Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Colonialism

Democracy

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:44:39 +0000

A delegate from Somaliland votes in Mogadishu, Somalia, on December 25, 2016. Photo by Ilyas Ahmed

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Initially published 15 Dec 2025

Abstract:

Democracy is a system of governance and a value with a widespread presence worldwide. However, anthropological literature has shown that the transition to democracy articulates practices, institutions, and additional values that depend on previous political experience that is often locally specific. This results in distinct meanings of democracy, as people may not adhere to the principles of Euro-American democracy, which tends to be secular, liberal and representative. Ethnography has cast light on how kinship, religion, gender, morals, and the economy (among others) are entangled in people’s political allegiances and decisions and thereby shape democratic governmental actions. Anthropology focuses not only on who is defined as ‘the people’, and included or excluded from positions of power, but also on how power dynamics organise democratic values, practices, and institutions.

After conveying these established propositions on the anthropology of democracy, this entry will address three important discussions in the discipline: Firstly, it shows that two core Euro-American assumptions—that democracy is necessarily secular and liberal—are disputed worldwide, including in consolidated democracies, where religious movements and populist and authoritarian leaders are flourishing. Second, it discusses the configuration of citizenship, and the citizen’s active role in fighting for rights and in producing oneself as part of a moral collective. It highlights the power relations and political rationalities involved in these processes. The third section addresses the notion of being represented and of participating directly in a democratic government, by looking at the study of elections, the meanings attributed to voting, and at protests and social movements. The entry concludes by arguing that anthropologists’ particular contribution to the study of democracy is twofold: it highlights the cultural, social, and moral aspects in the everyday experiences of democracy among ordinary citizens; and it discovers unexpected power dynamics that shift not only what people fight for in a democracy but also how they do it.

Introduction

What ‘democracy’ is, or ought to be, is not easy to grasp. It is often identified with Euro-American and modern nation-states and seen as rooted in ancient Greek cities. Yet, definitions of democracy and the ideas associated with it have been the subject of extensive debate (Dunn 2019). A simple definition is that democracy corresponds to the ‘rule of the people’ (from the etymological basis of demos and kratia, literally meaning the ‘force of the people’). Modern and contemporary democracy is usually associated with a set of elements such as the rule of law, equality among its members, fair elections of representatives, and freedom of expression, to name only a few. Still, anthropological studies complicate these assumptions by discussing who counts as ‘the people’, how their political will comes to matter, and whether we should distinguish between democracy as ‘a form of governance (i.e. a mode of communal self-organization) or a form of government (i.e. one particular way of organizing a state apparatus)’ (Graeber 2007, 329). What is striking about democracy is that it has increasingly become a core value worldwide over the last one hundred years.

Anthropologists have been studying politics for a long time among people under colonial rule or otherwise dominated within a national context (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940; Gluckman 1940; Leach 1954). Hence, they were well-positioned to pay attention during fieldwork to transitions of societies recently liberated from colonial rule or dictatorships towards more democratic forms of governance. Since the 1970s, numerous countries around the world have transitioned to democratic regimes. In these contexts, anthropologists have shown that what democracy turns out to be in practice can be quite different from assumed universal understandings of it. In distinction to other disciplines, which focus on institution-building or the rule of law necessary for the fair election procedures among elites (cf. Mainwaring 1989), anthropological fieldwork has focused on concrete expectations for and lived experiences of democracy as well as the power dynamics at play, which in some cases prolonged the effects of previous political regimes or hindered desired political transformations. Ethnographic fieldwork also enables anthropologists to reject analyses which reinforce normative standards of what democracy should be, and which consider their understanding of democracy as an end goal for history and part of a single road to progress. Such normative analyses all too often continue a colonial mentality that defines non-Euro-American countries as perpetually backwards (Coronil 2019, 238-40).

Anthropological work also brings forth the points of view of local and ordinary people, instead of restricting the study of democracy to formal discourses and state institutions. Thereby, it casts light on how kinship, religion, morals, gender, and the economy (among others) are historically entangled in people’s political allegiances and decisions. Ethnographic research, for example, shows that democratic citizenship is not just a legal status but a form of belonging and behaving that is rooted in particular social experiences, and that people may manifest their interests and political demands in indirect and sometimes even hidden ways. Thus, anthropologists often study democracy in the same way as one would research other intimate domains, such as religion and kinship, allowing them to observe a ‘vernacularisation’ of democracy, i.e. an embedding and reshaping of democratic practices, in people's daily lives (Michelutti 2007).

For example, in northern India, the Yadavs, milk producers and members of a caste that claims ancestral ties to the Hindu god Krishna, draw upon this mythical-religious relationship to shape their political demands. They argue that democracy is a primordial phenomenon passed on from the blood of Krishna to contemporary Yadavs, and that they therefore deserve greater political influence (Michelutti 2007). Such discourse blends religion and governance in ways that contravene democracy’s purported separation between religion and state. Political support for the Yadav also reaches far beyond mere politics of interest or recognition, relying instead on links of caste, ethnicity, and kinship. It produces highly specific dynamics of political inclusion and exclusion, pitting for example Hindus and Muslims against one another, and it changes the meanings of voting from creating flimsy contractual relations to affirming existing ties of status, prestige, or power (Michelutti 2019, 204). The broader insight—that democracy articulates specific sets of practices, institutions, and values that often continue pre-existing political contexts—has been confirmed in various other settings as well (e.g. Caldeira 2000; Paley 2008; Banerjee 2014; Hickel 2015).

The ‘turn to democracy’ worldwide, and in particular in the Global South since the 1970s (Heller 2022), has raised essential questions, such as if there are ‘alternative configurations of democracy and different ways of reaching it, or if claims of difference are merely excuses for undemocratic practices’ (Caldeira and Holston 1999, 727). In other words, scholars of democracy have asked if there can be a minimal transnational and transhistorical definition of ‘democracy’. The difficulty in offering that kind of definition has often led anthropologists to discuss and distinguish between democratic practices, institutions, and values, since similar institutions and practices can have completely distinct meanings as they take root in local contexts following different values.

The remainder of this entry discusses cases of democratic transition, asking how democracy acquires locally produced meanings that are entangled with pre-existing histories and values. It then presents three major aspects that anthropologists have focused on in their work on democracy. Firstly, it shows that anthropological studies have challenged two core Euro-American assumptions about democracy: its secular and its liberal nature. Anthropological work makes clear that even consolidated democracies do not generally adhere to dominant normative assumptions about democracy. In the United States, for example, Christian, authoritarian, and populist practices are flourishing. The entry then discusses different configurations of citizenship with democracy, including the power relations between the state and civil society. Citizens in democratic systems are held to play an active role in fighting for rights and in participating in politics more broadly. Studying these processes has highlighted how citizens produce themselves as ethically bounded subjects with corresponding democratic sensibilities. Finally, the entry examines the representative nature of democracy and how the will of the people can be expressed. This includes discussions on the nature and meaning of participating in electoral and other political processes, such as voting, community organising, and participating in demonstrations and other forms of popular protest.

In discussing these issues, anthropologists have tended to ask: Which sections of society are excluded from positions of power, and how do they fight to improve their participation and rights? How does the government create, promote, and limit ways for people to participate in the exercise of power? What is an election, which meanings are attributed to voting, and is voting the proper or the main form of political participation? And, which beliefs and values are compatible with the democratic decision process, and which may be a hindrance?

Transitions to democracy and local meanings

Given that anthropologists have directly observed various kinds of societies transition to democracy, their studies demonstrated early on that democracy needs to be understood in its local context and with reference to how democratic institutions have been introduced there. Many have pointed out that democratic institutions tend to get ‘selectively assimilated to an existing political cosmology, while also transforming that cosmology in important respects’ (Karlström 1996, 485). They have paid close attention to the underlying values and concepts that guide political decisions, whereby they add a significant layer to the analysis of political actions (Piliavski and Scheele 2022).

For example, local meanings of democracy can incorporate notions of freedom from oppression without thereby corresponding to Euro-American ideals of liberty and equality. This is the case among the Wolof speakers of Senegal studied during the 1990s (Schaffer 1997), where the idea of demokaraasi was derived from the French coloniser's démocratie, and had incorporated local Islamic metaphors as part of being introduced by ruling Muslim elites. Demokaraasi had three interrelated meanings and ideals: treating people fairly, sharing responsibility for one another's well-being, and achieving agreement. This understanding of democracy, which focuses on ‘cooperative caretaking’ and social peace, challenged more agonistic conceptions of democracy which centre on fighting for your candidate or party (Schaffer 1997, 42, 47; cf. Mouffe 2005). Interpreting democracy along Senegalese Islamic lines also came with unforeseen consequences, such as the idea that given that Senegalese mosques may have several muezzins, a democratic Senegalese government might accommodate several presidents at the same time (Schaffer 1997, 45).

Similarly, research in Uganda during the early 1990s shows that democracy (eddembe ery’obuntu in Luganda) was closely associated with freedom from oppression. Yet oppression was locally understood as ‘the consequence of a disordered state, of authority which has lost its anchor’. Democracy was also firmly linked to ideas of liberty, understood as ‘a rightly ordered polity oriented around a properly and firmly installed ruler’ (Karlström 1996, 487). Here, local democratic ideals of democracy did not match either Euro-American counterparts. Ugandans did value freedom of speech; justice and equity; and civility and hierarchy, yet the meanings of these democratic values were profoundly shaped by local context. Freedom of speech is the possibility to speak freely to their ruler, that is, speech in a context of legitimate unitary authority, and reliant on the willingness of power-holders to listen to their subjects. Similarly, justice and equity did not imply that people were fundamentally or ontologically equal, but only that they were situationally equal as subjects before their ruler, who has to treat all of them with fairness. Finally, to act with civility often meant abiding by existing hierarchies (Karlström 1996, 488, 491). Hence, when democratic ideals are re-interpreted locally, they frequently challenge Euro-American definitions of democracy.

The value of equality, which is frequently presumed to be the very essence of democracy, has been questioned in other instances as well. In rural India, for example, the fast adoption of democracy had as a crucial vehicle the value of hierarchy (Piliavski 2023, 583). Indian ideas of hierarchy come with expectations of responsibility, notably the responsibility of superiors to their subordinates. Politicians are patrons who are expected to take full responsibility for the well-being of ‘their people’, while voting is not so much an enactment of equality as it is an expression of loyalty and a way to create alliances with these political leaders (Piliavski 2020). Put differently, hierarchy is valued as a ‘relational logic of mutual expectation […] structured by differences of rank and role’ (2023, 584), and does not hinder but drives the spread of democracy.

The meanings of democracy are not just influenced by pre-existing local political concepts; they also change over time. This may be because different stakeholders attempt to secure a particular definition of democracy that serves their interests. In the 1990s in Chile, for example, campaigns for democracy against military rule attributed to the military dictatorship all that was wrong in the country (pain, misery, torture, exile, low salaries, and poor health clinics) and to a coming democracy what could be achieved (to express one’s opinions, elections, health and education, social benefits, community leaders, family houses) (Paley 2004). After Chile became a democracy, however, these meanings shifted. Social movements maintained a definition of democracy as entangled with social equality, free speech, and citizen's rights, as they demanded to ‘be taken into account’ in political decisions. Yet, government officials and elected representatives mostly ‘equated democracy with electoral procedures generating representative political institutions’ (2004, 504). They considered pressure by social movements in health policy as being on the verge of treason ‘because disagreement is considered unhealthy for democracy’ and ‘could potentially destabilize’ it (2004, 503, 505). Thus, the Chilean experience shows that democratic institutions can retain continuities of dictatorial political and economic practices, and that definitions of democracy can be part of intense power-oriented disputes over meanings and values (Paley 2004). It also foregrounds the ongoing processes through which specific notions of democracy are generated and come to predominate (Paley 2008, 5).

Local inflections of democracy are often linked to the nature of a previous government or governance system. In the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, colonial rule initially shaped democratic challenges to power, following the end of apartheid in 1994 (Hickel 2015). There, rural working-class migrants rejected liberal democracy as a threat to their most fundamental values—they could not reconcile their existing forms of personhood and social life with the idea that all individuals were supposed to be ontologically equal and autonomous. Kinship, gender, and household organisation were conceived of in hierarchical terms, and progressive policy was understood as destroying families and causing misfortune. This hierarchical moral order of rural Zulus was not an essential and unalterable traditional culture in opposition to modernity. Instead, it resulted from modern colonialism, which had long administered the population very differently, ‘relying on indirect rule in rural areas and deploying direct rule in urban areas’, fostering egalitarianism in urban settings compared to social hierarchies in rural ones (Hickel 2015, 15).

Democracy has also been shown as standing in close relation to and often in tension with existing moral economies. In Switzerland, for example, an emphasis on direct democracy and communal participation has historically favoured consensus over partisanship. However, there is an increasing tension between egalitarian and hierarchical values, made visible by the growing power of corporations and extreme right-wing positions in Swiss political life. This raises questions about the ‘compatibility of democracy with corporate formations’, suggesting that the original Swiss egalitarian bottom-up practice is changing. Positions are on the rise that harness hierarchical tendencies, ‘contributing to the subversion of the democratic process’ by relocating decision-making power from the ordinary citizens of a Swiss canton to a central federal government and multinational corporations (Gold 2019, 24, 27).

Similarly, in Argentina, Peronism had long shaped a national ideal of democracy as valuing trade unions, lifelong support from the welfare state, and state intervention in economic affairs (del Nido 2022, 14). At the same time, the post-Peronist impoverishment of the middle class and the rise of social media served as fertile grounds for the arrival of the multinational transportation corporation Uber in Buenos Aires in the spring of 2016. This prompted a political conflict between the state-managed taxi industry and middle-class citizens who demanded the end of the taxi monopoly. It positioned taxis as symbols of Argentina and its capital against Uber rides as symbols of entrepreneurship and individual choice. Middle-class citizens were quick to embrace and enact a new moral economy of ‘choice, efficiency, empowerment, opportunism, innovation, competition and freedom’ (del Nido 2022, 3) to pressure the government to liberalise its economy and legalise the Uber app.

What unites the examples in this section is the insight that one should not take the core values of democratic life for granted. It is this detailed focus on values and local meanings of democracy that can explain a series of questions about democracy, such as what the American working class may be striving for when it is said that they are voting ‘against their economic interests’ (Graeber 2011). Yet, the focus on values also raises the question: Are there any essential values, practices or institutions that every political configuration should enact in order to qualify as a democracy?

Secularism and liberalism

Anthropologists have spent considerable effort discussing secularism and liberalism, two values that are assumed to be integral to democracy and that transitions to democratic governance are expected to engender and promote. They have thereby questioned the assumed universality and homogeneity of these values.

Secularism

The term ‘secularism’ tends to refer to a separation between institutionalised religion and the state in matters of governance. France’s conception of secularism (laicité), which has often been upheld as an ideal to be pursued by other nation-states, encompasses individualisation and privatisation of religious beliefs, along with their separation from public, political, and institutional life (cf. Gauchet 1998; Bauberot, Millot and Portier 2014). However, maintaining the secular ideal of democracy poses the question of how to consider religious subjects as democratic citizens. Should they express their demands according to their religious beliefs and values, or should they translate and adapt their ideas into a secular (i.e. non-religious) and supposedly naturally shared understanding of politics (Habermas 2008, 114ss)?

It also raises the question of whether any truly secular system of politics exists in the first place. Anthropologists have critically noted that Christianity has served as the default setting against which today’s secular frameworks of democracy have been formed (Asad 2003). Consequently, a recurring political question has been whether (and how) nation-states with a non-Christian population can become truly secular and, hence, democratic. To answer this question, anthropologists have expanded their research beyond the North Atlantic to non-Christian states, arguing that secularism can emerge according to distinct trajectories and different sets of ontological premises (Mahmood 2010; Luehrmann 2011; Agrama 2012; Bubandt and van Beek 2012; Veer 2014; Furani 2015).

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, religion has become increasingly present in public debate. In some cases, historically secular citizens have reacted with furore and anxiety whenever fellow citizens, candidates, or democratically elected representatives have expressed their religious affiliations and concerns (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2002). And yet, as anthropological research has demonstrated, from the point of view of many ordinary citizens, there is no necessary distinction between an expression of religious morality and political demands. However, religious actions can affirm a particular (and minority) position, causing conflict. For example, in Brazil, many Evangelical Christians understand that they have a ‘duty to position themselves politically, to stop the advance of groups considered to be threats to the moral balance of society’ (Maurício Jr. 2019, 101). They demand changes to national legislation on sexual rights and public education that conform to their religious beliefs. In a religiously plural society, pushing forth such particular religious values can be challenging, as it may bring to the table unnegotiable principles and a moral crusade against those who sustain divergent positions. An alternative set of religious values in Brazil is that of Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé. Grounded in a fight against racism and religious intolerance, it values respect for elders, secrecy, and initiation. Proponents of Candomblé suggest at times that a return ‘to a more traditional social order […] grounded in Afro-Brazilian religious values and social practices’ could be a solution to the ‘social disorder’ the country is facing (Hartikainen 2018, 96), making explicit its connection to the religious value of hierarchy.

Religious practices can even become political techniques in a democracy. In Guatemala, Christianity and democracy are enmeshed to the point that religious actions like praying, fasting, and examining one’s conscience are considered political actions that aim at the moral strengthening of the nation (O'Neill 2010). In North Maluku, Indonesia, democracy and traditional beliefs and practices of sorcery are equally closely entangled (Bubandt 2006; 2012). Along with juridical manoeuvres and corruption, including bribery and vote-buying, politicians can use sorcery to attack their adversaries or to protect themselves before running in an election. Sorcery and corruption are here perceived as ‘an immoral but inescapable way of conducting democratic politics’ (Bubandt 2006, 426). By focusing on these occult and non-transparent aspects, including by incorporating various spirits and spiritualities, anthropologists have witnessed new ways in which modern politics and democracy are being conducted (Bubandt 2012, 196, 204).

Debates around religion and democracy often come back to a widely held perception that Islam and Muslims' religious practices that make claims on public life threaten democracy’s secular foundation (Hirschkind 2008, 126–7). Yet, studying diverse Muslim contexts such as Turkey (Navaro-Yashin 2002), Indonesia (Bubandt 2012), and Egypt (Agrama 2012), shows how many Muslims include non-Muslims minorities into their polities. In modern Egypt, freedom of religious belief is a right that marks which legal framework will be used to judge family disputes under the law (Agrama 2012). These works question the assumptions underlying the normative definition of secularism to demonstrate how the state regulates religion. Muslim religious and political doctrine does not equate submitting to traditional authorities and discourses, but tends to be much more complex, multifaceted, and open to internal criticism and disputes than popular media and political depictions would suggest (cf. Asad 2003; Mahmood 2005).

Overall, religious beliefs and values tend to remain relevant to citizens' political interests and public life. They are deeply entangled with and sometimes indistinguishable from democratic political life.

Liberalism

As with secularism, Euro-American contemporary democracy was also developed within the framework of ‘liberalism’ (cf. Ryan 2012). Liberal democracy contends that individual rights should be protected, in particular freedom of conscience and expression, as well as private property. The protection of such civil liberties has a strong collective dimension, as it relies on checks and balances on the ruling party and the protection of minorities to avoid democracy from descending into a ‘tyranny of the majority’. And yet, liberal democracy can fit oddly with or turn into authoritarian practices and positions of power that aim to impose or silence parts of the polity. Anthropological research on the global increase of populist and authoritarian leaders and movements, in particular the upsurge in far-right politics, shows the many different ways in which core liberal values and institutions can come under threat (e.g. Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016; Balthazar 2017; Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2018; Mazzarella 2019; Hatzikidi and Dullo 2021; Pasieka 2024).

