quite simple, ‘like how to name things and how to store data’, actually ‘constitute much of human interaction and much of what we come to know as natural’ (Bowker & Starr 2000: 326). Quantification may be a seemingly natural technology of classification, yet as Foucault (2001) has shown, the ranking and separating of countries, institutions, and projects through evaluative indicators and data production have specific histories and always reflect more than mere ‘common sense’.

In the twentieth century, the power of the nation-state became less centralised and all-encompassing than in Foucault’s analysis. Local and international governing agencies increasingly determined people’s everyday lives. This changed the role that quantification took in governance. According to Michael Powers, this decentralisation led to an ‘audit explosion’ (1994) which has been central to contemporary forms of governance since the 1990s. Quantification practices have often themselves become the link between populations and the local, national, or international entities that govern their economic, social, and physical wellbeing. These forms of wellbeing, as well as the accountability of governing organizations to secure them, have become objects to monitor. Practices of accountability – of counting and holding to account – have, for example, become a main mode of instilling trust in institutions which are now are measured against pre-defined quantitative indicators determining their success. This ‘governance by numbers’ has reached new levels with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), introduced in 2015, whereby all UN member states are obligated to produce data and monitor their progress across 17 goals and 231 individual indicators (Fukada-Parr & McNeill 2019). Sakiko Fukada-Parr and Desmond McNeill are among the scholars who argue that these indicators ‘have distinctive effects on knowledge (how things are conceptualized) and on governance (behaviour of actors, policy choices)’ (2019: 6). In this way, the means by which the SDG global development agenda is implemented – through the measurement of 231 individual indicators on such wide policy issues as health, education, poverty, and environment – is at the mercy of group consensus on statistical methodologies for how we measure poverty or ill-health, as well as what kinds of quantified data are actually available. What is measurable becomes what is implementable in our global development agenda and in global public policy.

Contemporary metrics-based modes of defining and determining good governance tend to have their origins in New Public Management (NPM), a school of thought that aims to render administrative structures and processes more business-like (Strathern 2000; Hulme 2007). Under the guise of ‘good governance’, they are often aimed at increasing economic efficiency. Thereby, they frequently join together ‘the financial and the moral’ (Strathern 2000: 1), presenting what is financially sound as being morally valuable. Accountability in this way holds its older meanings of responsibility to one’s fellow citizens or those under one’s care, while also gaining new meanings about promoting efficiency and balancing one’s cheque-book. One way of making sense of these developments is to consider them as part of the on-going rise of neoliberalism. In the context of a continued retreat of the state in the neoliberal present, business and finance-based auditing and accountability practices have expanded outward, becoming the means of defining success for medical, educational, and other social services institutions. University rankings incite students to apply to one university rather than another, while key performance indicators increasingly determine public sector budget allocations. Metrics also drive private investment by ranking corruption levels and the quality of life of entire countries. They even evaluate our day-to-day activities, such as our eating habits and exercising routines (Merry 2011: S84; Rottenburg & Merry 2015), designating each of us as a ‘quantified self’ accountable to ourselves and our fellow citizens for our individual and group well-being (Moore 2017). In this way, the governing power of the metric – in the context of global shifts of decentralization and the continued retreat of the state’s responsibility for our wellbeing – has gained the ability to assert new relationships of responsibility, alongside its ability to measure economic efficiency. Thus, much of our social lives is now assessed by managerial techniques of accountancy and performance management that do not just describe what we do but also assert our activities’ moral worth, often with an economistic bent (Shore & Wright 2015).

An anthropology of metrics

Drawing these debates into anthropology, scholars have asked whether the increased use of evaluative metrics has impacted both our societal structures and how we see ourselves. After all, the quality of our sleep or ability to be mindful, and even our societies’ levels of happiness, are closely linked to who we are. Since rankings enable comparability and competition between countries, institutions, and individuals, they have come to be a foundational component of how we situate ourselves and others in the world. It may define our individual sense of success where our university sits on ranking systems, or whether our country is ‘lower-middle income’ or ‘upper-middle income’. Further, indicators and evaluative metrics are a language through which we communicate urgency, morality, and our responsibility to one another, invoking or requiring redress or action. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation uses its estimations on global health burden to justify its own – non-transparent – investment in global health (Tichenor & Sridhar 2020). On the other hand, the Programme for Action for Cancer Therapy uses the evocative statement that ‘One woman dies every 50 seconds’ from breast cancer to both advocate for more funding for research and development for treating breast cancer, while also invoking women into action to attend to their own health through screening or genetic testing. In this way, metrics are tools of both the powerful and the resistance, and the viability of metrics is determined by the power structures within which they are produced and amplified.

Anthropologists have tended to study metrics through ethnography. Merry defines this methodology as

examining the history of the creation of an indicator and its underlying theory, observing expert group meetings and international discussions where the terms of the indicator are debated and defined, interviewing expert statisticians and other experts about the meaning and the process of producing indicators, observing data-collection processes, and examining the ways indicators affect decision making and public perceptions (2011: S85).

There has been a rise in the number of ethnographic analyses of monitoring and evaluation practices in the domains of justice, economy, and health.

A. Metrics in global governance

Take the example of global governance, which is a governing system headed by the United Nations and the member-states, agencies like the World Health Organization, and other international organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Within the system of global governance, countries are evaluated based on their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or their Human Development Index (HDI), or the World Bank’s newly introduced Human Capital Index (HCI). These evaluations have concrete impacts on what kinds of funding countries can receive from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, including the quality of their credit. In global health, countries are ranked based on the quality of their health systems and are provided with funding to fight certain diseases based on their perceived need through a metric known as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD). Yet, the nature of these indicators and the means of their production ‘involves a range of discretionary and sometimes arbitrary decisions’, despite their assumed objectivity and ability to represent reality (Jerven 2013: 4). There are missing data and questionable assumptions, and the debates about what can be counted and what cannot will remain hidden under the final indicator produced.

Morten Jerven (2013) has shown this by spending extensive time in statistics offices in different countries across Anglophone Africa, interrogating how the assumption that most of the ‘least developed countries’ are in Africa is based on partial and often inadequate information. Working with very limited resources and limited data, these statistics offices must regularly produce statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Income (GNI). In order to be ‘legible’ or acceptable, they must reinforce existing assumptions about income levels in-country, assumptions which then help both the international community and government agencies choose where to invest funds in the country.

It is not a trivial matter that GDP is, in this way, created based on existing assumptions that international agencies have about the level of ‘development’ of a country. As Lorenzo Fioramonti (2014: 15) shows, GDP is founded on the idea that ‘that which is not priced, what does not involve formal financial transaction based on money does not count’ toward one’s country’s social or economic wellbeing. GDP has thus given more power to the economy over politics and society. Further, these practices of enumeration and the defining of countries’ levels of ‘development’ or economic prosperity based on metrics have their origins in colonial projects. In the context of the British colonial power in India, ‘exoticization and enumeration were complicated strands of a single colonial project’ (Appadurai 1993: 315). Here, censes, maps, agrarian surveys, racial studies, and other projects of quantification were a crucial component of the categorization and essentialization of the ‘other’ under colonial rule. Metrics contributed to creating Orientalism (Said 1978), which was the process by which Western artists, scholars, and government officials exoticised populations in ‘the Orient’ – or the Arab world and Asia – through cultural and governmental representations of these populations, and which was a necessary and destructive foundation for colonial rule. Defining a country’s ‘development’ or ‘underdevelopment’ based on what is quantifiable and carries a price, and using statistical estimates based on pre-existing assumptions about ‘development’ levels, risks perpetuating the exoticising practices of colonialism. These measurement practices are all the more important as our current geopolitical system is based upon them.

The fact that evaluative metrics often carry with them ideas of financial value that enable the economic valuation of diverse human experiences becomes particularly obvious in development contexts. Gerhard Anders (2008: 187), who has studied the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s work in Malawi, calls this normative infusion of monitoring and evaluation the ‘normativity of numbers’. He shows how loans from both organizations came with conditionalities – that is, particular policy requirements attached to them. Conditional loans were meant to reconcile the organizations’ twin goals of respecting country ownership and tackling corruption. They required careful monitoring of particular ‘good governance’ indicators, such as GDP, inflation rate, and average life expectancy.