One important concept in these debates is the idea of populism, i.e. a ‘political logic’ or form of rhetoric that operates by antagonizing ‘the people’ from an external or internal ‘enemy’. Populism poses a particularly complicated challenge to liberal democracy because both consider ‘the people’ to be the foundation of political legitimacy and national sovereignty. Yet, populism frequently undermines the institutions and procedures aimed to safeguard civil rights, to the point of engendering ‘an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy’. Anthropology’s major contribution to debates over the similarity and difference between populism and democracy has been to ask who defines ‘the people’ and how this is done. It shows that ‘the people’ is a discursive and performative political entity that often excludes a significant part of the population who are treated as ‘non-people’ in that they are not valued, and in some cases even accused of being ‘anti-people’ and domestic enemies (e.g. Sanchez 2020; Hatzikidi 2023a).

A particularly creative way of studying populism is to focus on its aesthetics, styles, and performances. The way in which populist politics appear in the media has changed from traditional media like television to the more recent rise of social media (Cesarino 2024). In these spaces, populist leaders do not necessarily reach out to or are popular among their supporters for socioeconomic similarities or shared ideological values. Rather, because ‘late capitalism values style over content’ (Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016, 72), populist leaders can grab people’s attention with their words, gestures, and positions that are filled with comedy and spectacle (2016, 75). Donald Trump is a good example of this trend. In the context of hyper-mediatised American culture, Trump’s rise as a political figure mirrors his success as a TV entertainer and social media influencer, constantly seizing people's attention, and keeping everyone, including adversaries, attuned to his actions and speeches. While Trump as a billionaire has few socioeconomic similarities with the common citizen he represents, he has mobilised his widespread media presence to posit himself as somehow anti-establishment, thereby charting a common ground with the average American citizen, many of whom constitute his base. This strategy, which has been adopted by several populist leaders beyond Trump, constitutes a logical step in a hyper-mediatised politics ‘that lacks content, sells itself as entertainment, and incorporates comedic stylistics so as to immunize itself from critique’ (Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016, 93). Even after being shot at during a speech in his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump managed to perform strength by posing for pictures with blood on his face and the American flag in the background.

Research on democracy in the contexts of populism, far-right politics, and authoritarianism has also raised methodological issues: how should researchers interact affectively and epistemically with those with whom they have profound political and moral disagreements? And what should researchers do if they develop personal affection or friendship for some of the politically ‘unlikable’ others? (Pasieka 2019). Discomfort with studying some aspects of democratic life today may stem from anthropology’s own ‘populist stance, habitually aligning with the common sense of the common people’ (Mazzarella 2019, 46). Anthropologists have often mobilised ordinary people’s perceptions to critique democratic liberalism. Yet, the rise of an illiberal and often far-right populism creates a disconcerting overlap between anthropological critiques of liberalism and those of the far right. Reflecting on this issue, anthropologists have explored how ordinary far-right citizens are usually situated by their political opponents, including researchers. They may be exoticised and ‘othered’ as somehow deplorable because they hold the wrong values; they may be located outside of a progressive political space; or, their political proclivities may be explained away as a mere backlash to decades of neoliberalism (Pasieka 2019).

Given that researchers may disagree with the people they study, it is relevant to ask if they hold unequal epistemological positions for distinct subjects encountered in the field (Dullo 2016). One important response may be to emphasise an anthropological core value: the search for nuance and complexity in social life (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2021). In increasingly polarised times, such nuance, combined with a basic fundamental appreciation of other human beings regardless of their political convictions, may establish an increasingly rare and powerful political discourse. It allows anthropologists to portray complex life narratives of those who move from ‘hope’ (and a left-wing position) to ‘hate’ (and a right-wing authoritarian position) (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2020). At the same time, such a refined approach to studying anti-democratic ‘others’ also makes scholars vulnerable to accusations of not doing enough against authoritarianism and fascism. They may even find themselves accused of being complicit with the far-right by humanising it.

This is all the more serious as populist politics also threaten critical voices from academia, such as politically engaged anthropologists, who are all too easily subsumed under the category of ‘enemies of the people’. Fights against critical scholarship take all kinds of forms, from forbidding certain theoretical approaches and research topics, to cutting research funding across the board, to directly threatening researchers and their families. Scholars from the Global South (Gonçalves and Lasco 2023) have suggested that anthropologists have a responsibility to respond to the increasingly authoritarian and illiberal contexts in which research is conducted today. Instead of criticising liberal democracy due to its inability to prevent exclusionary practices, researchers should pay attention to how its enforcement of the rule of law and freedom of expression and association are the conditions of possibility for pursuing critical scholarship, even against those exclusionary practices. This includes distinguishing liberal democracy from neoliberalism as a governmental rationality that thrives under authoritarian and illiberal democracy, where it deepens its inherent exclusionary logics and widens inequality gaps.

Citizenship and governmentality

Two fruitful ways of studying democracy focus on citizenship and governmentality, i.e. on the techniques and rationalities that aim to direct how people conduct themselves in democratic settings (Foucault 1991; Li 2007). Democracy, like many other systems of governance, co-creates the subjects that live under it, inciting people to adhere to specific conceptions of personhood, often shaped around the idea of a bounded generic individual who is in an equal relationship with fellow citizens. Anthropologists have shown how this production of democratic subjects, or ‘subjectification’, is influenced by all kinds of factors, including disputes over civil, political, social, and human rights; people’s relationships with the state; and exclusionary practices and boundaries that comprise a political community, including gender, race and ethnicity, and class differentiation (e.g. Caldeira 2000; Postero 2007; Lazar 2008; O'Neill 2010; Muehlenbach 2012).

Focusing on citizenship, anthropologists have argued that democratic institutions that do not address inequalities and socio-economic injustice may fail to consolidate democracy (Caldeira 2000; Caldeira and Holston 1999). When Brazil transitioned to a democracy in the 1980s, for example, inequality and criminality developed together, producing new forms of urban segregation that aimed to protect the rich and legitimised state violence against the poor. Disrespect for individual civil and human rights resulted in conceiving of citizens' bodies as 'unbounded', i.e. as open to violent intervention. This idea of the body resulted from Brazil's history as first a colony and then as part of the periphery of global capitalism. Given Brazil's stark inequalities, the country became a 'disjunctive democracy' (Caldeira 2000, 371-5), institutionally democratic but without protecting people's rights in their everyday lives. In the twenty-first century, poor and Black citizens responded to this situation by taking political action and resisting becoming passive subjects of state violence. Fighting for their rights included, for example, trying to acquire legal property rights to their home and land. Such 'insurgent' forms of citizenship were crucial to the consolidation of Brazilian democracy (Holston 2008).

Since the 1990s, anthropologists noticed a widespread embrace of democracy, evident in the multiplication of social movements and new citizenship claims among previously excluded groups (Postero and Elinoff 2019, 4). However, this occurred together with the increased impact of neoliberalism as a dominant form of governmentality in which citizens are mostly considered consumers and dominant values include economic productivity, socio-economic empowerment, and entrepreneurship. The conjunction of new claims to citizenship and neoliberal rationality operated ‘by educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs’ (Li 2007, 275). This is to show that it is not just the state that shapes the techniques and rationalities that structure our behaviour, but a whole set of agents including companies, missionaries, scientists, activists, and NGOs (Li 2007, 276).

In an ideal world, functional democracies govern citizens who participate actively in decision-making and political life. However, anthropologists have debated what participation actually means, which actions are valued, and which ones are ignored (O’Neill 2010). Research in contemporary Italy showed that the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare system was met with a growing promotion of voluntarism and non-paid relational labour, such as care for the elderly (Muehlenbach 2012). Here democratic participation is moralised, and people were made to feel compassion and responsibility to care for others, while also covering gaps left by the withdrawal of state policies. This ‘ethical citizenship’ has citizens imagining themselves as bound together by moral and affective—rather than social and political—ties, leading to asymmetrical relations between caretaker and receiver. They are primarily driven by considerations of duty rather than by claiming their rights (Muelenbach 2012, 43).

Focusing on the different techniques of government has been fundamental to discussing democracy not only as a particular political arrangement but also as a manner of governing a population of citizens by altering ‘how bodies are oriented, how lives are lived, and how subjects are formed’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 984). Through it, anthropologists revisited the theoretical divide between the state and civil society (e.g. Appadurai 2001). It shows that the state is not a monolith but may use a myriad of different techniques, logics, and arguments, including bureaucracy, to shape who we are as citizens and how we conceive of political participation. This raises the question of how the state should be imagined. Does it stand above society and encompass it? Is the state best understood as the effect of spontaneous action by politicians and citizens in support of it? Or is the state largely manipulative and can manufacture even spontaneous-seeming action by citizens via governmental techniques (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 130–54)?

Consider the example of democracy in 1990s Turkey. Here, a dispute between a secularist social organisation and an Islamic party for a ‘better democracy’ led each side to establish their positions as reflecting the demands of the people. Yet, both sides did not just reflect but actively attempted to produce a corresponding ‘people’ that would sustain their agendas (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 144–52). The secularists tried to convince potential voters that secularism had a long history in Turkey, reprinting history books that fit their convictions and creating educational centres in various shantytowns around Istanbul, where women would be taught practical and professional skills, like childcare and sewing, while also learning about the principles of Turkish secularism (Ataturkism). In 1994, the governor of Istanbul even organised celebrations for ‘Republic Day’ in the heart of the capital, a seemingly traditional holiday that celebrated secularism, even if it had never been a day of celebration before. People started actively participating, providing seemingly spontaneous support for one side of the political dispute.

In sum, anthropologists have shown that active democratic citizenship can take unexpected and new directions, and that it is pertinent to consider not just the values that orient people’s actions but also the frequently subtle and pervasive power relations that shape how we think of and engage with state institutions and a ‘spontaneous’ civil society.

Representation and participation

Democracy relies on knowing the will of the people. Frequently, this will is expressed through individual votes for a representative, who will act on their behalf and govern them. Elections, which are crucial for liberal definitions of democracy and which have been studied critically by anthropologists (e.g. Heredia and Palmeira 2006; Spencer 2007; Banerjee 2014), have been a major focus in the study of democracy. Yet, the will of the people also finds other outlets, such as opinion polls, protests, and demonstrations (Paley 2001; Razsa and Kurnir 2012; Kunreuther 2018; Dullo 2022) or debates, memes, and propaganda spread on social media (Juris 2012; Cesarino 2022). The anthropological study of democracy has therefore questioned how citizens express their will and has asked what the limits of representation may be, or rather what may be ‘hidden from view when one figure speaks for another’ (Lee 2011, 937).

Elections and votes have long been analysed as specific kinds of ritual, creating a distinct temporality from everyday life, and with deep social and symbolic effects on how people relate to one another. For instance, in a small village of predominantly Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, the introduction of elections was perceived as producing conflict in an otherwise calm, polite, and peaceful village. To vote and position oneself according to one or another party was a way of distinguishing between good and bad community members, differentiating oneself morally from others while also following one’s self-interest. This upset the existing moral order in the village previously organised around ideas of unity, gentleness, and restraint in public life (Spencer 2007, 72–95). Here, elections did not just reflect the people’s will, but they generated meaning, plunging public life into a state of moral disorder where naked self-interest was not just displayed but increasingly produced. Electoral disputes’ conflictive relations generate gossip and performative adhesion to a side. They can even promote a split within a community, down to the granular level of homes, families, and friends, but they may also produce hope and faith in a better future (Mayblin and Clough 2014; Mayblin 2025).

Thinking of elections as ritual also highlights some of the constructive ways in which they make meaning. Elections mean a great deal to Indian voters, for example, where voter turnout has been high for decades. Here, voting expresses and enacts values of citizenship, accountability, and civility (Banerjee 2014, 3). It allows people to challenge for one day the inequalities of wealth and status that usually dominate their daily lives, akin to a carnival that turns social hierarchies on their head for a short period of time (Banerjee 2014, 10–1). Surprisingly, the spread of neoliberalism does not so much undermine Indian elections but indeed strengthens them, as voting is one of the few outlets for poor, subaltern, and rural Indians to have a say in an otherwise neoliberal world.

All that said, elections are much more than just ritual. They can be thought of as ‘a set of practices and artifacts’, which may lead to an alternative conceptualisation of democracy (Coles 2004). By focusing on the practical implementation involved in organising elections, such as the production of documents, people’s physical displays and movements inside polling stations, and the filling of forms and registers, it becomes obvious that elections are not just symbolic events that foster or challenge social hierarchy, but also technical artifacts that not only elicit but make real the will of the people. For example, in the democratisation following the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the turn of the twenty-first century, various measures were taken to ensure people would only be able to cast a single personal vote. First, voters’ fingers were marked with a special fluorescent ink, visible under an ultraviolet light, then voter registries and identification documents guaranteed that votes could be properly registered (Coles 2004). A polling station can thus be thought of as akin to a scientific laboratory, in that it produces ‘facts, knowledge and order’ (Coles 2004, 553).

Given the power that voting techniques and procedures have, it is unsurprising that they are often the subject of heated debate. This was the case in the 2022 presidential campaigns in Brazil, when the incumbent candidate Jair Bolsonaro questioned the security of electronic voting machines and demanded the return of printed ballots. Discrediting the voting system and promoting conspiracy theories about the fairness of a ballot count (Hatzikidi 2023b) can be a political strategy that highlights the importance of elections and their procedures to establish a fair decision. That is why anthropologists nowadays include fake news and digital influencers in their analyses of the technical processes of campaigns (e.g. Cesarino 2022). The latter also reminds us that elections do not exist in a vacuum. While the concrete electoral procedures may try to uphold and instantiate egalitarian ideas such as ‘one person one vote’, electoral campaigns also reproduce structural inequalities when it comes to campaign financing, access to media outlets, and the existing social stigma of ethnic groups running for office (Collins 2021).

Studying democracy ethnographically also attunes us to the unintended effects and internal paradoxes that it can bring. Take, for example, the experience of the rural Mueda people of Northern Mozambique, studied in the 1990s (West 2008). Here, democratic reformers sought to promote local leaders to political office rather than sending authorities from the capital to govern Mueda communities. These changes in the dynamics of authority and local power were perceived locally as an abandonment by the central administration, as the loss of local voices at the federal level. Instead of empowering the Mueda, efforts of bringing about local leadership as part of a greater democratic participation made them less integrated with the decision-making centres in the capital and thus politically weaker. This case raises the question of whether choosing one’s representative is sufficient as a democratic practice, or whether democracy also requires having freedom of speech and the power to be taken into account.

Understanding how elections are made sense of locally is as important for understanding rural Mozambique as it is for grasping the political dynamics in the capital of the United Kingdom. Here, the Brexit referendum in 2016 was not so much an expression of ‘culture wars’ between cosmopolitan liberals and nationalist conservatives; rather, it was an expression of dissatisfaction with the government and with elections more generally, which were seen as having no tangible effect on people's lives (Koch 2017). Once again, democratic elections presented us with a paradox: namely, that the Brexit referendum had a high voter turnout, in part to communicate via voting that electoral politics do not make a difference. It was an opportunity to reject British government, police monitoring, and Kafkaesque welfare bureaucracy. Thus, people took an opportunity to insert their own moralities and expectations into how electoral politics are run (Koch 2017, 228).

The aforementioned works show that in order to analyse elections as both extraordinary rituals and epistemic and political laboratories it is necessary to understand ordinary life. Elections and ordinary life can also hang together, sometimes inextricably so. In Brazil, for example, left-wing demonstrations took millions to the streets across the country in June 2013 over a continued dissatisfaction with the government, public services, and living conditions against the context of a booming economy. This in turn produced a rise in right-wing demonstrations and a polarised presidential campaign in 2014, with a narrow victory for the governing Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). Conservative demonstrations during the following years demanded and eventually succeeded to remove the president via impeachment in 2016. This was again followed by mass demonstrations from both political sides until the presidential election of 2018. Against such a politically explosive series of events, the elections of 2018 cannot be studied in isolation. They need to be understood as part and parcel of a longer period of political turmoil, which changed the parameters of collective action and the self-perception of the nation (Dullo 2022).

The permeability of election periods highlights that democracy-making is an open-ended process. It also emphasizes the importance of other forms of expressing political will and claiming their demands, such as protests. Self-organised communities can be created via discussions and semi-formal procedures that enable collective decision-making (Razsa and Kurnik 2012; Juris 2012; Greenberg 2014; Kunreuther 2018). In Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, young activists were fundamental to the decline of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998 and for the establishment of democracy. As part thereof, these activists also positioned themselves as the sole voice of the people, excluding other citizens from demonstrations who did not share their masculine, young, and middle-class identities and styles. Despite their biases and limitations, they claimed to be universal and national citizens, raising the question of ‘who constitutes the fringes as well as the centre of democratic discourse’ (Lee 2011, 934). Protests are thus also sites of exclusion, frequently loaded with power relations among those who constitute the core of a political movement and those who do not. Anthropologists have analysed internal disagreements and ways of reaching consensus, sometimes across generational divergent expectations of what is achievable and how to pursue it (Flynn 2021). One of the most long-lasting social movements, the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil, reached forty years of existence in 2024 and has produced leaders across generations, allowing researchers to ask how political demands and strategies transform over time (Flynn 2024).

But democratic protest is also a site of creativity and prefigurative politics. In social movements around the globe, participants frequently organise according to more horizontal and egalitarian relationships, illustrating as much as claiming what a proper understanding of democracy should be. In Occupy Slovenia, for example, protesters engaged in direct democracy, without trying to embody a popular majority or stand in for the voice of the nation. Instead, they emphasised democratic ways of finding agreement, organising small workshops, the decisions of which were later taken to a common assembly. In this case, it was the form of political decision-making that empowered minorities and unleashed political energies (2012, 244).

Conclusion

Anthropologists’ unique contributions to studying democracy hinge on an empirically grounded understanding of the cultural, social, and moral aspects of the everyday experiences of democracy among ordinary citizens. This distinguishes the discipline’s contributions from other approaches that focus on institutional governance and formal definitions. Instead of adhering to liberal, secular, and representative definitions of democracy, anthropologists have questioned the assumptions underlying these normative concepts. They have shown that local understandings of democracy are much more varied and complex, entangled with history and culture, blurring the boundaries between politics, economics, religion, and ethnicity, and stretching across diverse notions of citizenship, participation, or elections.

Democracy was frequently promoted in the second half of the twentieth century as a remedy for dictatorship or colonial rule, transforming the political regime into one where ‘the people’ are in charge. Yet, anthropologists have demonstrated that asymmetrical power relations are embedded in definitions of democracy, including who counts as ‘the people’ and when. Therefore, anthropologists have concentrated on uncovering the power dynamics and political rationalities that uphold existing democracies and their inequalities, highlighting the gap between their promises and actual realities. In a global landscape marked by rising populism and authoritarianism, anthropologists are also examining the effects of a democratic decline not only on the citizens affected but also on anthropology itself. Rather than formulating a single, universal definition of democracy, many anthropologists focus on democratic practices, institutions, and values. They have concluded that democracy does not always function identically everywhere and that unexpected power dynamics can transform both the concept of democracy and the ways in which people strive to promote or challenge it.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this entry benefited from great input and exchange from my students at the Anthropology of Democracy seminar; colleagues - in particular Corinna Howland and Katerina Hatzikidi -; and the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at the OEA, Riddhi Bhandari, Felix Stein, and Rebecca Tishler.

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Note on contributor

Eduardo Dullo is an associate professor of anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. His historical and ethnographical research focused on the disputes between governmental and religious projects to produce citizens with specific ethical subjectivities leading to the formation of Brazilian secularity and democracy.

Dr. Eduardo Dullo, Department of Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. eduardo.dullo@ufrgs.br ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3793-7406

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Anti-Blackness

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

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

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

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

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery and anti-Blackness

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

racist_tree_diagram.png

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

The Black body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afrophobia

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

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

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

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

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

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

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

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

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

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

Racial capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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[5] 2020. “Vision for Black lives.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Outer space

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:54:32 +0000

Rocket launch at Playalinda Beach, Florida, 2017. Picture by Jill Bazeley

Anna Szolucha

Jagiellonian University

Initially published 26 Nov 2025

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

Abstract:

People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billionaire tourists, astronomers, or the military. However, ethnographic work shows how deeply outer space is intertwined with people’s lives on Earth, from the daily work of space scientists to the impacts of space infrastructure on local communities around the world.