B. Metrics in justice and education

Within the domain of justice, it has become obvious that indicators exercise power in a variety of ways. They have, for example, been used to bring claims to individual human rights into closer relation with population-based discourses and management of international development, as economic indicators have increasingly been used for measuring and ranking human rights compliance (Merry 2011: 2016). Thus, economists at the World Bank, who have been pivotal for collecting and collating socioeconomic data throughout the world, have promoted the concept of ‘economic rights’, such as the right to an adequate standard of living or to social security, as central to the human rights agenda. Their success illustrates the power of certain indicators over others, based on the resources that they open up or close down. With the considerable economic and governing power behind it, the World Bank can prioritise which kinds of indicators it uses to direct its funding, or how much funding individual countries or organizations receive. It has the power to refine human rights indicators to prioritise the economic opportunities of individuals over other aspects of human life. These decisions affect not just what kind of funding countries may receive, but also how they measure human rights issues within their own borders.

Metrics often shape what is prioritised in our justice and education systems, but anthropologists have also shown that they must be understood in the context of other forms of evidence. Thus, qualitative narratives or other forms of evidence are part and parcel of numeric indicators themselves. Take the example of popular media rankings of quality for law schools. They impact the day-to-day occurrences within those schools by producing narratives that are just as important as the numbers themselves (Espeland 2015). When rankings are reorganised and some law schools are suddenly put ‘below’ others that law students and faculty had previously believed themselves to be superior to, they may provide narratives that try to temper and explain away the new hierarchy. For example, a law school dean may provide a narrative to his students about the ways that the rankings themselves were produced and the fact that they could be impacted, and changed quickly, by limiting class sizes the next year. In this way, rankings create narratives that ‘speak back’ to the numbers. Other examples also show that indicators are not simple and straightforward facts, but that they require qualitative interpretation, a perspective that some South African prosecutors studied by Muegler (2015) have taken. Thus ‘performance measurement systems’ measuring the ‘accountability’ of the justice system to the country’s population in South Africa must be analysed through how indicators and measurement are used in legal cases. The prosecutors’ ‘stat talk’ was always situated in larger understandings of practices of accountability, showing how indicators always must be understood in their larger context.

C. Metrics in health

The anthropology of metrics has traditionally had a strong focus on health. This is linked to the history of colonialism, where measurements of the body, of health, and of illness have been particularly pernicious in producing and maintaining oppressive theories of othering and racism (Arnold 1993; Anderson 2005). This history highlights how important it is that anthropologists continue to analyse the assumptions at the heart of health metrics. Further, techniques of measuring the body or sub-elements of the body have come to stand in for determining health in general, in ways that shape the lived experience of individuals as well as the institutions with which they interact.

In The mismeasure of man, evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould (1996) explains how complex human intelligence was systematically reduced to what could be measured with crude tools, such as IQ tests and skull size gauges, and how such unsuitable proxies were used to justify existing social hierarchies. The use of metrics of bodily weight and size to measure individuals’ health echoes this history (Yates-Doerr 2013). For example, obesity has come to be measured through various techniques including waist circumference, body mass index, and bioimpedance analysis. As part of this trend, ‘the public health community has become swept up with the idea that measurements can reveal the interior health of the body’ (Yates-Doerr 2013: 50). A major goal in public health is to find the best tool to provide a quantified value for body fat. In the process of finding more and more ‘accurate’ tools to do so, public health officials and clinicians easily forget the ‘representational quality of numbers’ and allow them to stand in for the concept of health itself. This standardised and metrics-based understanding of health stands in contrast to alternate ways of conceiving of fatness. In Guatemala, for example, where one individual’s corporeality is not necessarily commensurate with another’s, fatness and illness are not considered to be intrinsically linked as they so often are in the public health literature. Here, experiences and attitudes about fatness connote abundance and joy rather than illness or poor health. While numerical representations are not inherently bad, the power of numbers means that ‘other knowledges about bodies become harder to see, and though they certainly do not disappear, they become more difficult for scientists and public health worker to value’ (Yates-Doerr 2013: 64).

Metrics tend to impact those who use them, down to the level of their innermost subjectivity. Enumerative practices around the surveillance and prevention of HIV/AIDS in Miami, Florida, for example, have helped shape the identities – or ‘numerical subjectivities’ – of those living with the disease (Sangaramoorthy 2012: 292). Here, HIV/AIDS patients come to define themselves and how they understand wellness through their viral loads, or the number of viruses within a given amount of bodily fluid. They also define themselves through their CD4 counts, or the number of CD4+ T cells in a given amount of fluid, measuring individuals’ immunity levels. They tie changes in such numbers explicitly to external phenomena, arguing they might change for the better if a favourable health policy was passed. At the same time, statistics co-create how people see the world around them. Thus, the Center for Disease Control uses gathered surveillance data on Haitians living in Miami, classifying them as a ‘high risk’ population that requires extra HIV/AIDS surveillance. This is a legacy of the incorrect assumption that the presence of the disease in the US originated from Haiti (Farmer 1992), and Thurka Sangaramoorthy shows how Haitian-Miamians’ contemporary risk level is based on national statistical estimates on the disease. Previously-held assumptions about these populations being ‘high-risk heterosexual’ populations have made them particularly targeted for surveillance, and as a result of these categorizations, Haitians living with HIV/AIDS in Miami have internalised this externally imposed risk. In opposition to non-Haitians understanding their HIV/AIDS experience through ‘numerical subjectivity’, Haitians living with HIV/AIDS in Miami have been placed in a category of ‘high risk’ by outside forces – a category maintained through statistical surveillance – that has led them to reject these same practices of self-enumeration because of these legacies of discrimination. In this way, categorizations maintained by metrics are imposed externally, but there is always space for rejecting or manipulating them on the level of the individual.

Since global health metrics are powerful tools, they are always a tangle of contentions over epistemological definitions of disease, competition over limited funding from international organizations, and techniques of calculating and modelling proxies for disease. This has been shown in the example of maternal health in Malawi (Wendland 2016). Here, the officially-stated national progress on maternal health, based on a maternal mortality ratio (MMR), stood in painful disconnect to the experiences of physicians at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. The MMR had been estimated in 2010 by the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which projected success in the country’s goals for maternal mortality. Yet local physicians observed the same frequency of funeral processions in the maternity wing of the hospital. An analysis of the way that IHME and the World Health Organization produce MMR estimates shows that the metric, in places where maternal mortality data collection is sparse, like Malawi, is, in fact, an estimation of estimations, which in this instance failed to capture reality and risked losing funding for maternal health programmes. At the same time, epidemiologists, statisticians, and demographers have been developing and advocating for better metrics to measure progress in maternal health, asserting that their current forms do not appropriately represent reality (Storeng & Béhague 2017). However, it may be that at the heart of this effort is not so much a desire to represent the world, but one to ‘sell’ maternal health as a priority over other health issues to global health donors. It may well be that health metrics are themselves marketing techniques in a world governed by indicators.

In a world where metrics proliferate but health inequalities persist, one may go so far as to ask whether metrics create value only for a select few (Erikson 2016: 148). Not only are numbers required to give value to past action, but they are also asked to produce ‘future actuarial worth’. Promoters of health interventions among the global health community in Seattle, or Washington D.C, for example, often package their work for investors by providing productions of ‘expected growth’ due to their interventions, providing them a return on their investment (Erikson 2016: 153). Metrics have evolved from being strictly an accountability tool to one to be used to attract and incentivise investment, which we can see in the example of the shift in how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has approached the use of metrics. ‘“Tools of business’ will be the solution to bringing health and welfare to the world’, Bill Gates stated in his 2013 Annual Letter, showing how BMGF has fully embraced the use of metrics to govern global health like a business. These ‘incentivizing financial tools’ have been proliferating at a clip, using modelled and forecasted metrics as a means to show investors which medical commodities are the important ones to support.