Since outer space cannot often be known directly, what humans know about it and how they relate to it tends to be shaped by what they know about and how they relate to Earth. Consequently, earthly relations and political dynamics inevitably influence human activities in space. At the same time, an anthropological perspective on outer space can help defamiliarise the taken-for-granted contexts and factors specific to the earthly realm, revealing how deeply they shape human lives and people’s understanding of Earth within the cosmos. Thus, examining outer space can help us recontextualise fundamental questions about society and culture, compelling us to expand our analytical framework to encompass the cosmic realm but also encouraging us to explore alternative models for social life on Earth and beyond. This entry showcases anthropological research that has attempted to answer three fundamental questions at the human-cosmos interface: How do people interact with outer space? How does outer space impact human lives? How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Introduction

Outer space exerts a constant, albeit sometimes imperceptible or remote, influence on the daily lives of people worldwide. From treating the sky as the domain of ancestors and a guide for social and environmental understanding, to utilising space-based infrastructures and technologies for essential needs like communication and travel, outer space profoundly impacts human existence. Yet, what constitutes ‘outer space’? How have people interacted with this realm? And given its intimate connection to human life, is the term ‘outer’ space even appropriate?

The boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space remains ambiguous, conventionally placed between 80 and 100 kilometres above sea level. Anthropological studies generally avoid rigid definitions of outer space as a purely physical entity, recognising it instead as a domain of human sociality beyond Earth’s atmosphere where diverse political, social, economic, and cultural relations are being played out.

At the same time, media and political discourses often frame outer space within an expansionist, competitive, and developmental narrative, employing terms like ‘space colonisation’, ‘frontier’, ‘race’, and ‘settlement’. Some of these are also used in academic literature. International and national legislation governing space activities, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, frequently reinforce the perception of space as an empty territory, available on a first-come, first-served basis. Some argue that the very descriptors ‘outer’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ perpetuate this sense of detachment, overlooking the long-standing Indigenous connections to the sky and the myriad ways in which it has shaped the lives of various communities and individuals throughout history, both before and after rockets soared through the atmosphere (see, for example, Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Certain critical scholars refer to outer space with the term ‘cosmos’, which usually carries a more philosophical or spiritual connotation than ‘outer space’. Within this entry, these terms are treated as synonymous. Doing so deliberately avoids reinforcing some of the dualisms—such as technology/culture or sacred/profane—that anthropological inquiry strives to critically examine and challenge.

Space anthropology is still an emerging field, despite its roots in early works by Ben Finney and Eric Jones (1986), among others. While it is already grappling with intricate terminological challenges and shifting research foci, its inquiries are fundamentally driven by a desire to ask better questions about humans and understand their place within the cosmos. Thus, ethnographic studies have investigated communities deeply immersed in outer space, such as space scientists discovering new planets by comparing their features to Earth and engineers working with Martian rovers that navigate an extraterrestrial terrain, for whom the cosmos is not merely an imagined realm but also a remote yet tangible and real place. These studies demonstrate that our understanding of the cosmos is not solely derived from an unmediated scientific perception, but rather shaped by a confluence of individual imaginations, organisational structures, and national cultural influences (Messeri 2016; Vertesi 2015).

As people’s familiarity with the vast cosmos deepens, it forces them to re-evaluate Earth’s position within it, broadening understandings of human environments and challenging anthropocentric and geocentric perspectives. At the same time, anthropological and historical research consistently underscores the persistent terrestrial impacts of space exploration, the ecological and social footprint of which extends beyond the celestial sphere. Launch sites, research facilities, and other infrastructure are firmly rooted on Earth. These structures are not merely stepping stones to the cosmos; anthropological research argues that they are also intricately intertwined with earthly realities of colonialism, environmental impacts, and social displacement (e.g. Redfield 2000, 212–44). Outer space thus emerges as an arena of political power struggles, military competition, and capitalist expansion, where approaches deemed historically problematic on Earth are apparently readily adopted for exploring the unknown. Despite the powerful forces that frame the cosmos as a domain for profit-making and geopolitical expansion, anthropological perspectives both provide nuance for and problematise these narratives.

As space exploration continues, anthropological analysis has also addressed the more speculative possibilities of encountering extraterrestrial cultures or establishing human habitats beyond Earth. Ethnographic knowledge of intercultural dialogue, encounters, and migrations once served as anthropologists’ claim to a rightful role in space exploration endeavours (Finney and Jones 1986). Today, some continue to envisage outer space as a potential new home for humanity where the limitations and shortcomings of current societies could be transcended (Valentine 2012). This opens up discussions about human futures, both on Earth and potentially beyond. Consequently, outer space emerges as a space for not only critiquing existing politico-economic relations but also for projecting and contemplating alternative social formations.

From an anthropological perspective, outer space can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of terrestrial realities. According to this approach, earthly relationships and dynamics play out and expand within a cosmic context, intricately connected to events on Earth. On the other hand, outer space can also be seen as an overarching realm that encompasses our planet. This perspective recontextualises Earth’s position and significance within the cosmos. It offers potential avenues for imagining alternative social and economic relations both on Earth and beyond. This entry delves into anthropological investigations exploring the profound relationship between humans and outer space. It examines three core questions that have shaped space anthropology so far. These are: How do humans engage with the cosmos? What is the impact of outer space on our lives? And what is its influence on people’s understanding of social reality?

How do people interact with outer space?

Ethnographic research has demonstrated a diverse range of ways in which people around the world engage with the cosmos. Their interactions shape their understanding of its significance within their communities and for humanity as a whole. While these understandings may sometimes differ, their analytical value lies in their capacity to offer alternative perspectives that can enrich, nuance, problematise, or challenge established narratives of space and space exploration. For example, Indigenous connections with the sky often problematise the assumption that outer space is empty and inanimate and no people or beings other than a limited number of astronauts have travelled or lived in space. Reportedly, Inuit peoples in Alaska laughed when an anthropologist informed them about the first Moon landing, as they claimed to have been travelling there for years (Young 1987).

In fact, several Indigenous knowledges express a profound interconnectedness between the earthly and cosmic realms, recognising their mutual dependence. The sky is often considered to be inhabited by ancestors and other beings. Indigenous cosmologies such as those of the Yolŋu in northern Australia are deeply embedded within the stories told about outer space and the sky (Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Moreover, oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge of the skies not only aid in understanding natural patterns related to weather, seasons, animal behaviour, and plant life but also sometimes pre-date Western scientific knowledge of historical celestial phenomena (Hamacher 2023). Given their close and kin relationships with the cosmos, Indigenous communities worldwide such as the Diné (the Navajo nation in the southwestern United States) often caution against exploitative approaches to space exploration, which they believe disrupt the cosmic order (Bartels 2024).

Non-Indigenous interactions with the cosmos can appear to lack the Indigenous sense of kinship with the sky. Space scientists and engineers within major Western space agencies and laboratories, recently the focus of ethnographic attention, often rely on technological devices and terrestrial landscapes to mediate their interactions with and conceptions of the cosmos. However, even they strive to reaffirm the reality of the cosmic objects they study and operate upon, seeking to establish more intimate and multi-layered relationships with outer space.

For instance, scientists who study planets that circle stars outside our solar system (exoplanets) strive to measure the dimming of a star while the exoplanet transits across its face—a technique known as ‘the transit method’. Subsequently, they visualise and interpret data obtained through such methods to turn the measurements into something that would seem more tangible and relatable. As part of this process, the scientists imagine exoplanets as potential places that they might inhabit, as worlds (Messeri 2016). They draw, for example, upon the more familiar language of the Earth’s solar system to describe the properties of newly discovered planets. Even though their precise parameters remain uncertain, astronomers employ familiar comparisons, calling the exoplanets ‘super-Earths’ or ‘hot Neptunes’, etc. They also utilise a variety of visualisation techniques, from producing curves and graphs to generating statistics, to represent these places that elude visual observation. Similarly, scientists can now translate cosmic phenomena, such as gravitational waves, into audible sounds. While this process relies on established scientific theories, models, and instrumental captures, the resulting sounds are also shaped by a multitude of social and cultural metaphors. For example, an astronomical observatory is compared to ‘a hearing aid’ and sounds of cosmic phenomena to ‘chirps’ or ‘whines’. These visual and acoustic ‘informalisms’ (Helmreich 2016) not only reflect upon the original theories and instrumental data but also foster a more intimate connection between the astronomer and the celestial objects they study.

This connection mirrors the direct experience of observing the night sky at an optical observatory. Although astronomical work increasingly relies on digital data, some astronomers still deeply value the opportunity to conduct research at an observatory, where the distant universe becomes more tangible (Hoeppe 2012). Ethnographic work within science and engineering teams responsible for operating Mars rovers has also underscored the importance of such embodied practices (Vertesi 2015). Various team members identified with the bodies of the rovers, incorporating their physical gestures and movements into their understanding of the rovers and their objects of analysis. This shows how important representational techniques are in establishing and cultivating relationships with the extraterrestrial. Simultaneously, team members aligned their work structures with local and workplace-based norms, meetings, and forms of talk, thereby forging a specific community. Put differently, the intimate engagements with the Mars rovers represented the extraterrestrial as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of a particular social order. People’s representations of and engagements with outer space not only facilitate the scientific exploration of the cosmos and render extraterrestrial scientific objects more legible, but also generate new social relations on Earth, aligning individuals’ aims and values in their collective endeavour to familiarise the unknown.

Many of the techniques that bring the cosmos closer and render it more familiar are inherently social and cultural. Consequently, our representations of outer space are profoundly shaped by cultural tropes and socio-political narratives. The spectacular images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, are not merely unfiltered photographs of the universe; they are products of scientific and aesthetic negotiation. Astronomers had to make deliberate choices about how to translate raw data into meaningful colours and contrasts. In the process, they drew upon familiar geological and meteorological formations, as well as the iconography of nineteenth century American Western landscapes (Kessler 2012). These images were carefully composed for both American domestic and international audiences, serving as a form of scientific outreach and public service. However, by drawing parallels to earthly landscapes and aligning with narratives of outer space as a frontier, these images also encouraged a specific perception of the cosmos: a place simultaneously distant yet inviting exploration. Similar dynamics are evident in other public-facing initiatives, even those designed to be more ‘democratic’, i.e. open to independent public interpretation. For instance, a group of computer scientists at NASA aimed to create an interactive map of Mars that the public could explore independently. Yet, even this initiative promoted a specific way of seeing Mars: as a dynamic, vital place that merits continued research and financial commitment from NASA's exploration project—ultimately reflecting NASA’s overarching mission of extraterrestrial conquest (Messeri 2017). Our highly mediated engagements with outer space offer valuable insights into the socio-cultural nature of how humans represent the cosmos. They also demonstrate how we connect to the cosmic realm while simultaneously shaping our realities on Earth.

Analogue sites (and various forms of simulation training, more generally) offer another example of an important medium for human interaction with outer space, particularly for experimenting with aspects of human spaceflight missions. These sites allow space scientists and future astronauts to familiarise themselves with the unfamiliar environment of outer space while remaining on Earth. Analogue research typically involves travelling to locations with environmental, geological, or other conditions resembling those found on Mars or other celestial bodies, enabling the testing of equipment and mission designs. For example, ethnographic work with scientists at NASA demonstrates how Mars was brought into being as a group of scientists descended upon an analogue site in the Utah desert (Messeri 2016). These ‘mission’ members treated earthly geological formations as if they were Martian, weaving planet-specific narratives about their past and present. This experience provided the closest possible approximation of being on Mars, and it helped maintain the possibility of future human habitation on the planet. The physical and imaginary elements of the analogue mission, including the strict protocols governing ventures outside the ‘space habitat’, induced a cognitive shift among its participants, redefining the experience of living on Earth. However, these missions also possessed more practical elements. At the time of this research, NASA had stalled plans for human missions to Mars. Consequently, the activities observed by the anthropologist present also represented an attempt by NASA employees to cultivate a utopian narrative within the agency, one that preserved the possibility of Martian missions in the future (Messeri 2016).

In another ethnographic study of analogue sites, anthropologist Valentina Marcheselli worked with astrobiologists in Italian caves and mines, simulating potential microbial habitats or shelters on Mars (2022). Their embodied experiences of the caves and mines were crucial not only for transforming these earthly settings into otherworldly analogues but also for establishing astrobiology as a novel scientific discipline. The analogue astrobiological work challenged traditional scientific practices, as its observations and results were no longer solely derived from hypothesis testing but emerged through a more open-ended approach. Such embodied and open-ended research was deemed particularly suitable for a discipline dedicated to encountering and explaining the extraterrestrial unknown. Studying analogue sites, then, reveals something about the inherently dual nature of analogue space missions. In trying to keep Martian exploration viable in times of institutional contraction, or reinforcing the case for a new scientific research method, they aim to make mission participants more intimately familiar with another world, while also utilising this work to influence human engagement with this one.

In a similar vein, astronautics, or the science of space travel, is thought of by US scientists, physicians, and engineers involved in human spaceflight as relying on various ‘systems’ in order to work (Olson 2018). Such systems are defined as technologies that relate diverse concepts and materialities to one another. Thinking of human-technology constellations as systems serves a technocratic function. It contributes to perceiving outer space as governable, thereby perpetuating expansionist narratives of space exploration. The work conducted in extreme terrestrial environments, such as analogue lunar bases on the seafloor, and the allure of radically different extraterrestrial conditions, resonates with a culture in which the extreme has positive connotations as a catalyst for improvement and progress. Consequently, analogue missions participate in a cultural dynamic that frames the extreme as an imperative for overcoming challenges, fostering social innovation, and achieving distinctiveness (Olson 2018).

Earlier research on the European Space Agency (ESA) examined the entanglement of space with a different cultural dynamic, specifically the metaphor of European cooperation (Zabusky 1995). Studied during the 1990s, European cooperation in space science turned out to, paradoxically, rely on both conflict and diversity. The inherent internal diversity of European institutions, in which staff comes from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds, helps ESA employees avoid feelings of alienation and stagnation. Through regular, contested interactions and performances of difference, cooperation emerges through space technology as a form of rational solidarity. However, this process is not merely instrumental; it also constitutes a journey through which individuals experience a sacred and intense sense of community (i.e. communitas).

Even though science often claims to be largely impartial and independent of cultural influences, the social nature of the human-space interface is evident not only within the structures and practices of scientific communities, but also in the scientific outcomes of major research organisations such as NASA. Their varied internal hierarchies and interactional norms produce different kinds of scientific knowledge. Sometimes NASA's collective work modes relied on collectivist decision-making structures such as consensus, and emphasised the importance of arriving at a common ground. On other occasions, integrative work modes were favoured, stemming from a position that respected the autonomy of separate units and tried to unite the particular interests of different units in some form of a workable whole. These differing organisational structures were reflected, for example, in the authorship structure of scientific articles and in the influence that different scientific disciplines had in NASA's research (Vertesi 2020).

While the socio-cultural connections between Earth and outer space turn out to be robust, as is evident in human representations and engagements with the cosmos, it is also crucial to avoid an overly deterministic view of this relationship. While human perceptions and interactions with the universe are undoubtedly shaped by cultural narratives and social structures, these influences are multifaceted and nuanced rather than one-dimensional or all-powerful. For example, NASA employees working with Mars rovers encountered significant challenges in aligning their work schedules with the Martian day-night cycle, which is around 40 minutes longer than that of Earth. Despite the use of visual displays and other representational techniques to track Martian time, the inherent mismatch between Earth and Mars time led to confusion and—with ever-changing work schedules meant to allow staff to keep up with Mars—bodily fatigue (Mirmalek 2020). This highlights the limitations of simply imposing external (and extraterrestrial) frameworks on human experience.

Just as the human body cannot simply adapt to Martian time while remaining firmly rooted on Earth, human imaginations are not solely shaped by dominant narratives of space exploration. Ethnographic work with 'New Space' advocates, who invest in commercial space ventures (Valentine 2012), as well as space creators and enthusiasts, who popularise space exploration (Szolucha 2024), reveals a more nuanced picture. While these individuals may operate within the constraints of capitalist relations or navigate the uncertainties of a social spectacle, they also challenge conventional investment strategies, foster community, and actively produce shared visions of the future, thereby creating new social relations. The work of space creators, for example, not only popularises space exploration and makes it comprehensible to a global audience of enthusiasts, but also has the power to mould the public’s collective space myths. The collective imagination of outer space may, therefore, contain possibilities for new narratives of space exploration.

How does outer space impact human lives?

Space exploration leaves a visible mark on Earth, requiring diverse infrastructure for the manufacture and operation of space technologies. These facilities are often situated in locations perceived as remote or uninhabited. However, anthropological research foregrounds the stories of communities impacted by these developments, emphasising their needs, perspectives, and the structural biases that limit their agency. For example, several engaged anthropologists worked during the 1970s with the Yanadi, an Indigenous tribe in India with a nomadic lifestyle historically centred around hunting and gathering (Agrawal, Rao and Reddy 1985). This engagement occurred shortly after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had acquired the Yanadi’s traditional lands to establish a new space centre on an island off India’s eastern coast. The anthropologists documented the profound changes ISRO brought to the region, displacing the Yanadi from their traditional hunting grounds, offering employment opportunities, and creating new community facilities. By collaborating with the Yanadi and ISRO, the anthropologists helped negotiate extended land access rights for the tribe members and educated the ISRO about the social impacts of its activities on the Yanadi community.

The Yanadi case is not an isolated historical incident. Displacement or various degrees of neglect of Indigenous or disadvantaged populations during state or commercial encroachment on their territories has been a recurring theme in the construction and siting of space-related infrastructure, persisting to the present. In the 1980s, the space base in northeastern Brazil displaced Afro-Brazilian villagers, reflecting a history of class and racial inequality within the country (Mitchell 2017). In French Guiana, the construction and operation of ESA’s spaceport in Kourou continues to be entangled with the colonial history of the region (Redfield 2000) and its peculiar status as a European periphery (Korpershoek 2024). Currently, the Native American Esto’k Gna oppose the operations of a private space company for restricting the access to their traditional lands on the southern tip of Texas in the United States (Szolucha 2023). The proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred mountain of Maunakea in Hawai'i, despite sustained local protest and predicted environmental impacts, is another example (Hobart 2019; Maile 2019). Anthropologists have helped to amplify the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous and disadvantaged groups, documenting the historical legacies of inequality and injustice, while exploring potential avenues for change.

Such examples have led some social scientists to formulate more sweeping critiques of space exploration efforts, characterising them as inherently colonial and exploitative (for example, Rubenstein 2022; Treviño 2023). Against such views, critical scholars propose alternative approaches to engaging with the cosmos, such as celestial wayfinding. Aiming to mirror the way Polynesians navigated the ocean and to avoid the perpetuation of colonial dynamics in space exploration, celestial wayfinding is meant to be guided by principles of sustainable settlement, informed by an animate view of the cosmos and based on a belief in the inherent value and necessary co-existence of all beings (Lempert 2021). The !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa have been suggested as a positive and egalitarian model for social organisation of space communities (Lee 1985). Their adaptations were based on the practice of sharing, living in a small group, and being self-sufficient for a very long time. Anthropologists have also considered the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, with their emphasis on mutual learning and reciprocal interaction, as a potential model for interstellar migration (Tanner 1985). Furthermore, alternative modes of travelling and living together that have been explored in science fiction movies also hold the potential to inspire and improve space exploration (Lempert 2014; Salazar 2023).

Queer and feminist perspectives on space exploration equally offer frameworks for reimagining it. ‘Queering the cosmos’ would involve liberating it from the constraints of established, often limited, visions of the future and opening it up to multiple possibilities (Oman-Reagan 2015). Similarly, feminist approaches to space travel challenge the presumption of heterosexuality—pervasive within the imaginaries and designs of human spaceflight—and critically examine the ideological and structural biases that lead to exclusionary and oppressive practices and imaginaries (Gál and Armstrong 2023).