One particularly elaborate incentivising financial tool of this sort is the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), which promised large interest rates to investors in the absence of a major pandemic within a three-year window (Erikson 2015; Stein & Sridhar 2017). Using medical expertise as well as that of multinational insurance companies, the PEF’s dispersal of funds for the support of lower- and middle-income country governments and global health agencies is determined by a series of metrics that some have argued are ill-fitting for many potential pandemics (Jonas 2019). This raises the question of whether metrics can be used to incentivise inaction, rather than action in global health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the PEF was only triggered in late April 2020, when other non-metrics-based funding mechanisms had already been allocated. In addition to fostering inertia, and slowing down the disbursement of aid, metrics like those required by the PEF turn health itself into an object of investment for which actors obtain a financial return (Erikson 2016). This shifts the fundamental measure of success for health interventions from addressing health problems to whether an investor makes a profit, further deteriorating the concept of health as a public good.

Conclusions

This entry has focused on the anthropology of metrics, which analyses the effects of the increasing quantification of our institutions, communities, and selves. However, anthropology’s engagement with metrics as an object of study exists alongside the use of indices, indicators, and statistics for research. Anthropologists make use of or even help produce population-based statistics to provide context for ethnographic studies. At the same time, the UK’s Research Excellence Framework requires that anthropology departments produce performance indicators of the impact of their research, turning its members into both producers and researchers of metrics. Anthropologists sometimes assert that their research output is ‘a form of counterevidence to metrics’, which produces a tension between ‘stories and numbers’ (Moats 2016: 596). They will need to bridge the chasm between qualitative and quantitative ways of representing the world, which exist alongside and in tension with each other (Benton 2012). Rather than arguing against metrics, which is a dangerous thing to do in our ‘post-truth’ world, anthropologists may want to argue for better metrics and the simultaneous use of multiple modes of evidence. Analysing the practices that create metrics, and interrogating their effects, does not stand in for an argument against their use. Instead, it indicates the importance of couching metrics and quantified data within other forms of evidence, in a way that ensures that the assumptions, data sources, and estimations that were used to create them remain clear.

We may today be reaching a point at which the production and consumption of evaluative metrics has reached its peak (Kelly & McGoey 2018). At the same time, our trust in the systems that produce and consume them is at a historic low. In a time where nuance seems to be mostly absent from political debate, debating the validity of metrics feels like a dangerous game. And yet, those who design and implement metrics, and those whose lives are impacted by them, must understand how the dominant categories and measurements affect social life. Based on this understanding, they may be able to decide where measurement is needed and where unmeasured life should continue.

Acknowledgements

This entry is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under Grant agreement No 715125 METRO (ERC-2016-StG) (“International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field”, 2017–2022, PI: Sotiria Grek). It was also supported by Wellcome Trust [106635/Z/14/Z].

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Note on contributor

Marlee Tichenor is a research fellow in the Social Policy Department at the University of Edinburgh and received her PhD from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. She is a medical anthropologist interested in the politics of evidence and data in global health policy and intervention.

Marlee Tichenor, Social Policy Department, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15A George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD. marlee.tichenor@ed.ac.uk

[1] In anthropology, ‘subjectivity’ is used to mean many things, including personhood, the ‘emotional life of a political subject’ (Luhrmann 2006: 345), and the processes by which a ‘modern subject’ is made (Biehl, Good & Kleinman 2007: 1). The concept is used to interrogate the ways by which individuals understand themselves and how this is influenced by social processes and conditions around them.

[2] Along with other feminist anthropologists of science, Donna Haraway has argued that the objectivity touted by natural scientists over the centuries is not a ‘view from nowhere’. She holds that evidence, research designs, and theories have historically been produced from a Western, masculine perspective, and that all production of knowledge must be thus understood to be ‘situated’ (Haraway 1988: 575). Social anthropologists, particularly since the field’s representational turn in the 1980s, have tended to assert the importance of acknowledging the positionality of the ethnographer in the knowledge they produce about different communities.