While various critical approaches are being proposed to ‘reclaim outer space’ (Schwartz, Billings and Nesvold 2023) a growing body of anthropological work is emerging in parallel that challenges the seemingly monolithic character of modern space projects. On the one hand, space infrastructure developments are typically justified in the name of scientific and economic advancement for a specific community, region, or even nation. While the examples above illustrate some significant challenges and pitfalls of these justifications, space projects may mobilise a sense of hope, agency, and visions of alternative futures that extend beyond serving as an escape plan for a select few (Denning 2023). They can provide alternative visions of international cooperation and even increased ecological care.

At the same time, outer space has always held the potential for increased militarisation, neocolonialism, and extractivism. Anthropologists demonstrate that these two facets, of care and extractivism, are inextricably linked and that space exploration, while perpetuating harmful legacies, also automatically elicits alternative practices and visions of the future (see, for example, Ojani 2024). Many Mexicans, for example, reveal complex imaginaries surrounding space. They see space exploration as a pathway to economic development through technological innovation while simultaneously emphasising the need to critically reflect on the conditions that shape its achievement (Johnson 2020). Similarly, astronomers in Madagascar demonstrate that a problematic and culturally specific notion of the ‘universality of science’ can nevertheless serve as a tool for navigating inequalities on Earth (Nieber 2024). Assuming that science is to some extent universal is not just an epistemic requirement for gaining entry into an international scientific network. It is also a horizon of possibility, one that offers both hope and direction.

How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Outer space not only affects people’s lives but also recalibrates their structures of understanding. Being outside Earth and thinking about the cosmos involves encountering extraterrestrial materialities and contexts that are unfamiliar or behave in unexpected ways. Living in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS), for example, removes the people involved from the familiar bounds of Earth and from usual ways of being and feeling human. The physical experience of weightlessness affects emotions and their social expression, demonstrating how gravity—a condition we typically take for granted—influences not only the human body but also emotions and social relations. This is because the effective communication of emotions and human relations depends on certain material conditions. When those are dramatically altered in such environments as outer space, a simple hug, for example, becomes a challenge because bodies behave and react differently than they would on Earth. The hug becomes a somewhat awkward experience, because bodies of astronauts struggle to align and exchange the same sense of touch they would under the conditions of gravity (Parkhurst and Jeevendrampillai 2020). Similarly, venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere allows us to reconsider its role as a primary context, one that provides the reference points for our fundamental understandings and distinctions, such as the one between nature and culture, for example (Battaglia 2012; Valentine 2016). An anthropological engagement with outer space turns out to broaden the notions of what constitutes an ‘environment’ and to decentre our geocentric and anthropocentric perspectives (Battaglia, Valentine and Olson 2015; Helmreich 2012; Olson and Messeri 2015).

This recalibrating nature of outer space has also prompted a rethinking of anthropological methodologies (see, for example, Gorbanenko, Jeevendrampillai and Kozel 2025). Specifically, it has been suggested that anthropological research be recontextualised in ‘more-than-terran’ spaces (Olson 2023), to think about fieldwork as having significance and being localised beyond Earth, and as being entangled with entities, dynamics, and phenomena beyond Earth-based contexts. While humans’ earthly embeddedness is undeniable, an expanded methodological toolkit would acknowledge that societies already exist on a boundary between terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms. However, how radically methodologies need to be adjusted is currently somewhat under dispute. Given that people constantly negotiate their social existence through a dialogue with their social and material worlds, life on Earth may be quite mediated already and therefore not that different to study than life in space (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2023).

Ethnographic research in locations like the ISS is unlikely to occur anytime soon, given how expensive and hard it is to access. Studying Earth-based space infrastructures related to it, such as its Mission Controls, is much more feasible and can still be highly elucidating. Ethnographers can more easily enter a meeting in ground-based buildings by government agencies and companies designing space experiments or observe livestreamed conversations with ISS crews. Seemingly remote locations can thus be studied via the multiple, interconnected sites, media, and groups of people that constitute a field both up in space and here on Earth (Buchli 2020). These include the constant online presence of the ISS, multimedia archives, and communities tracking the ISS from Earth.

Space activities, both on Earth and in outer space, are dispersed across vast distances and dynamically evolving networks. Therefore, field sites are never stable entities but are better understood as sometimes-atomised and relational spaces connected through shared meanings and materialities (Timko 2024). The distributed nature of space-related sites and globally dispersed communities has led to the idea of a ‘planetary ethnography’ (Szolucha et al. 2022; 2023). This approach to research seeks to push the boundaries of representation to uncover new perspectives both by engaging with diverse social groups across different cultures and by bringing them into a comparative analysis that can reveal unexpected alliances or effect a change in perspective. These under- or unrepresented experiences and viewpoints, much like the extraterrestrial itself, should have the potential to revisit and reorient entire fields of understanding, rather than simply adding another perspective, one that remains on the periphery.

Conclusion

Although outer space remains a physically distant horizon, unreachable for most, it is closer than one may think. It plays a significant role in the everyday lives of diverse groups, from Indigenous communities to the global network of space professionals. Through their engagement with outer space and its many representations, they make communal histories, social norms, as well as distant celestial objects and phenomena more readily comprehensible. In doing so, they reshape social relations and realities here on Earth. Regardless of how they connect with the sky, people worldwide seem to actively strive to forge more intimate relationships with the cosmos, underscoring its inextricable link to human life.

But why is this connection with the universe so important? Perhaps the answer lies in viewing outer space as a social and cultural canvas, one on which individuals and communities can project their understanding of the present social order and their aspirations for the future. For example, Russian cosmonautic amateurs who build and test satellites and other space technologies hold the idea that anyone can participate in space exploration, even without government backing (Sivkov 2019). Their activities highlight the importance of merit and technological know-how in driving space exploration. Therefore, engaging with the cosmos allows them to critique the social and political realities of their country. Outer space can thus be understood as a field for critiquing current social conditions and experimenting with potential alternatives.

Popular representations of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects (‘UFOs’) have also been interpreted as expressions of broader socio-political concerns. These include feelings of alienation and mistrust towards political representatives. Alien abduction narratives equally reflect anxieties, including concerns about racial and ethnic difference. In other depictions, extraterrestrial beings are viewed as divine, expanding the scope of human understanding beyond purely scientific explanations. Historically, ‘ufology’—the study of UFOs—emerged from anxieties surrounding military tensions and technological advancements (Battaglia 2006), a dynamic that continues to resonate today.

Public interest in the cosmos waxes and wanes, driven by the vagaries of politics and cultural trends while popular sentiment toward even the most successful space programmes is often ambiguous (Launius 2003). However, anthropological research has definitively demonstrated that people worldwide actively seek deeper and more complex connections with the cosmos. It is an inextricable part of daily life, shaping their past, co-creating their present, and prefiguring their future.

This understanding challenges the detached view of the cosmos as an outside domain, a perspective some argue was reinforced by the first images of Earth taken by astronauts of Apollo missions from the void of space (Arendt 1968; Cosgrove 1994). This seemingly detached ‘view from nowhere’ may perpetuate the notion that the cosmos is simply there for the taking, whether by technologically advanced nations or an oligarchy-controlled private sector. If technological engagement with outer space expands in the coming decades, largely fuelled by commercial and military-led space ventures, what convergences and tensions will emerge with the fundamental human drive for cosmic intimacy? One thing is certain: humanity will discover ever-new ways to imbue outer space with meaning, both on Earth and beyond.

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Note on contributor

Anna Szolucha is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the ARIES (Anthropological Research into the Imaginaries and Exploration of Space) project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of new technologies, natural resources, and society.

Research for this article received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.

Anna Szolucha, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, ul. Golebia 9, 31-007 Krakow, Poland. ORCID: 0000-0001-8938-6066

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Humanitarianism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:00:56 +0000

Bosnians waiting at a UN food distribution point in the town Ilijaš, in 1996. Picture by AMN M. Andrea

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima Malay Firoz

University of Bristol, Arizona State University

Initially published 18 Oct 2025

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

Abstract:

Humanitarianism can be broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It manifests not only through discrete acts of helping, but also through a set of practices, norms, laws, and forms of government. The urgency of humanitarian causes is regularly invoked to justify the large-scale mobilisation of people and resources. They provide anthropologists with a critical site for studying the structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations.

This entry explores four main areas of anthropological scholarship on humanitarianism. First, anthropologists have examined the political implications of the humanitarian management of suffering populations, with its emphasis on fostering physical survival. Second, they have developed critiques of humanitarian ethics, particularly in relation to how lives are valued differently within Western humanitarianism, and the political and moral weight carried by the word ‘humanitarian’. Third, anthropologists have interrogated the concept of crisis, with a focus on how local communities are transformed by the routine presence of humanitarians in protracted conflicts or disasters. Finally, they have explored non-Western humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action.

As climate change impacts prospects for human life in vulnerable areas of the world, it is likely that climate-induced displacement crises will only grow more common and prolonged. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, offering anthropologists an important terrain of inquiry into how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

Introduction

In the public imagination, the term ‘humanitarian’ invokes a concern for human suffering and a motivation to alleviate it in some form. It gestures to an altruism borne of the recognition of a shared humanity with distant others. One need only think of humanitarian appeals launched on TV, social media, or billboards to see how representations of the suffering of others might inspire an urge to act (Boltanski 2004), be it through donations, volunteering, or public support for governmental action. These sentiments can mobilise people and resources on a large scale in response to disruptive events with devastating human impacts, such as armed conflicts and disasters. Given the scope and reach of humanitarian deployments, it is vital to understand their inner workings and their unintended consequences. This is particularly important because the concept of humanitarianism can be used by different actors for different purposes and in different contexts, ranging from calls for emergency assistance in the aftermath of earthquakes to justifications for military interventions with the purported aim of saving lives. As a contested concept with multiple meanings and uses, humanitarianism offers an especially rich and productive site of research for anthropology.

One of the enduring origin stories of humanitarianism dates its creation to the establishment of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant in response to the suffering he witnessed at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. In its early years, the Red Cross primarily provided medical assistance to soldiers wounded in battle, though the organisation would later expand its scope to include civilians affected by war and disasters. Today, the sector is represented by United Nations (UN) agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), Oxfam, Save the Children, among others. The Red Cross has also grown into a more complex institution, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) being a private entity under Swiss law, while national Red Cross Societies such as the British Red Cross or the Syrian Arab Red Crescent function as appendices of the states where they are based. Each of these organisations has different mandates and modes of operation, but they generally share an emphasis on prioritising urgent needs through specialised life-sustaining aid, including medical care, shelter, and food assistance. It is important to note, however, that these organisations comprise a highly institutionalised and largely Western mould of humanitarianism, originating and headquartered in Global North countries, whereas there are other forms of humanitarian aid espoused by religious, community, and grassroots actors both within and outside the West that are not encompassed by the formal Western aid system (Brković 2023).

Early scholarly critiques of Western humanitarianism highlighted how humanitarian actors took ‘war as a fact’, in the sense that they sought to remedy not the root causes of war but the suffering that resulted from it. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross in its foundational tenets acknowledged the persistence of war in modern life, and sought to collaborate with all parties to conflict—including states and non-state armed groups—to humanise its conduct and minimise the suffering it caused (Kennedy 2004, 267). Such a narrow focus on suffering, however, failed to consider how aid could fuel the conditions for further conflict. Numerous examples exist from conflict zones across the world where aid has been diverted by armed groups to sustain the fighting, or fomented violence and resentment between different groups, or used to recruit new soldiers from refugee camps and settlements. In particular, the figure of the ‘refugee-warrior’ benefiting from aid poses a moral and political conundrum for aid workers working to provide humanitarian sanctuaries in the midst of war (Terry 2002).

Scholars have also criticised humanitarianism for its historical complicity with Western colonialism and imperialism, and for the continued instrumentalisation of aid to serve the geopolitical and national security interests of donor countries in the Global North (Barnett 2011; Donini 2012). Governments throughout the twentieth century have justified military actions on humanitarian grounds, from India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 to NATO air strikes in Kosovo in 1999 (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). While these actions have not necessarily involved the explicit cooperation of humanitarian INGOs, the United States’ long war in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2021 co-opted aid organisations into counter-insurgency programs aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ among local communities through developmental aid and reconstruction efforts (Williamson 2011). While this entry primarily focuses on the values and practices of aid actors rather than states, we discuss the growing entanglement between humanitarianism and development and its implications for the independence of aid organisations from geopolitical agendas.

Anthropology has contributed to these debates by questioning the foundational notion that humanitarianism is an inherently altruistic enterprise, and by interrogating the power relations that underpin the humanitarian endeavour. Anthropologists have asked: what does it mean to help ‘suffering others’? Who is being helped and how are their lives valued? Who is providing assistance and what motivates them? The discipline helps answer these questions through sustained ethnographic inquiries into the everyday operations of humanitarian organisations, and the social, political, and ethical implications of the humanitarian drive to help. In particular, it points to a structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations. The anthropological approach to humanitarianism as ‘an ethos, a cluster of sentiments, a set of laws, a moral imperative to intervene, and a form of government’ (Ticktin 2014, 274) captures this tension.

Other anthropologists have challenged the predominant focus of scholarship on Western institutionalised forms of humanitarianism, and have pushed for a broader understanding of the concept that encapsulates grassroots mutual aid initiatives led and implemented by vulnerable people themselves (Brković 2020). After all, impacted populations are often ‘first responders’ to crises through mutual aid networks involving community, religious, and local organisations, blurring the boundaries between the ‘providers’ and ‘recipients’ of aid (Fechter 2023). Large-scale responses organised by UN agencies, INGOs, and foreign governments arrive later as a crisis garners international attention, displacing local interpretations of humanitarian giving with professional guidelines and principles.

Biopolitics and the management of populations

The gradual institutionalisation of Western humanitarianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at a time when ideas about the state’s responsibility to care for its citizens assumed growing legitimacy (Glasman 2020). Anthropological studies of humanitarianism are therefore profoundly influenced by the concept of ‘biopolitics’, which refers to governmental techniques and procedures that aim ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’ (Foucault 1998, 138). Biopolitics encompasses a range of practices and institutions established to regulate the health, reproduction, and sexuality of the biological body based on hierarchical ideas about normality and deviance. Humanitarian actors can be thought of as exercising a form of biopolitics in contexts where state actors are either absent or incapable of safeguarding life (Fassin 2007b; Pandolfi 2003; Redfield 2005; Ticktin 2014).

Much of the anthropological writing on this area has analysed the biopolitical logics and rationales espoused by humanitarian INGOs in the management of populations they purport to help. MSF, for example, enacts a ‘minimal biopolitics’ (Redfield 2013, 18) as they temporarily administer to lives perceived to be in immediate danger—providing medical assistance to endangered populations in conflict zones and ceasing operations once they deem the crisis is over. The INGO’s decision-making on the deployment and withdrawal of personnel is based on assessments of the magnitude of life-threatening needs, such as medical care or child nutrition, and critics have noted instances when MSF waited for the crisis to grow more aggravated before establishing a field mission (Redfield 2013). This focus on temporary solutions prioritises immediate survival but does little to ensure the long-term dignity and empowerment of vulnerable people.

Another key site for the exertion of humanitarian biopolitics is the refugee camp. The refugee camp represents a ‘biopolitical figure par excellence’ (Fassin 2010a, 81), where bodies are contained, disciplined, and sustained towards a potentially indefinite future. An early ethnographic study of Burundian refugees in Tanzania described the representation of refugees in public and policy discourse as a form of ‘bare humanity’, a living body presumed to have lost all its cultural and identitarian inheritances (Malkki 1995, 11). This work presaged later critiques of humanitarian action that centred on what form of life is possible in refugee camps. Drawing from the concept of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998)—which denotes a form of persecuted humanity reduced to its basic biological existence—anthropologists argued that refugee camps are zones of exception that sustain people only at the level of physical survival and prevent them from realising their full biographical selves as social and political beings (Agier 2011; Diken and Laustsen 2006; Hanafi and Long 2010; McConnachie 2016). Such framings of refugees as ‘bare life’ presupposed an ethnically homogenous nation-state as the ‘natural order of things’, from which refugees were excluded as demographically threatening outsiders (Malkki 1995).

In recent years, anthropologists have questioned the notion that refugees are merely passive subjects of humanitarian management, or that refugee camps are little more than temporary way-stations without a lived history of their own. A growing body of ethnographic work on camps has pointed to the political agency, heterogeneous identities, place-making practices, and transgenerational memory of refugees living in long-term camps. Palestinian camps in particular have fostered a robust national liberation movement, which imbues everyday spaces with intense political significance (Allan 2014; Gabiam 2016; Peteet 2005). Similarly, Burundian Hutus living in Tanzanian camps during the 1980s developed new expressions of Hutu identity anchored in shared narratives of victimisation and memories of violent displacement. In their case, the camp represented a locus of ‘purity’ that protected Hutu identity from contamination through assimilation (Malkki 1995). In other words, refugee camps over time become invested with a ‘politics of living’ (Feldman 2018), revealing how refugees not only survive, but strive, thrive, and contest their devaluation as ‘bare life’.

Beneficiaries of aid also reshape the terms of their humanitarian protection. For example, as the French government tightened its immigration policies in the early 2000s, it introduced a humanitarian exception for undocumented immigrants with life-threatening illnesses that could not access adequate medical treatment in their country of origin. Facing stricter bureaucratic requirements and longer wait times, many immigrants translated their narratives of suffering into medical categories, or even deliberately infected themselves in order to qualify for medical asylum, thereby leveraging the diseased body as an object of humanitarian concern (Ticktin 2006; 2011). Paradoxically, their survival depended on their very exposure to vulnerability (Ticktin 2006). ‘Bare life’ in these instances is not associated with passive victimhood, but points to the myriad ways in which migrants wield their biological vulnerability as a form of capital. Taken together, this literature on humanitarian biopolitics reveals that international aid wields enormous managerial power over the subjects it governs while being actively contested and appropriated by those subjects as well.

Humanitarian ethics

In 1965, the Red Cross established seven fundamental principles governing humanitarian practices—humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and universality—which have since found widespread adoption across the aid sector (International Committee of the Red Cross 2015). Taken together, these principles embody a form of secular morality committed to the sacred but material value of all life (Redfield 2012a). Furthermore, humanitarian morality serves as a governing framework that extends beyond formal humanitarian institutions and may be invoked by state and non-state actors alike. Didier Fassin (2007a) calls this a form of ‘humanitarian government’. Concerns around the formulation of ethical objectives and processes in governmental affairs has garnered keen interest from anthropologists studying the intersections between life, health, and suffering (Daniel 1996; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003). One of the core challenges they raise pertains to the ethical ideal of humanity that underpins humanitarian action. During the early years of the Iraq War, for instance, a worsening security outlook compelled MSF to terminate its operations in the country, evacuate its staff, and leave behind vulnerable populations unassisted (Fassin 2010b). Humanitarians thus produced a ‘politics of life’ by establishing a hierarchy of humanity between the lives deemed worthy of saving and those left to perish (Fassin 2007b; 2012).

This hierarchy also manifests among aid workers themselves. Ethnographies of humanitarian diplomacy have revealed how local aid workers skilfully leverage their identities to negotiate humanitarian access in places torn apart by ethnic strife (James 2022; Pottier 2006). However, even as they are uniquely positioned to deliver aid in areas inhospitable to international staff, local aid workers also face greater risks to their own safety and more limited prospects for career progression within the organisations that employ them. Transnational border regimes permit humanitarian staff from the Global North to travel more easily between countries, usually along geographical circuits established by colonial history (Redfield 2012b). Meanwhile, aid workers hired locally by INGOs from the Global South frequently do not have the option to evacuate if their lives are endangered, or receive the same standard of international care should they fall ill (Benton Forthcoming).

In the context of the Syrian Civil War, for example, restrictions on the entry of foreign nationals into the country placed the responsibility of providing humanitarian assistance entirely onto Syrian aid workers. While shouldering the risk of navigating an active warzone, these local humanitarian teams were nevertheless managed by INGOs with offices in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, with major policy decisions being taken by senior leadership predominantly from the Global North (Fradejas‐García 2019). Even within the humanitarian sector, therefore, human lives are valued differently according to their race, gender, nationality, and other markers of social difference (Firoz and Lima 2024). The ‘politics of life’ maintains hierarchies between not only aid workers and refugees, but between different categories of aid workers as well.

At an institutional level, the ethical principle of neutrality dictates that humanitarian actors must not take sides in hostilities in order to secure trust by all parties involved and maintain access to vulnerable populations. While a neutral stance appears to position humanitarians ‘beyond politics’, anthropologists point out that this claim to neutrality is also a tactical one, as aid workers regularly engage in political negotiations with warring parties behind closed doors (Redfield 2012a; Malkki 2015, 174). Rather than simply retreating from politics, neutrality is deployed as a political strategy toward political actors, constituting ‘an impossible or negative form of politics’ (Redfield 2010a). Such paradoxes in humanitarian logics represent what Fassin calls ‘aporias’, which, ‘contrary to contradictions, are not a matter of organisational dysfunction but rather of the dysfunction intrinsic to their very functioning’ (2010c, 50). These aporias have been constitutive of Western humanitarianism from its very inception, and at the same time remain insurmountable for the success of its mandate.

Another question related to humanitarian ethics is the political weight carried by the attribution of the term ‘humanitarian’. Humanitarianism is an unstable concept and claims to being humanitarian have to be maintained through constant ‘ethical labour’, which can be described as ‘an ethical practice that join[s] concern for others with care of the self’ (Feldman 2007; cited in Brada 2016). For example, in an HIV clinic in Botswana where American healthcare staff worked alongside with national staff, the former’s claim to be ‘humanitarian’ engendered a sense of ‘unquestionable technical and moral superiority’ that disregarded the ethical commitments and expertise of their Motswana counterparts (Brada 2016, 757).

Even for beneficiaries of aid, the ethical claim to humanitarian relief carries important political connotations. Palestinians have resisted for decades the framing of aid they receive from the UN as ‘development’—broadly construed as the long-term improvement of human life—and insisted on a humanitarian narrative that highlights the transience of their status as refugees (Gabiam 2012). Here, the appeal to humanitarian aid is not only pitched as a global right, but rather, amplifies the urgency of their predicament. Like the immigrants who leverage their biological vulnerability, Palestinians leverage their status as humanitarian subjects to demand a political solution that guarantees their right to return to their lands.

Finally, it is worth noting that anthropological critiques of humanitarian ethics do not dismiss the ethical commitments of individual aid workers, but rather, address the systems and structures within which they perform their ethical labour. In her ethnography of the Finnish Red Cross, Malkki (2015) questions the tendency of critics to trivialise small gestures of humanitarian care, such as making toys or weaving blankets, as being insufficient for real structural transformation. Rather than simply equating the ‘real’ with the grand ambitions of geopolitics, she calls for scholars to take the sentimental practices of humanitarians seriously as a form of ‘imaginative politics’ that is rooted in culturally specific modes of helping. Such an analytical orientation resonates closely with how anthropologists describe the mandate for an anthropological approach to morality and the social good, which requires attending ‘to the way people orientate to and act in a world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them, and to avoid dismissing their ideals as unimportant or, worse, as bad-faith alibis for the worlds they actually create’ (Robbins 2013, 457). In other words, anthropology does not adopt a moralising or normative stance on humanitarian action itself, but rather, empirically traces what moral commitments mean to aid workers themselves and how they are practiced, challenged, and transformed during humanitarian emergencies.

The politics of ‘crisis’

The large-scale mobilisation of humanitarian interventions relies on the naming of specific sites as ‘emergencies’ or ‘crises’. The label of crisis evokes the sense of a temporary interruption in social order, an ‘unpredictable event emerging against a background of ostensible normalcy’ that will eventually be succeeded by the return to normalcy (Calhoun 2013, 30). The declaration of crisis produces a temporality of urgency that demands immediate action, and cultivates moral clarity for humanitarian actors to intervene (Redfield 2013; Calhoun 2004; Roitman 2014). However, by virtue of this logic of naming, situations that remain ‘on the verge of crisis’ or in ‘states of permanent emergency’ are sometimes confounded with the ‘ordinary’—a non-site for humanitarianism—leaving aid organisations in a state of ethical uncertainty, constantly renegotiating the terms of their engagement (Redfield 2010b; Pandolfi 2010). Ethnographies that address the categorisation of crisis situations, and the potentially novel sites and modes of operation that emerge from this exercise, are therefore especially useful for uncovering the ‘complexities, limits and boundaries’ of humanitarianism as it responds to new challenges (Ticktin 2014, 283).

There are many areas of protracted conflict or displacement where humanitarian actors have been at work for decades. Anthropologists have analysed these contexts to inquire how crises are experienced and understood by the populations impacted by them, in some cases over multiple generations. Haiti is one such context. The country has seen waves of civil unrest, authoritarian rule, and gang violence since the 1990s, coupled with disasters such as the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic in its aftermath, and more recently the disintegration of the country’s state apparatus. Haiti was often dubbed a ‘Republic of NGOs’, characterising the prolonged administration of life during this period by aid organisations, with international funding being channelled mainly to humanitarian and development actors rather than the country’s own government (Schuller 2017). As aid came to encompass all aspects of daily living, the presence and logics of humanitarian care became banal (Beckett 2019). Anthropologists make a similar point about the decades-long displacement of Palestinians, for whom crisis is a ‘condition of life’ and whose everyday survival hinges upon their claims on humanitarian rights (Feldman 2012). In such contexts, everyday life is saturated with layers of crises past and present, such that the very idea of crisis becomes ordinary. Put differently, crisis becomes ‘an atmosphere – the often invisible outer layer of life that surrounds us, envelops us, and comes to be taken for granted or even ignored’ (Beckett 2020, 79).

Narratives of crisis can also be rendered useful to neoliberal governing strategies. We might look at the recent shift among aid organisations towards an auditorial approach to aid: instead of engaging directly with vulnerable communities during a crisis, the ICRC has pivoted to tutoring state actors or armed groups on monitoring threats and violations through the collection of data, the production of indicators, and the use of risk management tools (Billaud 2020; Lima 2022). In Rio de Janeiro, for example, a humanitarian programme created by ICRC trained healthcare workers on how to promote their own safety while also protecting their patients from the risk of gun violence, since local police did not operate effectively in territories controlled by drug-trafficking gangs (Lima 2022).

Aid organisations have similarly adopted a ‘managerial orientation’ that frames refugees as an economic burden for host states and advocates strategies to mitigate the burden through international cooperation (Calhoun 2013, 41). For Global South countries where the large majority of the world’s displaced population resides, such strategies also offer unique economic opportunities. Under the auspices of building refugee resilience and self-reliance, UN agencies have negotiated livelihood rights for refugees in exchange for exploiting their labour to benefit the developmental agendas of host states (Easton-Calabria and Omata 2018; Skran and Easton-Calabria 2020). For instance, the Jordan Compact launched in 2016 committed the host government to providing vocational training, the formalisation of Syrian businesses, and the provisioning of temporary work permits for Syrian refugees in designated labour sectors, in exchange for US $1.7 billion in international assistance and trade concessions for Jordanian exports to Europe (Lenner and Turner 2019). This approach was formalised in 2018 into the Global Compact on Refugees between donors and aid organisations, providing a blueprint for future humanitarian responses to mass displacement.

Humanitarian crises are thus used by states to advance the frontiers of what scholars have called ‘disaster capitalism’, forcing open new territories and economic sectors to capital accumulation (Gunewardana and Schuller 2008; Klein 2007; Swamy 2021). At the same time, the promise of development is designed to incentivise refugee integration in the Global South and prevent their onward migration to the Global North. This multi-pronged approach to aid, often referred to as the ‘humanitarian–development nexus’ (Lie 2020; Strand 2020) or in some cases the ‘humanitarian–development–security’ nexus (Riggan and Poole 2024), anchors the legitimacy of humanitarian efforts to the national interests of host states and the security agendas of donor states, which many scholars and practitioners consider a betrayal of core humanitarian values such as neutrality and independence.

De-centring Western humanitarianism

Recent anthropological scholarship has attempted to de-centre the analytical focus on Western institutionalised humanitarianism by turning its attention to humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action. The principles guiding these alternative forms of humanitarianism can differ markedly from the Red Cross principles espoused by international organisations, and are often more consonant with cultural notions of mutual aid and communal solidarity found among grassroots networks that emerge in response to emergencies. To understand these ‘vernacular humanitarianisms’, anthropologists propose to interrogate ‘what people in a certain place understand as ‘human’, ‘humanity’, or ‘humanitarian’, and then to build an analysis from there’ (Brković 2023, 9).

Displaced communities in Myanmar, for example, routinely alternate between the positions of aid provider and aid recipient depending on their circumstances: those who are helped might shift to helping others once they are settled (Fechter and May 2024). Similarly, Greek humanitarians helping migrants (solidarians) during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean actively refused the labels of ‘volunteer’, ‘beneficiaries’, or ‘services’ when describing their motivations, insisting instead on a principle of solidarity based on horizontal, non-hierarchal relations (Rozakou 2017). These cases of Myanmar and Greece are not uncommon, and highlight the value of letting in-depth ethnographic research inform our understanding of how people invest the concepts of humanitarianism and humanity with meaning (Brković 2023).

We may alternatively examine how states and civil society in the non-Western world mobilise aid for distant others by drawing on different articulations of suffering, rights, and humanity (Osanloo and Robinson 2024). Anthropologists have drawn our attention to an older genealogy of humanitarian care rooted in the Hindu concept of dān, which refers to the sacred virtue of charity considered essential for spiritual liberation in Hinduism (Bornstein 2012). Whereas the anthropology of humanitarianism often separates religious philanthropy from professional humanitarianism, the shared symbolism of the ‘gift’ binds both institutionalised redistribution and individual acts of giving to shifting notions of citizenship and the entitlements it affords. Similarly, the concept of zakat undergirding Islamic humanitarianism is seen by its adherents not as a voluntary virtue but as a form of ‘financial worship’ that purifies both the giver and the receiver (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2003). While this pillar of Islam may have functioned as an early system of social security, anthropologists note that it has diminished in modern Islamic states from a public welfare institution into a private, voluntary practice of piety.

The idea of humanitarian duty as synonymous with service to God continues to survive at other scales of civil society. The distribution of free meals near a mosque in Cairo, for instance, was primarily motivated not by a formalised commitment to alleviate human suffering but by khidma, a sense of service ‘directed by’ and ‘at God’ (Mittermaier 2024, 256). In Northern Pakistan, humanitarian action is often motivated by jazba, an ‘emotional impulse’ or ‘spirit to get the unlikely done’ and to leave behind a material legacy of concrete, transformative projects (Mostowlansky 2020, 251). These specific orientations notwithstanding, the broader geopolitical logics of Islamic humanitarianism can still at times echo its Western counterparts: Turkish humanitarians, operating in Islamic Africa south of the Sahara, draw on the heritage of a shared religion but nevertheless frame themselves as heirs to an Ottoman civilisation that protects its less fortunate Black African neighbours. The racialised and colonial underpinnings of ‘white’ Turkish humanitarianism here reproduce the historical associations between Western humanitarianism and the European colonial project (Güner 2023).

Conclusion

As prospects for life on earth deteriorate with climate change, it is likely that climate-induced displacement will only grow more protracted and routine for the world’s most vulnerable communities. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, as a new array of actors mobilise humanitarian logics to pursue their own agendas. New spaces may be reframed as sites for humanitarian intervention, such as cities affected by urban violence (Lima 2022), while existing sites and instruments such as refugee camps may continue to proliferate. To deal with these emerging challenges, humanitarians are innovating with new technologies, including drones, biometrics, digital currencies, artificial intelligence, blockchains, and algorithmic data management. Anthropologists tend to remain sceptical of such limited, technical solutions to humanitarian needs, and often warn against the sector’s deepening reliance on proprietary tools—often developed in partnership with Big Tech companies—that rely on extractive data collection practices with minimal safeguards for refugee privacy, rights, and freedoms (Ajana 2013; Firoz 2024; Iazzolino 2021; Scott-Smith 2016; Tazzioli 2019).

In 2025, international humanitarianism faces one of the largest financial crises in its history. Following the abrupt withdrawal of support from the world’s largest humanitarian donor, the United States, donors across Europe also implemented major reductions in their aid budgets. Humanitarian organisations have warned of disastrous consequences for food security, primary healthcare, disaster relief, educational access, poverty alleviation, and refugee protection across the globe. In particular, the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has sent shockwaves through the sector, interrupting operational partnerships and supply chains. At the same time, the complicity of Western states with Israel’s genocide in Gaza has also undermined the framework of international law that enshrine humanitarian rights and obligations. As another genocide rages on in Sudan, it is more difficult than ever to imagine a sustainable future for survivors of humanitarian crises. In a future marked by resource scarcity, ecological collapse, warfare, and militarised borders, when the protections once afforded by citizenship are waning and the moral appeal of our shared humanity is endangered by the resurgence of authoritarianism, humanitarianism will continue to offer anthropologists a vital terrain of inquiry to understand how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

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Notes on contributors

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a research associate in anthropology at the University of Bristol, and was previously Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. His work has featured in American Anthropologist, Humanity, and Focaal. Pedro has also previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Rd, Bristol BS8 1TH.

Malay Firoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He currently serves as director of ASU's Global Human Rights Hub and has previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Firoz’s work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Humanity, Migration and Society, among others, and has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Malay Firoz, Faculty Administration Building S171, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Mail Code 3051, Glendale, AZ 85306-4908, USA. malay.firoz@asu.edu. ORCiD: 0000-0002-1323-1946.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Deep sea

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 23:59:15 +0000

A glass sponge known as ''Advhena magnifica'' in the Pacific Ocean being collected in 2016, at a depth of 2,000 meters. Picture by the US Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.

Marta Gentilucci

University of Bergen

Initially published 11 Aug 2025

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

Abstract:

The mystery evoked by the deep sea—its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility—has long captivated the public imagination. Iconic works of science fiction as well as pioneering documentaries reflect a fascination with unveiling the unknown; this spirit of discovery, of bringing light into the depths, remains alive today and has arguably even intensified. The deep sea has also emerged as a critical geopolitical space. Scientists race to study its fragile and little-understood ecosystems before commercial deep-sea mining gains momentum, aiming to fill urgent knowledge gaps. In this high-stakes environment, anthropologically ‘being (down) there’ is no longer solely about exploring the abyss itself. Rather, it is increasingly about gaining a voice within scientific discourse and broader societal debates. Today, more than ever, anthropology must engage with this sociopolitical space.

This entry highlights anthropology’s shy yet critical approach to the deep sea as an ethnographic site—one imbued with meanings that shift depending on who encounters it, with what tools, and through which mediations. It does so through interdisciplinary insights from the social sciences and reflections that are profoundly anthropological in theory. The first section explores the deep sea’s otherness or strangeness, a space that challenges terrestrial frameworks and poses questions about the nature of knowledge. The second examines how the deep sea is socially constructed through politics of (in)visibility and the deep sea’s representation as a chaotic and messy space. The third highlights how relationships between human and non-human life in the deep sea can be reimagined in non-extractive and porous ways. The fourth presents another approach, viewing the deep sea as a privileged site from which to interrogate the past, critique the present, and envision Afrofuturistic futures. Polyphonic in nature, this entry invites readers to explore the deep sea through multiple social science perspectives, collectively capturing its complexity and significance.

Introduction: Under pressure

As the spectre of deep-sea mining (DSM) looms large, it has galvanised a diverse coalition of scientists, activists, NGOs, artists, writers, and global communities. In the near future, large quantities of minerals, including those used in electronics, batteries, and green technologies such as copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements, are highly likely to be extracted from the seabed. Scientifically, the deep sea refers to oceanic regions below approximately 200 meters—the depth at which sunlight gives way to perpetual darkness. However, global attention is increasingly drawn to even greater depths, as DSM is expected to extend down to 5,000 meters. Now more than ever, the media spotlight is focused on the deep sea and its ‘alien’ creatures—organisms with extraordinary adaptations that allow them to survive under extreme pressure and in harsh, lightless conditions. At these depths, pressure increases dramatically, while temperature, oxygen levels, and food availability sharply decline. DSM is also under pressure, facing growing scrutiny from scientists, policymakers, and civil society. Unlike historical precedents in industries such as oil and gas—where legislation typically followed technological and commercial breakthroughs or disasters—DSM is experiencing a reversal of this pattern: regulatory frameworks are being developed in advance, actively shaping and steering both technological innovation and commercialisation efforts.

A realm governed by the vast timescales of geological and ecological processes—what Richard Irvine (2014) calls ‘deep time’—the deep sea has become a major geopolitical issue (Hannigan 2016), caught in a clash of competing temporalities. Despite the inherently slow epistemic process, scientists are working with urgency to fill critical knowledge gaps about its ecosystems before the accelerating mineral rush begins. In this high-stakes context, ‘getting (down) there’ is not only about reaching physical depths but also about navigating the tension between ocean preservation and industrial exploitation.

Today, more than ever, anthropology must engage with this seascape, which—as this entry shows—is increasingly seen as a sociopolitical space. In recent decades, anthropology has expanded its focus beyond coastal fishing communities to engage with the ocean more broadly (Helmreich 2009, 2015, 2023; Aswani 2020; Leivestad 2022; Dua 2024a, 2024b). This includes explorations of human-ocean creature relations (Uimonen and Masimbi, 2021; Ahlberg 2022), underwater worlds (Helmreich 2007; Rodineliussen 2024), and offshore industries (Appel 2012; Schober 2022; Markkula 2022), including deep-sea mining (Gentilucci 2022, 2024; Larsen 2024). This growing attention to the ocean is part of a broader shift in the social sciences and humanities—variously termed the ‘oceanic turn’ (Deloughrey 2016), the ‘blue turn’ (Braverman and Johnson 2020), or ‘blue humanities’ (Mentz 2023). These movements have contributed significantly to challenging ‘terra-centric’ perspectives on the sea (Steinberg and Peters 2015), advocating for approaches that think in and through the ocean as a form of radically situated knowledge (Jue 2020). More recently, hydrofeminist perspectives, which emphasise a reciprocal relationship with water—learning from it while also giving back by embracing shared responsibility—have further deepened these discussions (Shefer, Bozalek and Romano 2024). Despite the growing anthropological literature on the ocean, the deep sea itself remains relatively understudied in anthropology, especially when compared to the growing attention it has received in other social sciences.

It is then crucial to highlight anthropology’s subtle yet critical approach to the deep sea as an ethnographic site—one imbued with meanings that shift depending on who encounters it, with what tools, and through which mediations. Equally important are the foundational insights contributed by historians of science, geographers, media scholars, and cultural theorists. These reflections are pivotal to anthropology, enabling it to recentre its voice in the scientific and public debate. While the approaches outlined here are marked by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, and ethico-political aims, they share at least two key features: a critical engagement with the scientific and epistemological challenges posed by the deep sea, and an emphasis on the environment’s unique materialities that blur the boundaries between distance and proximity, the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the visible and the invisible, as well as connection and disconnection.

The entry is divided into four sections. The first focuses on the deep sea as an (un)familiar place that challenges epistemologies of life. The second takes on a political lens, showing how the deep sea’s unique characteristics give rise to a politics of (in)visibility. The third section explores the potential for porous encounters between humans, machines, and the abyss. The last one approaches the deep sea as a colonial space in which the past, the present, and new alternative futures are claimed. The conclusion invites reflection on the deep sea as an ethnographic field, encouraging a rethinking of how fieldwork is conducted in unconventional or hard-to-access environments.

Life and knowledge at the edge

A significant inspiration to the anthropological study of the deep sea comes from historians, who trace the scientific and cultural history of how the deep ocean emerged as a distinct territory—one in which nations began to assert claims of sovereignty and control (Rozwadowski 2005). Between 1840 and 1880, British and American scientists and hydrographers extensively studied the deep sea, a period marked by heightened cultural fascination with maritime depths. Scientific exploration during this era intersected with a broader acknowledgment of the economic and social importance of the maritime world, shaped by mid-nineteenth century maritime practices, technologies, and cultures. This setting was characterised by a masculine naval culture, physical challenges, and harsh conditions—a blending of scientific inquiry with maritime work cultures. Notably, this period included the first global deep-sea exploration, conducted by the HMS Challenger expedition (1873–76), which carried out meteorological and biological observations, as well as soundings to identify potential submarine cable routes.

The deep ocean, once regarded as an ‘unfathomable barrier’, gradually became a space accessible to technological observation, facilitated by the laying of submarine cables aimed at generating knowledge about undersea landforms, deep trenches, and seafloor conditions (Starosielski 2015, 203). While these expeditions occasionally retrieved organisms when recovering cables, misconceptions of the deep sea as a lifeless abyss persisted for decades. The serendipitous encounter with life in extreme conditions ‘turns out to be a relatively recent possibility, not just technologically but epistemologically’ (Helmreich 2009, 36). It is worth highlighting here the vivid account of the encounter with hydrothermal vent chimneys, cylindric structures on the ocean floor that may emit mineral-rich water, during the 1978 Galapagos Hydrothermal Expedition (Ballard and Hively 2017): ‘We couldn’t help but wonder what so many animals were doing at that depth, in that eternal darkness. […] But we were not biologists. We were supposed to be finding warm water’ (170). The discovery sparked profound fascination: ‘We felt as if we had glimpsed unknown, alien life on a new world, or at least an alternate version of life as we know it’ (Ballard and Hively 2017, 173).

This unfamiliar life at the bottom of the ocean, particularly deep-sea microbes thriving at the edges of hydrothermal vents and adapted to extreme conditions, captivated public imaginaries, scientific debate, and anthropological interest in these debates. Questions on whether these microbes could be humanity’s most ancient ancestors remain unanswered, but they show how these organisms challenge human-centred notions of lineage and evolution (Helmreich 2009). The deep sea is in fact a complex ecosystem that defies anthropocentric perspectives and resists being captured in a singular narrative. These organisms are ‘strangers’: beings that are ‘not yet—or not fully ever—friend or enemy, self or other’ (Helmreich 2009, 17).

Life in the deep sea and the knowledge surrounding it are central themes in the ongoing debate on DSM. Establishing a baseline—the current state of the environment—for assessing the impact of mineral extraction is challenging due to significant scientific gaps in our understanding of the fauna inhabiting this remote and largely unexplored habitat. Anthropologists ask what it might mean for people to develop an interest in life at the ocean’s depths—and to care for creatures so profoundly different from the animals humans typically recognise (Alaimo 2025). The deep sea is an unfamiliar environment: unlike forests, mountains, or other recognisable landscapes, it remains inaccessible to tourists or casual observers and can only be experienced through costly, technologically mediated scientific expeditions (Alaimo 2025). It evokes a multifaceted aesthetic engagement—ranging from ‘the beautiful, the adorable, the surreal, the weird, the monstrous, the grotesque, the psychedelic, the unfathomable, and even the self-reflexive Anthropocene’ (Alaimo 2025, 13). These aesthetic dimensions deeply influence human imagination and ethical reflection. The deep sea’s extraterrestrial nature is a realm where life hovers at the very limits of what humans can comprehend (Helmreich 2009, Alaimo 2012).

However, this otherworldly perception of the deep sea should not alienate us from recognising the real and tangible consequences of climate change, ocean acidification, mining, industrial fishing, and pollution. The fact that abyssal zones differ from shallow waters does not imply a lack of interconnection between them. Oceanographers, for example, remind us that benthic creatures (organisms that live on or near the bottom of marine ecosystems such as sponges, worms, sea stars, etc.) rely on phenomena like whale falls, in which whale carcasses sink to the deep-sea floor. Framing the deep ocean as unknowable could reinforce the mistaken idea of it as ‘a separate realm where human harms dissolve into invisibility’ (Alaimo 2025, 11).

As we encounter different aesthetic and scientific captures of deep-sea creatures, the question of what it means for the depths to be unknowable will repeatedly arise — as a way to dodge legal and financial responsibility, as an admission of scientific or scholarly failure, as a pervasive cultural trope, as a mathematical impasse, as an impetus for environmentally ethical epistemologies, or as an ordinary, even clichéd, sense of the wondrous and sublime (Alaimo 2025, 12).

The (un)knowability of the deep sea raises an epistemological dilemma. With DSM now at stake, this largely unknown and enigmatic maritime space is being transformed into one that must be rendered visible, mapped, and digitised as extensively as possible. Evidence must be gathered to reduce uncertainty and risks. Notably, the United Nations’ Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development has endorsed Seabed2030, a flagship programme driven by a global consortium of partners across industry, government, academia, philanthropy, and civil society, with the ambitious goal of producing a complete map of the world’s ocean floor by 2030.^[1] Furthermore, significant public and private funding is currently directed toward both ‘unlocking’ the value of the deep—to use the terminology favoured by many DSM stakeholders—and filling knowledge gaps in deep-sea ecosystems through scientific research. As the deep sea becomes increasingly entangled in economic, technological, and political ambitions, questions emerge not only about who has the right to know but also what kind of knowledge has to be sought. It is this tension that surfaced, for example, at the Deep-Sea Minerals Conference held in Bergen, Norway in April 2025, where the pressing issue was: when do we know that we know enough? — a question driven mostly by the market imperatives of DSM. It is therefore important to consider the ‘context of motivation’ among scientists leading deep-sea exploration—specifically, how they frame their mission as a pursuit of something larger than themselves, a moral imperative or higher calling (Oreskes 2021, 499). What scientists choose to make knowable (visible), and what they allow to remain unknowable (invisible), is ultimately a political decision.

Both knowing and unknowing the deep sea present their own problems. In the name of science and for the ‘love of facts’—and because environmental assessments are essential for regulating the future of deep-sea mining—scientific research can sometimes become entangled in extractive logics. For instance, whether or not to extract a sample from an active hydrothermal vent can become a point of contention among scientists. While collecting data to understand fluid chemistry is crucial for comparing life at active versus inactive vents—and ultimately for challenging the ambitions of deep-sea mining proponents—some stakeholders in deep-sea mining argue that such scientific practices should also be subject to regulation. For example, in an effort to protect coral reefs, scientists could deploy killer robots programmed to inject a lethal substance into crown-of-thorns starfish which feed on coral (Braverman 2020). While robots, with their physical capacity to perform tasks that humans cannot, can bring us emotionally and epistemologically closer to the ocean, they can also obscure the ethical implications of violence in marine ecosystems. By outsourcing harm to non-human actors, they displace responsibility (Braverman 2020, 162). The mechanisation of knowledge production in marine environments—deciding which species ‘make live’ or ‘make die’—not only obscures human agency but also generates a space of biopolitical governance, where life is managed remotely and often invisibly (Braverman 2020, 148).

As in the oil and gas sector, environmental risk legislation in the DSM sector is tightly linked to the setting of ecological thresholds. To establish these thresholds for ecotoxicology (how toxic substances affect the reproduction and survival of organisms within an ecosystem) in deep-sea fauna, scientists assess the balance of entire ecosystems. While some species may be more resistant to stress than others, the goal is to integrate various data types to evaluate the overall impact. Crucially, the loss of a particular species is not necessarily a concern—what matters is whether its ecological function can be replaced. This involves determining whether another species can fulfil the role of a sensitive organism.

The current rush to collect as much data as possible—whether to support DSM, to monitor its impacts, or to oppose it—raises urgent anthropological questions. Why is it so difficult to leave the deep sea unknown, unmeasured, undivided, and uncontrolled? What does this compulsion to know—and thereby to claim—reveal about our broader relationships to nature, science, and power?

The deep sea is already deeply entangled with legal regimes, ranging from international treaties to national jurisdictions. These numerous and often overlapping legal frameworks are largely invisible to the public. ‘Like the ocean’s abyss, the legal abyss, too, is out of sight, out of mind, and out of the frame of reference for most lay persons’ (Braverman 2024, 4). Most people onshore remain unaware of ‘those dark, remote, and unexciting practices that take place in locations so vastly removed from the ocean’ (Braverman 2024, 4).

Material politics of (in)visibility

The deep sea oscillates between visibility and invisibility depending on the stakes involved. It is both an untouched, mysterious frontier far from sight, and a critical, contested space for human industrial or scientific extraction. Catastrophic events—such as the Deepwater Horizon spill, one of the largest environmental disasters in history, which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010—have the power to expose and disrupt an industry, like the oil industry, that largely operates out of sight of the oil-consuming public (Watts 2015). It also showed to politicians, fishers, and tourism operators the danger of taking marine resources for granted (Adler 2019). The deep sea has long occupied a special place in the human imagination, seen as exotic, empty, otherworldly—a kind of earthly outer space. It is precisely the perceived absence of humans in the deep sea, coupled with the opaque materiality of water, that helps sustain the enduring notion of the ocean as a frontier space (Ratté 2019).

This frontier can be seen as a space of disorder, where the oil supply chain not only absorbs but also accumulates and generates systemic risk, because ‘much of what is entailed in deepwater production is literally invisible (underwater), but also because the normalized operations [are] in extremis laid bare’ (Watts 2015, 214). As a result, the offshore oil industry often remains hidden until a disaster makes its precariousness undeniable, drawing attention to the risks inherent in its operations and the ethical dilemmas that arise when the deep sea is treated as an invisible resource frontier. The chaos and ‘messiness’ of the deep sea are also key factors in ethnographies that analyse how companies, for example, legitimise deep-sea mining projects (Childs 2019; Han 2022). Hydrothermal vents, underwater volcanoes, and the irregular crusts of seamounts are characteristics of the deep sea that corporations emphasise to influence political decisions. The sediment plume — underwater ‘clouds’ composed of dissolved materials and fine particles suspended from the seabed and generated by mineral collectors — is often described by DSM actors as relatively imperceptible, in stark contrast to the black smoke of hydrothermal vents (Childs 2019). This reframing serves to minimise the environmental impact of mining operations, which create sediment plume, as relatively invisible within the dynamic and chaotic deep-sea environment. The black smoke of hydrothermal vents, by contrast, is highlighted to depict the environment as legible and manageable (Childs 2019).

Sediment plumes have emerged as a significant conceptual and analytical lens through which the deep sea is examined in the social sciences. They are characterised as ‘spectral’ phenomena, existing at the threshold between the perceptible and imperceptible, the visible and invisible (Han 2024). In popular imaginaries of the deep sea, expanding tendrils of fluid and smoke continue to evoke associations with war, fire, and contamination, ‘connected to hell itself’ (Ballard 2023). Traditionally, plumes have served as visual markers of destruction and disturbance, yet they can also function as invisible hazards, potential risks for investors, or visible manifestations of broader, intangible events and natural phenomena that can be strategically managed through dispersion (Han 2024). The efforts to regulate these environments and control plume mobility—‘making visible that which is always in the process of becoming invisible’ (Han 2024, 96)—depend on a range of technological interventions, including sensors, dyes, and other monitoring devices designed to render the unseen legible within modelling technologies. Examining how scientists and corporate managers interpret sediment plumes—through their abstraction into graphs, simulations, and digital imagery—reveals how the deep sea is not merely discovered but actively constructed through scientific and industrial practices (Gentilucci 2024).

Porous encounters

Anthropological reflections on how the remote, seemingly human-less deep sea is rendered knowable—via visualisation, digitisation, and data extraction—have turned attention toward the embodied experiences of scientists themselves, particularly as they operate marine robotics. Oceanographers’ reliance on sensors and robotic technologies—deeply entangled with the sea’s material and affective dimensions—produces novel sensory relationships between humans and nonhumans (Helmreich 2009; Lehman 2020). In a similar vein, the anthropology of outer space has highlighted the embodied engagements of scientists with their technological surrogates, such that they ‘become rovers’ by learning to ‘see like a rover’ (Vertesi 2015).

The sensory modes through which the deep sea has been scientifically understood have evolved over time—from the tactile to the auditory and, finally, to the visual (Helmreich 2009). This progression has made the submarine world simultaneously more comprehensible and more fantastical (Helmreich 2009). To gain experience of the deep sea, anthropologists and other social scientists rely on the same technical aids as the oceanographers with whom and through whom they study. Stefan Helmreich, for example, boarded the renowned submarine Alvin—the same that accompanied Ballard and other oceanographers during the first explorations of hydrothermal vents—which led him to conceptualise human interaction with the deep sea through the lens of what he terms the ‘submarine cyborg’. This medium of engagement ‘blurs distinctions between inside and outside, artifice and environment’ and is simultaneously ‘hyper-present and invisible’, much like the water surrounding the submarine itself (Helmreich 2009, 214). What distinguishes the submarine cyborg is not merely its ability to operate within boundaries but its capacity to dissolve them entirely, merging interior and exterior spaces.

The dissolution of boundaries in the deep sea has prompted scholars to explore more porous and reciprocal forms of engagement with the ocean. Investigations of the architectural innovations of Olivier Bocquet are interesting in this respect (Brugidou and Clouette 2021). Bocquet is an architect collaborating with scientific institutes in Paris to design underwater habitats, including those at abyssal depths. His projects extend beyond the technological advancements of deep-sea robotics to address a more fundamental question: abyssal habitability. Among his innovations is the BathyReef ramp, a 3D-printed biomimetic concrete mesh designed to support remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Bocquet conducted an extensive inventory of sponge forms to identify those best suited to support the robot’s weight while simultaneously fostering a habitat for microorganisms. The ramp is thus conceived not merely as a structural element but as a catalyst for life, engineered to attract bioluminescent microorganisms that may aggregate over time. This luminous presence, in turn, could attract other species, gradually transforming the structure into a multi-layered habitat—one that ultimately contributes to conceptualising the possibility of human habitability in the deep sea. The ramp is deliberately unfinished at the moment of immersion. Rather than being a static structure, it evolves dynamically as local and transient organisms colonise it, transforming it into a living system (Brugidou and Clouette 2021). The materiality of the deep sea and the relationships it enables allow the ramp to function as a sanctuary for organisms drawn to light. While its foundation is human made, its subsequent layers emerge through interactions with non-human actors such as robots, bacteria, and marine life. In this context, the human is no longer central to reflections on abyssal architecture. The design of a ‘cohabitation reef’ constitutes not only a technical challenge but an ontological one, redefining the relationship between human and non-human life in the deep-sea.

(T)he boundaries of the human are no longer central to the reflection on abyssal architecture. […] The design of a cohabitation reef becomes the technical, and even ontological, challenge of architectural work. This is what we call the symbiotic paradigm (Brugidou and Clouette 2021, 3).

If capitalist, extractivist, and industrial approaches to the deep sea are ‘a-porous’ (‘aporétique’), this example examined by social scientists offers an alternative framework—one in which human presence in the abyss is porous, shaped through the gradual co-creation of a shared habitat as microorganisms settle and transform the environment (Brugidou and Clouette 2021, 3). Understanding the deep sea as a highly sensory place that allows for porous human–non-human encounters helps us acknowledge the agency of the beings that inhabit it. In contrast to portrayals of the deep sea as an empty, lifeless void, ethnographic writing reveals it to be a vibrant, non-human-rich ecosystem—one that may even be haunted by ‘ghosts’ (Palermo 2022).

The Blackness of the abyss

In the social sciences and humanities, the deep sea is sometimes conceptualised as a ‘ghostscape’—a space where the histories of the transatlantic slave trade resurface, and where Afrofuturist imaginaries and alternative world-views begin to take shape:

Coming from the Abyss, these ghosts re-emerge to question us about the past, the present, and possible alternative sea-related futures, as a presence-absence on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, the no-longer and the not-yet: a space of possibilities (Palermo 2022, 41).

This perspective challenges visions of the ‘cyborgs of the deep’ as the only ‘heroes’ that will allow society to meet the requests of the ‘Green Shift’, i.e. of transitioning towards more environmentally friendly ways of living (Palermo and Steinberg 2024, 9). The deep sea is populated by ‘unseen bodies […] whose hauntings persist’ even as their stories are obscured by the plumes of the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) used to collect minerals (Palermo and Steinberg 2024). Recognising these ghosts and incorporating Black history into our understanding of the deep sea means examining the relationship between colonialism, exploration and the ocean.

Thus, the abyss is the space of the White Whale described in Moby-Dick—the formidable, uncontrollable force that defies human dominance and ‘whose rolling and vaulting in the depths of the sea stands for the alliance between modernity, capitalism, coloniality, and the conquest of ocean-space’ (Palermo and Steinberg 2024, 10). The whale’s roundness symbolises the idea of the globe as something to be conquered, mapped, and controlled, while its elusiveness reflects the unattainable nature of these desires when driven by capitalist and colonial imperatives. The abyss is also the space of ‘the Drexciyan myth’, developed by Drexciya—an electronic music duo from Detroit, composed of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. They reimagine the transatlantic voyage of slaves (‘the Middle Passage’) as the origin of an underwater nation, born from the unborn children of enslaved African pregnant women thrown overboard during the transatlantic crossing. Such Afrofuturist mythology—expressed through music, visual art, comic books and novellas—show that our understandings of the deep sea are deeply historically informed, often harking back to times of slavery and colonialism.

Some scholars have even called for the Middle Passage to be formally recognised as cultural heritage within the legal framework of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which governs DSM activities in international waters (Turner et al. 2020). While the ISA does adopt the language of heritage—referring to deep-sea resources as the ‘common heritage of humankind’ and requiring that ‘a prospector shall immediately notify the Secretary-General in writing of any finding in the Area of an object of actual or potential archaeological or historical nature and its location’—it notably excludes recognition of intangible heritage.^[2] It is not uncommon to find marine archaeologists at DSM-related meetings—perhaps because their interests align more closely with mining operations than one might expect. Indeed, ‘the blue archive and the blue frontier are two sides of the same coin’ (Han 2024, 30), and special attention must be paid to how we collectively make sense of the deep sea.

The construction of a speculative seabed archive through the language of common heritage can thus, practically speaking, become a tool of colonization. In the blue archive, the notion of a ‘resource’ or ‘cultural artifact’ is thereby invented alongside the designation of others as obstacles (ocean waste, natural turbulence, indigenous communities, environmental fragility) (Han 2024, 45-46).

The jurisdictional structure of maritime space has increasingly become the politically-sanctioned battleground for turning the deep sea and its seabed into economic territory (Gentilucci 2022). For several decades, coastal states have been permitted to submit claims to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS, established in 1997) to extend their continental shelf. In the juridical definition, this concept refers to the seabed and subsoil extending beyond a coastal state's territorial sea, up to 200 nautical miles from the baseline, within which the state holds exclusive rights to explore and exploit natural resources. Meanwhile, the ISA—composed of 167 member states, with the United States being a notable exception—has entered into 15-year contracts for the exploration of mineral resources in the deep-seabed with 22 contractors operating across various oceanic regions.

Alongside legal and extractive frameworks, alternative imaginaries—such as those inspired by Drexciyan mythology—disrupt dominant logics of ownership and exploitation. Attuning ourselves to these forgotten heroes, buried in the seabed and disturbed by the drilling of robotic machines, invites a critical rethinking of the ongoing territorialisation of the ocean. These visions ‘re-turn colonial geo-logics, slowly tearing at colonial pasts, presents, and futures in an iterative, ongoing process of imaginative decolonisation’ (Stuer 2025, 33-4). The ghosts of a violent past call us to awareness, mourning, and action, urging us to envision oceanic futures that resist repetition and reclaim submerged histories (Patrizi 2024).

Conclusion: ‘Being (down) there’

The deep sea is not yet a distinct subfield within anthropology, nor is it likely to become one. It will probably be integrated into the broader domain of the anthropology of the ocean. Yet this does not diminish its significance as a site for anthropological reflection. On the contrary, the issues raised by scholars engaging with the deep sea are deeply anthropological in nature. They involve questions of otherness and estrangement, which unsettle terrestrial assumptions and challenge conventional ethnographic methods. The deep sea also invites to contemplate concepts such as chaos and disorder, and to critically examine the politics of corporate legitimacy. It blurs the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the interior and the exterior, the knowable and the unknowable, the familiar and the alien. In doing so, it opens up space for porous, entangled, and multi-species encounters but also for rethinking the past and imagining alternative futures.

All the reflections raised in this entry lead back to a central question: can the deep sea be considered an ethnographic site? And if so, how can anthropologists uphold the foundational principle of ‘being there’—a core tenet of ethnographic fieldwork—when the field itself resists direct human presence? Much like outer space, the deep sea challenges conventional understandings of fieldwork (Messeri 2016; Gorbanenko et al. 2025). However, physical and experiential distance from the object of study does not necessarily undermine anthropological engagement. ‘Are we still anthropologists if we go to space using only our imaginations?’ (Dovey and Potts 2025, 130). Anthropology needs to expand ‘being-in-person modes of ethnographic immersion’ (Dovey and Potts 2025, 130) and embrace a ‘one step-removed presence’—a partial, mediated, and prosthetic form of engagement (Helmreich 2007).

Marine biologists’ immersion of devices, like their robot, in the deep sea, my immersion for a time in their social practice and language; their remote readouts of deep dynamics, my semi-detached participant-observation... The more I thought about it, though, the stranger fieldwork seemed as a word for what we were doing... (Helmreich 2007, 21–2).

Like oceanographers, anthropologists cannot directly observe the deep sea with their own eyes. The engagement with this environment is highly mediated—through research vessels, remote sensors, autonomous machines, graphs, images, algorithms, and other technologies. Anthropologists who want to ask about this ‘out of sight and reach’ realm, the deep sea, should look ‘over the shoulder of marine biologists’ (Helmreich 2007, 28) and scientists at work. However, they may encounter challenges in doing so, such as trying to join research-based sea expeditions.

Being on board a research cruise, sitting in control rooms where scientists navigate remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), or observing their work in laboratories—all of this depends on access and permissions granted. The deep sea today is not a neutral scientific space—on the contrary, it is highly contested and politicised. In the current ‘call for science’ to gather knowledge before industrial exploitation intensifies, anthropologists—and social scientists more broadly—are not always welcomed participants. Research cruises are costly endeavours, often funded by industry, and participation is tightly controlled. Priority is typically given to natural scientists collecting quantitative and computational data, rendering anthropologists potentially superfluous in their eyes.

What kind of knowledge, then, can anthropologists contribute? This entry aims to encourage deeper engagement with this ethnographic realm, asserting the importance of claiming a voice within both scientific discourse and broader societal debates.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to the OEA Managing Editor, Hanna Nieber, for their thoughtful feedback and support in developing this entry. I would also like to sincerely thank Stacy Alaimo for generously sharing the introduction to her book, The abyss stares back: Encounters with deep-sea life (2025, University of Minnesota Press), which had not yet been published at the time of writing. My thanks extend as well to Giuliana Panieri, principal investigator of the EXTREMES project (UiT, ePhorte 2023/62800), and to the entire research team, for the invaluable insights they continue to offer on the geological structures and ecosystems of the deep-sea. The ethnographic material presented here is part of the ongoing research conducted through the OCEAN-MINeD project, funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01).

Note on contributor

Marta Gentilucci is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, where she leads the project OCEAN-MINeD. She is also the co-founder and co-convenor of the EASA Anthropology of the Seas Network.

Marta Gentilucci, PO Box 7802, NO-5020 Bergen, Norway. ma.gentilucci@gmail.com. ORCID: 0000-0002-5825-8624

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Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Sustainability

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:29:00 +0000

Vegetable farmer watering plants at the organic farm in Boung Phao Village, Lao PDR, 2013. Picture by the Asian Development Bank.

Alice Rudge

SOAS University of London

Initially published 18 Jul 2025

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

Abstract:

The term ‘sustainability’, as used in policy and common contemporary parlance, has a very European heritage, but its meanings and implications defy easy definition. While perhaps most famously the term is used in the UN’s ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, the term has roots in seventeenth century German forestry, where it was used to characterise optimal efficiency in tree planting. Since then, it has come to be strongly associated with questions of how the world’s resources might be better managed to ensure equality, prosperity, and health for future generations in an era of climate change. Anthropologists, however, have identified several intertwining issues with dominant approaches to sustainability that centre around questions of inclusion and exclusion from policies, metrics, and perceived global futures. Whose sustainability gets to count on the global stage? And what, exactly, is being sustained?

This entry identifies four main themes cross-cutting anthropological studies of how sustainability is imagined, enacted, and debated from the lab to the boardroom to the forest and the ocean. First, studies explore plurality in sustainable development, exploring conflicting ontologies and epistemologies of sustainability in diverse milieus. Second, studies address the problem of commensurability: as sustainability is measured and counted, compared and priced, how are diverse beings, contexts, people, and values made to stand in for one another? This leads to the third theme—moralities. Studies have addressed the conflicting moral projects brought about by sustainable development, as people grapple with what should be sustained and why. Finally, anthropologists have explored the kinds of futures that are imagined and made material by discourses on sustainability. Together, these studies form a body of work that refuses to take high-level discourses on sustainability for granted. They push anthropologists to ask how attention to on-the-ground realities might pose alternatives to dominant sustainable futures that remain defined by growth, extraction, and profit.

Introduction

Sustainability is one of the key terms of the contemporary moment—making daily headlines, shaping policy initiatives, business strategies, research grants, development projects, and public visions of what future prosperity and wellbeing in a changing world might look like. In our era of climate change, heat waves, floods, fires, and extinctions, and in the context of the economic, social, and political instability and inequality that characterise the Anthropocene, sustainability is increasingly—and rightly—on the global agenda.

However, the term ‘sustainability’, as it is used in common parlance today and often as the adjective in the phrase ‘sustainable development’, has meanings and implications that defy easy definition. For example, the coupling of ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’ has been so influential to how sustainability itself is conceptualised that any difference between the two terms is very often ‘decisively being let to blur into fuzziness’ (Rival 2017, 183). This coupling has been termed ‘oxymoronic’ because, while ‘development’ often denotes economic progress and growth, ‘sustainability’ usually denotes limits on material consumption and production. But despite this, today, the term ‘sustainability’ has becoming all-encompassing of what may once have separately been called ‘development’ or ‘sustainable development’ (Rival 2017, 183).

Perhaps because of this coupling, ‘sustainability’ has come to encompass a dizzying array of initiatives spanning access to water, gender equality, climate resilience, and economic prosperity, to name just a few (Yamada et al. 2022). It is an inherently plural term, used across politics, economics, and ecology. But despite this wide variety of ways and global contexts in which the term is used today, the word ‘sustainability’, in particular but not exclusively in its conjunction with ‘development’, tends to circulate as a tool and a goal of high-level policymaking and intervention. Anthropological approaches have therefore made important interventions, showing the social and political nature of how dominant approaches to ‘sustainable development’ have been constructed, demonstrating the friction with which such approaches to sustainability are articulated on the ground, and exploring how grassroots approaches to sustainability may offer a more hopeful way forward. The breadth of anthropological work on sustainability has therefore worked to challenge top-down approaches that have also been well described in other disciplines. Often occurring in conversation with history, political economy, science and technology studies (STS), geography, and political ecology, anthropological work on sustainability brings together longstanding debates in environmental anthropology and development studies.

To address this breadth of research, this entry begins by exploring how social scientists have understood the historical context of sustainability, before examining how anthropologies of sustainability have noted the plurality of environmental meanings and ontologies that precede and are produced by ‘sustainability’. It continues by describing two main anthropological challenges to the idea of sustainability. Anthropological scholarship has challenged the view that life can be abstracted, measured, and valued in market terms in the interests of sustainability and it has stressed the importance of attention to localised moral conflicts and the need for contextual, embedded approaches to understanding sustainability. The entry ends by reviewing anthropological work that imagines what meaningful sustainability might look like beyond the paradigms of growth, development, improvement, and progress that have harmed so many. In each case, the value of ethnography for ‘understanding what living sustainably means in practice for human societies, and what it does not’ (Brightman and Lewis 2017, v) has been reinforced, allowing anthropology to insistently ask: whose ‘sustainability’ gets to count on the global stage? And what, exactly, is being sustained?

Contextualising sustainability

Anthropologists and historians have pointed out that the concept of sustainability in its dominant form, as a term denoting the need to ensure the continued existence of the world’s resources alongside promoting economic growth, has a European heritage, with its roots in seventeenth century German forestry. It was first used to critique the conversion of woodland to fields and meadows as forests were burned to fuel the smelting plants of Saxony, and to call for optimal efficiency in tree planting for reforestation (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 3; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013, 22; Buller 2022, 18; Scott [1998] 2020, 11). This created the impetus to develop better measurements and analysis of forests and the development of mathematical frameworks that modelled optimal planting in the interests of nachhaltende Nutzung (‘sustaining use’) (Lewis & Brightman 2017, 3).

But when the ideals of this model were enacted—trees planted and spaced accordingly, brush cleared away—it was found that trees could not thrive. In this rigid planting scheme, pests and fungi flourished and yields of trees went down. But this did not prevent such managerial approaches to natural conservation from becoming dominant throughout the colonial era. These manifested, for example, in the desire to manage and conserve landscapes in the interests of singular species or resources, or through exclusive protected areas management regimes that still exist today (Brockington 2002; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). Often, these came alongside the denigration of local practices in the colonised world as ‘unsustainable’ even when they may have in fact been more sustainable (Randle et al. 2017; Fairhead and Leach 1996). From its origins, then, sustainability has been defined in terms of ‘use’ (Ahmed 2019), and this use was often valued through mathematical and economic abstraction, and disembedded from context. ‘Nature’ was also considered a resource, to be ‘improved’ in the interests of sustaining profits into the future, and such efforts were often considered moral projects in and of themselves (Yamada et al 2022). Thus, environmental and social concerns have paradoxically been secondary to economic concerns in dominant paradigms of sustainability (Hirsch 2020).

A focus on the economic aspects of sustainability became accentuated in the 1930s, in the inter-war period. It was then that the very idea of the ‘economy’, as an object separate from environment and ecology, became common. This was articulated through new measurement tools such as Gross National Product (GNP), a standard measure of the value of goods and services produced by a country’s citizens in a year (Tooze 2001; Mitchell 1998). GNP created the possibility of comparing and competing between the ‘markets’ of nation-states (Lane 2019), including for natural resources. While concerns around forestry in Saxony were abstractions, they had a material basis and referred to real, existing trees. But with the emergence of standard measures, like GNP, there was a turn to ever more abstract understandings of market exchange, focused on the idea of the national economy. In this framework, natural resources were abstracted as measurable goods with economic potential that must be simultaneously sustained and used to power economic growth.

This laid the groundwork for increasing attention to the conjunction of concerns about environmental or resource collapse with ideas about the need for economic ‘development’ in the post-war period, from 1945. After WWII, the US-led boom in productivity, known as the ‘Great Acceleration’, both relied on and furthered an enormous amount of fossil fuel extraction and expansion (Lane 2019), and came alongside US-led neo-colonial endeavours in the Global South. These often took the form of large-scale, US-funded development schemes that had ending global poverty as their agenda but often had devastating environmental and social impacts. Such projects included infrastructures like roads and hydroelectric dams, but also the agricultural intensification and land development projects of the Green Revolution, and national development plans and loan schemes. Each aimed to ensure markets in the Global South for US-produced products as well as resources for their production (Bayliss, Fine, and Waeyenberge 2015; Rist 2014, Cullather 2013, Patel 2013).^[1]

However, the oil shocks of the 1970s, where oil supply from the Middle East was disrupted due to conflict, engendered fears of the end of the age of plenty. This was a new fear of resource scarcity which linked market-maintaining development schemes with ideologies of sustainable resource preservation. These fears of scarcity became entangled with fears of a growing population and political revolution in the Global South that could potentially threaten trade relations with the North (Cullather 2013). As noted, the tools of abstract economic comparison, such as GNP, facilitated the political construction of ideas of scarcity in relation to the world’s resources. And amidst these fears of scarcity, older problematic theories about the need for population control (Malthus 1803) in the Global South were re-popularised. Contemporary anti-immigrant theories drawing on Malthusian ideas, such as of the ‘tragedy of commons’, also gained traction (Hardin 1968). As per this theory, ‘rational’ self-interest would destroy ‘common’ goods, and therefore, common resources needed to be privately owned and managed (Hardin 1968). These fears and theories were also called into question at the time, for example by examining how the commons had been governed historically and had actually persevered or flourished without privatisation. For example, some mechanisms to prevent the self-interested destruction of shared resources included face-to-face communication among resource users, mutual monitoring, and locally sensitive approaches to rule-making (Ostrom 1990). E.F. Schumacher’s still-influential monograph, Small is beautiful (1973) was also born of this context of oil shocks, fears of planetary resource scarcity and population growth, and environmental and social collapse. It did, however, offer a critique of capitalist industrial growth and focused on the need for human wellbeing and local-scale approaches to technology and economic policy.

Despite these critiques, the fears of resource scarcity produced by population growth remained highly popular and were furthered by well-known environmental writers, such as Paul Ehrlich, who posited population growth as the primary driver of environmental collapse, arguing for the need for population control alongside the development of new agricultural technologies (1968). Fears of scarcity were increasingly framed in environmental terms in the image of a fragile planet with finite resources that would be outstripped by population growth. For example, the ‘Club of Rome’s’ 1972 publication, The limits to growth (Macekura 2015), also re-hashed older Malthusian ideas to argue that the planet did not have enough resources to support contemporary levels of population growth and consumption, and that this would lead to global collapse. Such discourses on population—rooted in racist, colonial thought—resulted in the use of regimes of forced sterilisation under the guise of ‘educating’ women and girls in South Asia (Murphy 2017). These narratives are echoed today in the discourses of eco-fascism and the far right, as well as in mainstream economic policy which continues to call for population reduction in the Global South in light of planetary limits (Tilley and Ajl 2022). These entwined fears of population growth and environmental collapse permeated politics and policymaking in America and Europe, where policymakers increasingly predicted that population growth and migration, especially in and from the Global South, if left unchecked, would pose a major threat to the global order. It was in light of these developments that the explicit coupling of ‘sustainable development’—that is, growth within ecological limits—would eventually take shape, thereby blending paradoxical or oppositional concepts of sustainability and development together.

As the post-WWII period saw the entanglement of environmental and economic concerns, a result was increasing environmental awareness and the consolidation of the idea of a ‘global environment’ (Selcer 2018). In the Global North, landmark events and the formation of global campaigning organisations in the 1960s and 70s such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace, the formation of powerful international conservation organisations like the World Wildlife Fund, and major UN conferences, helped popularise and shape public attention to the global environment as an object of concern (Selcer 2018). These were supported by notable publications and ideas that also shaped public opinion and awareness, such as Silent spring (Carson 1962, Benson 2020), which raised awareness of the devastating ecological consequences of pesticide use, and the popular idea of a fragile ‘Spaceship Earth’, characterised both by the interdependence of all life and the limits of its resources (e.g. Fuller 1969).

Each of these developments from previous decades—new tools of economic comparison, fears of global resource scarcity and political revolution, the impetus for developing infrastructures and technologies for ending global poverty, and increasing environmental activism and awareness—meant that by the 1980s, the stage was set for one of the first and most important explicit institutional uses of the term ‘sustainable development’. This was in a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, entitled ‘Our common future’, also commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report after the author, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the then-prime minister of Norway. The report defined sustainable development as, ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. It makes generalised references to ‘the effects of human activities’, arguing that the ‘limits’ that ‘we’ face as humanity are not absolute limits in the earth’s resources, but limits ‘imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources’, both of which can and should be ‘managed’ and ‘improved’. The report might be interpreted as a call to action, but many have argued that these kinds of calls for technological fixes for the crisis in sustainability (or ‘techno-fixes’, sometimes called ‘techno-optimism’) make the problem out to be the solution (Rist and Camiller 2014, 196). While perhaps grounded in a desire for change, this institutionalises a managerial view of sustainability (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 5; Rajak 2020) that masks the political origins of layered contemporary crises through making intwined crises in poverty and ecology out to be technical problems rather than political ones, just as ‘development’ did decades previously.

It is therefore worth understanding more of the context for this report and its more recent criticisms. By the 1980s, neoliberal paradigms for development were coming to the fore with ‘structural adjustment policies’ that aimed to ‘free’ national economies from the ‘constraints’ of government welfare programs and which resulted in enforced austerity measures whose underlying assumption was that countries had been living ‘beyond their means’ (Rist and Camiller 2014, 172). A ‘strange alliance’ resulted between the World Bank, NGOs, and philanthropists, which encouraged the public to believe ‘in the harmless – even positive – character of a procedure [sustainable development] with catastrophic effects’ (Rist and Camiller 2014, 173). Thus, ‘sustainable development’ relied on the political production of the idea of material scarcity and planetary limits, which by the 1980s was constructing poverty as a technical problem to be fixed by Global North’s technical and fiscal interventions and improvements in ‘market’ flexibility and integration (Li 2007). Such problematic legacies can often be seen in contemporary sustainable development initiatives that may seem ‘obviously sensible’ yet have profound epistemological and on-the-ground consequences (León Araya 2021; Howell 2017). They include intra-governmental initiatives like REDD+ (‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries’), which aims to protect forests by paying countries and companies to keep them standing, as well as ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES), in which donors pay individuals or communities for seemingly ecological forms of resource management. They also include work done by NGOs as they try to impose sustainable development through microfinance, entrepreneurship, and market integration (Dolan and Rajak 2016a; Schuster 2015).

For these reasons, anthropologists have argued that sustainability discourse often covers up ‘destructive practices’ (Tsing 2017) and the inequality that these practices rely on with universalising claims to the improvement of ‘humanity’ (Eriksen 2022). Yet the depth of sustainability’s inextricable yet paradoxical link with (economic) development, and the phrase’s assumed humanitarian and self-evident moral character, has continued to be marked by institutional milestones like the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, and the UN’s 2015 adoption of the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’. Some ecological movements have repurposed this term to lobby for land rights and justice today, including agro-ecological movements across Latin America (Rival 2017), and Indigenous projects of planning for sustainability and social justice (Whyte, Caldwell & Schaefer 2018). However, the mainstream global sustainability industry continues to be characterised by troubling partnerships between the private and public sector; and state, NGO, and private sector violence against environmental defenders (Silva Menton and Gilbert 2021; Igoe & Brockington 2007). This situation has led some to argue that ‘perhaps the most useful contemporary working definition for sustainable development is this: an effort to extend capitalism with often token attention to environmental or economic constraints’ (Hirsch 2020, 3). However, because of the plurality of ways that sustainability circulates as either a meaningful critique of ‘unsustainability’ or as a tool of corporate greenwashing, anthropologists have found that they must both attend to critiques of dominant framings and their construction, and to the visions of a meaningful sustainability that these may mask—visions that anthropologists may be uniquely placed to bring to light owing to ethnography’s potential to understand the worldviews of all those working in and affected by sustainability from a grounded perspective.

Plurality

Anthropologists have utilised ethnographic research’s potential to highlight that, despite top-down attempts at sustainability that assume a one-size-fits-all approach to environmental management, the landscapes, institutions, and ‘communities’ into which ‘sustainable development’ initiatives land are plural, constructed, and contested, and with different political and historical contexts (Li 2007; Mosse 1999). For example, in Cape York Peninsula, Australia, different ideologies of land use and management clash in the use of fire to manage the landscape. Here, Aboriginal traditional owners, park rangers, and cattle graziers work in ‘uneasy coalition’ (Reardon-Smith 2023). While Aboriginal landowners may burn the land for environmental purposes and to create custodianship, park rangers burn to create firebreaks, and cattle graziers burn to protect and encourage pastures.

The failure of top-down approaches to sustainability to attend to these sorts of local concepts and methods of environmental management has led to the erasure of local lifeways, despite the frequent celebration of such initiatives as successful (West 2006; West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006; Brockington 2002; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). In East African Rangelands, ‘community based natural resource management’ initiatives, in which local people are asked to set aside land for conservation in order to increase wildlife and hence attract tourist revenue, have not demonstrated any useful environmental outcomes, despite being celebrated on the international stage. Furthermore, the financial returns from such initiatives have accrued to foreign and state actors, not local communities (Homewood 2017). In British Columbia, ‘sustainable’ fishing policies deny First Nations Gitxaała peoples access to their ancestral fisheries, despite the fact that they have managed these fisheries sustainably for generations. Surveillance, in turn, focuses on First Nations fishers, while leaving illegal commercial fishers unchallenged (Menzies 2016).

Anthropologists have thus shown how plurality, and the work it takes to navigate, can be masked by top-down approaches to sustainability, leading to real-life harms and exclusionary practices that may cause additional environmental damage. A key focus in this area has been on the UN’s REDD+ schemes, which aim to foster forest protection by paying for their sustainable management. In Suriname, anthropological work with local communities has demonstrated how Indigenous ‘cultures of ownership’ mean that the debates surrounding land ownership—and hence entitlement to inclusion in REDD+ schemes—do not easily match with Indigenous forms of relationality and sovereignty (Brightman 2019). In Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, tensions are produced by REDD+ projects when they land among Indigenous Ngaju people, where they sit uneasily with local values of autonomy and equality (Lounela 2020). Researching from the other side of the negotiating table, STS scholars have drawn attention to the contingent, situated, and ‘theatrical’ nature of UN climate negotiations that have led to and continually shape the implementation of REDD+ schemes (Ehrenstein 2018a). Such processes leave little possibility for the inclusion of Indigenous voices (Howell 2017).

These arguments link to older debates about ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012), in which land is ‘grabbed’ from local communities for ostensibly sustainable projects, like plantations whose crops are destined for biofuels or solar parks, while local communities still experience dispossession (Makki 2014). They also recall much older pejorative demarcations of local resource-use practices as unsustainable, to justify colonial interventions. For example, swidden agriculture in Southeast Asia was prohibited by colonial authorities as the burning and seeming abandonment of land was seen as destructive. Other allegedly more ‘sustainable’ land uses that offered more consistently predictable profits for colonial centres, such as plantation agriculture, were promoted (Yamada et al. 2022; Randle et al. 2017) despite these being less environmentally sustainable (Dove & Kammen 1997). Labelling something as ‘unsustainable’ or ‘sustainable’ can be a powerful political move (Fairhead and Leach 1996). It can mask the plurality of ways that people manage, use, and dwell in their environments, and impose hegemonic ideas of environmental responsibility that stem from the Global North (West 2006; Chua et al. 2021; León Araya 2021). This has been documented in the Himalayas, where justice needs have been sidelined through the IPCC’s imposition of scientific knowledge production from the Global North that marginalises Indigenous historical and environmental knowledge and experience (Chakraborty and Sherpa 2021).

Many argue that sustainability, therefore, ought to be reconceptualised as the ‘process of facilitating conditions for change by building and supporting diversity – ontological, biological, economic and political diversity’ (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 2), and reflecting ‘pluriversal’ politics, a politics that prioritises the existence of many distinct ontological and epistemic worlds (Escobar 2020; 2011; de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). Some have sought to enact such politics through meaningful collaborations on the ground. Anthropologists working on orangutan conservation have sought dialogue with conservationists in order to practically envision just futures through ‘mutually transformative dialogue’ (Chua et al. 2020). Such dialogue might usefully help to encourage the broader realisation that ‘[s]ustainability is an English word’ (Maldonado, Meza, and Yates-Doerr 2016), and foster greater sensitivity to collaboration and understanding across diverse positionalities (Chua et al 2021). Anthropologists have therefore usefully demonstrated the need for attention to the plurality of, and the nuances in, grassroots approaches to sustainable conservation, and collaborative land and resource management in the face of top-down approaches.

Commensurability

Just as top-down approaches to sustainability tend to flatten plurality, many sustainability projects also work through imperfect processes of making things, people, and places ‘commensurable’, that is, measurable by the same standards, so that they can be assigned comparable value, and may substitute for one another. This process of ‘commensurability’, sometimes also referred to as ‘comparity’, is used to make decisions on how to mitigate or offset the effects of certain actions to produce sustainability (Carse 2021; Schinkel 2016). Carbon measurements are a common metric through which this work of creating commensurability is done in sustainability interventions. Decontextualised from time and space, and in many cases from carbon itself, ‘carbon’ is objectified in order to be traded or exchanged in the form of permits, credits, or ‘offsets’ including in, but not limited to, REDD+ schemes. Not only does this mask the plurality of interests and value clashes that have gone into carbon trading systems (Dalsgaard 2013; Lane 2012; Ehrenstein 2018b), but appealing to ‘carbon’ becomes a way to compare and make commensurable entirely different forms of life and ‘different actions across spheres’ (Dalsgaard 2013, 83; Neale 2023). Through these processes of commensurability and comparity, ‘carbon’ has become the ‘standard’: the metric of comparison used to put a price on almost all human actions, each of which are considered to produce ‘carbon’ or avoid producing it in some way.

Anthropologists attending to these processes have pointed out that once carbon is ‘fetishised’— that is, made to seem of transcendent importance—it is able to circulate in financial markets and in the development sector. Furthermore, carbon offsets, insofar as they make the world commensurable (Cointe 2024), help pass the responsibility for climate change to the Global South, while absolving the individual off-setter in the Global North who can continue emitting (allegedly) guilt and consequence-free (Dalsgaard 2013, 86). This process is commonly referred to as ‘carbon colonialism’ (Parsons 2023) as it leaves intact or reproduces the history of long-distance resource extraction from the Global South to the Global North (Ehrenstein 2018b). In this way, the maintenance of carbon markets becomes an ‘end in itself’ (Machaqueiro 2017) rather than a meaningful way to create sustainability.

The practice of making things commensurable with carbon is also shown by social scientists to shape the work of contemporary science, in particular the common practice of ‘sustainability by substitution’ (Ulrich 2023). This is the practice of seeking sustainable substitutes for harmful substances or materials (Abdelghafour 2024, Pihl 2024, Kotzen 2024, Ulrich 2024). For example, metabolic engineers work to harness the metabolisms of microbes to encourage them to produce useful compounds that might become substitutes for petrochemical compounds. Sustainable chemical compounds, which are to be produced by these microbes, are thought of as ‘drop ins’, meaning they must be made almost commensurable with their unsustainable cousins, but without the carbon (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024). This ‘logic of substitution’ (Ulrich, Rudge & Ehrenstein 2024; Ulrich 2023) creates both the conditions of possibility for the research itself, by making it ‘sellable’, as well as the impossibility of its meaningful success. Low-carbon alternatives must be made commensurable to their high-carbon versions: able to scale up to slot into the political, economic, social, and physical infrastructures derived for the circulation and trade of fossil fuels over centuries (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024; Mitchell 2009; Boyer 2014). In short, sustainable substitution is often ‘about commensurability and competition’ much more than about sustainability (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024, 15).

Work on commensuration has been crucial to scholars working on waste, recycling, and ‘circular economies’. For example, black soldier flies are, like microbes (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024), envisioned as ‘living technologies’ for waste processing. The larvae should eat organic waste, eventually emerging to become adult flies who might also become a protein rich food for agricultural animals or a human nutrition supplement (Zhang 2020). All waste can thus become a potential source of value, as scientists develop a ‘chemical gaze’ in which waste is seen not in terms of its material or origin, but as a store of potentially useful and valuable chemical compounds (Landecker 2019). Organic waste can also be made profitable through making it commensurable with animal or human food. Agricultural residues can even be made commensurable with high-value aromatic compounds. The latter occurs through the labour of other-than-human metabolisms, producing a ‘logic of circularity’ (Zhang 2020). This work of commensuration found in circular economies becomes linked to entrepreneurial efforts by NGOs, as in plastic-waste-to-‘funky-home-accessories’ initiatives in Cambodia (Jensen 2023). Despite circularity being a ‘patchwork effect of multidirectional movements’, through the necessary work of scaling up for international markets, this multiplicity and its potentials are obstructed by visions of universal integrated markets (Jensen 2023).

But, it is precisely these markets that count on the global sustainability stage. They often operate by making various actions and things morally commensurable. For example, they create moral comparability through the lens of carbon, as individuals come to believe that they can measure their own actions and choices through carbon as the moral arbiter in which one individual action can offset another (Dalsgaard 2013, 83). Each of these ethnographies demonstrates that an unsustainable status quo is maintained in situations in which novel technologies and materials must align themselves with the infrastructures of the capitalist carbon economy. They also envision alternative possibilities and potentialities. Alternatives may lie in the labour of non-human beings, the multi-directional relations brought about by material circulations, or the critical political task of revealing flawed logics of commensurability. The next section turns to the moral economies revealed in such acts of subverting the dominant paradigms of sustainability.

Moralities

Sustainability is well-suited to being constantly reconfigured in line with diverse, often conflicting, moral positions (Yamada et al. 2022). Sustainability discourse is often characterised by ‘virtuous language’ that makes it difficult to criticise specific sustainability measures (Kirsch 2016). The paradox of ‘sustainable development’ as ‘common sense’ has, for example, allowed for the unabated acceleration of dispossessory plantation dynamics in Costa Rica’s pineapple industry (Araya 2021). New plantations are deemed necessary for sustainable economic growth and the increasing use of new technologies on plantations is used to portray them as ‘green’ and modern, providing a cover of legitimacy that hides the dispossession and violence also produced by plantations (León Araya 2021, 112). The same is true of how sustainability is mobilised as a moral narrative by the mining industry. Coal mining companies market themselves as corporations who care through funding conservation projects designed to ‘offset’ their emissions. However, these ‘sustainability measures’ may actually facilitate the corporations’ ability to extract more fossil resources from the earth with impunity (Kirsch 2010).

Anthropologists have also turned their attention to how moral boundaries are drawn by sustainability initiatives, by attending to who the beneficiaries and losers are, who is included and who excluded in these initiatives, and by examining the moral underpinnings that underlie sustainability discourse. Questions around sustainability’s moral projects surface frequently in studies of renewable and clean energy provision. In the context of a wind park development in Mexico, resident communities, state officials, corporate representatives, and environmental experts each attempted to assert ‘ecoauthority’, laying claim to an ethical, renewable future (Howe 2014). This created tensions, notably between local and global environmental knowledge (Howe 2014, 383). Comparable is the positioning or emergence of the ‘solar good’, in which solar power becomes inextricably linked to ideas of development and humanitarianism: the ‘good’ formulated in market terms and the language of inclusion in the market for the ‘bottom billion’, i.e. the world’s poorest people (Cross 2019). Solar power constitutes a seemingly ‘ethical-economic utopia’ that affords the ‘opportunity to express care for others and the environment while also fulfilling a fiduciary duty of care to investors and shareholders’, all with the magic of converting sunlight to power (Cross 2019, 48, see also Günel 2021, Abdelghafour 2024). This masks the fact that the new global demand for solar technology is producing new forms of precarity, inequality, and environmental damage through extractivism and toxic waste (Mulvaney 2019; Bedi 2022; 2018), alongside its potentially useful implications for social justice movements and the decolonisation of energy (Lennon 2017; Kinder 2021). These debates raise questions around how dominant ideas of the moral good of sustainability may be overshadowing meaningful efforts towards energy justice.

These ethical debates link with longstanding anthropological work on ‘corporate sustainable responsibility’ (CSR), a moral economy that legitimates corporate power (Dolan and Rajak 2016b; Rajak 2011; Gardner 2015; P. R. Gilbert and Dolan 2020). Similar issues are revealed in voluntary certification schemes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Sustainable Mining, or Fairtrade certifications (Archer 2022; Dolan 2007; Ruysschaert and Salles 2016; Delabre and Okereke 2019; Kirsch 2010; Gardner 2015), as well as in the underregulated ‘Alternative Investment Market’ (Anbleyth-Evans and Gilbert 2020). In West Papua, it is both conventional and ‘green’ palm oil plantations that dispossess Marind people from their forests and lands (Chao 2019). In the Kenyan fairtrade flower industry, although Fairtrade certification is ‘predicated on values of partnership and interdependence’, it also constructs ideas of a ‘distant poor’ in contrast to the consumer as ‘agent of progress and transformation’. At the same time, the language of ‘ethics’ is used ‘as a mode of governmentality over the African “other”’ (Dolan 2007). Similar contours exist in the coffee industry, where regimes of governmentality are produced by commodity chains which rely on images of ‘primitivity and poverty’ to sell coffee from Papua New Guinea to overseas markets, obscuring the structural relations that are the root of this poverty (West 2012). Sustainability labels can thus set up geographic imaginaries that build on histories of inequality. This is the case in New York City where the ‘false promises’ of sustainability contribute to exclusive gentrification (Checker 2020), and in the Bahamas where sea level rise was paradoxically and strategically reconfigured into ‘opportunities for more tourism-based enterprise’, such as the creation of ‘sustainable’ tourist visitor farms that appeal to ‘sustainable imaginaries’ but may exacerbate issues of environmental injustice and food sovereignty (Moore 2019, 1–3).

Such schemes work through constructing a moral Other—whether utopian, primitive, or poor—with sustainable development offering both a solution to, and an increasing difference from, them (Li 2023). Communities deemed ‘unsustainable’ are often demonised, made abject, or viewed with disgust. In Jamaica, ‘single-use’ plastics are never only single-use for those who rely on them, and yet their demonisation and banning reflects the racial, social, political, and economic geographies of their production and use (Gibson 2023). In India, narratives of disgust mask how e-waste is recycled, in which toxicity links with the unevenly distributed hazards of urban life (Perczel 2024). In Bulgaria, Roma are equated by officials with the trash that they supposedly ‘steal’ from recycling bins (Resnick 2024). In the Sundarbans, India, crab fishers are vilified by local authorities for supposedly endangering the delicate ecosystem with their centuries-old fishing practices (Mehtta 2021). There, the authorities’ denunciations of ‘greed’ against the fishermen are in fact a mere scapegoat in a context of the local authorities’ impotence against real environmental harms, like a proposed international shipping lane through the delta (Mehtta 2021, 552). This gets to the heart of anthropological questions about sustainability, which as with Anthropocene anthropology, encourage not only the interrogation of localised moral projects, but also attention to how and where their borders are drawn, and in whose interests.

Futures

Questions that anthropologists ask about moral projects of sustainability are very often linked to questions about the future—what kinds of ‘sustainable’ futures are imagined, how, and by whom? In short, whose futures get to matter?

To answer these questions, some have turned to examining finance—such as the public-private partnership called the Insurance Development Forum, or weather insurance start-ups—to explore how futures are imagined and made material by risk specialists and modellers (Vaughn 2023; Schuster, Bernardou, and Bueno 2023). In the UK and South Africa, the language of ‘political risk’ used in financing extractive industries replaces older colonial ideas of an African ‘lack’. This is used to create immovable ideas of ‘best practice’ including ‘restricted [African] host government ownership’ (Styve and Gilbert 2023). Rooted in lingering colonial anxieties, this amounts to ‘futurework’, whereby mining financiers determine potential threats to anticipated revenues, all the while masking alternative futures with long historical antecedents—such as Third World sovereignty over national resources (Styve and Gilbert 2023; Gilbert 2020). Others have explored how carbon credits make potential future actions equivalent to real actions, based on assumptions that someone would have acted otherwise; this comparison of the real with potential future creates possible value by referencing non-existing action (Dalsgaard 2013; Buller 2022, Cointe 2024). Such studies indicate that ‘one of the defining qualities of our current moment is its peculiar management of time’ (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009, 246).

A particular focus for anthropologists has been the utopian promise of the aforementioned ‘techno-fix’. In agriculture, for example, sustainability discourse justifies new technologies like improved oil palm seeds that will supposedly be more sustainable as they create higher-yielding fruits that will create more oil from less land. These technologies are inspired by the Green Revolution, the post-war attempt to increase global agricultural production by technological means, and promise to do little to challenge entrenched inequality or existing plantation dispossessions (Chao 2018b; Flachs 2019). In Masdar City, Abu Dhabi (an experimental eco-city), technologies such as renewable energy currencies, driverless personal rapid transit, or carbon storage helped put forward utopic visions of a renewable future that were in fact ‘a thinly disguised version of the present’ (Günel 2019, 13). In the UK, oil company executives promote ‘win-win synergies between growth and sustainability’ that allow visions of a future in which salvation through technology will allow for fossil-fuelled business as usual to continue, while abdicating oil company executives of responsibility (Rajak 2020). Each of these ethnographies show how sustainability discourse ‘thrives on crisis and relief’, mobilising visions of an ‘impending disaster that is tempered by the promise of technological resolution’ (Yamada et al. 2022, 12), not unlike the narratives of development that preceded and co-constitute it.

Other ethnographies have laid bare the cruelty of desires for the future in a context of limited choice. In Baltimore, imagining a cleaner future happens in a context of a longstanding ‘winnowing of options’ for residents close to a planned waste-to-energy plant (Ahmann 2019, 329). The plant is posited as ‘renewable’ despite its emissions of lead, mercury, fine particulate matter, and carbon dioxide. At the same time, the development promises to ‘solve’ Baltimore’s trash problem by converting waste to energy, while providing jobs for local residents (Ahmann 2019, 329). As aspirations are pinned on this development, a ‘subjunctive politics’ is created, whereby aspirations for the future are shaped by an ‘affective pragmatism’—the felt need for choice within a context of limited options—among people who ‘feel they have been cast aside’ (Ahmann 2019, 330). Anthropology thus demonstrates the need to understand how the success or failure of energy transitions is linked to whether and how they fit with local worldviews. They also demonstrate the profound ambivalence of hope and optimism in a context where the least bad is all that’s on the table. Anthropologists, too, are encouraged to attend ‘to the many future orientations that shape our politics’ (Ahmann 2019, 341), and to demonstrate the need to understand that the success and failure of energy projects are linked to local contexts shaped by global realities.

Ambivalences and contingencies also shape future-oriented scientific work in Brazil, where sugarcane scientists grapple with paradigms of growth, development, and environmentalism, sometimes using their work with sugarcane as an ‘excuse’ to develop other, more radical research outcomes that might offer the ‘space for doing something potentially different in the future’ (Ulrich 2023, 443). Different visions of growth, in short, might offer alternative futures beyond economic growth (Ulrich 2023, see also Kaşdoğan 2020). Scholars working with and as activists have similarly pointed to the situatedness and stickiness of aspiration and hope, whether as realised through the power of art and storytelling (Vaughn 2021), the transitional nature of youth (Eriksen 2021), or ethical self-formation (Harms 2022). For some, sustainable futures are imagined as a battle (Gard 2018); for others, as a refusal to hope (Chao 2018a). For still others, futures cannot and should not be imagined without an insistence on the need to stay close to the present (Bond 2021). Such studies show how ‘we are seeing the emergence and proliferation of new ways of thinking about the future, and new ways of linking the future with the present or the past’ (Mathews and Barnes 2016, 10).

How, then, do anthropologists envision a truly sustainable future beyond false utopias? Many advocate for attention to new forms of more-than-human interdependence, such as might be found in Anthropocene ‘patches’ and ‘ruins’, or as revealed by unlikely forms of interspecies kinship (Tsing, Mathews & Bubandt 2019; Tsai 2019; Tsing 2015). Others hope for ‘a transition to an altogether different world’ that has space for spirituality, self-organisation, inter-being, and co-emergent relationality, as an alternative to the ‘modern dualist, reductionist, and economic age’ (Escobar 2011, 138). Models for a sustainable future often seek inspiration from Latin American and Indigenous political theories such as buen vivir—representing the coming together of centuries of Indigenous struggles—that force attention to dignity and social justice for all (Escobar 2011, 138). Indeed, implicit in many of the critiques of global sustainability that anthropologists outline are visions of alternative futures grounded in local realities and in meaningful conceptualisations of what environmental justice might look like ‘beyond development and progress’ (Lewis & Brightman 2017). It is often the case that in radical visions for the future, the term ‘sustainability’ is dropped in favour of a more encompassing vision of environmental justice (Checker 2020, Gilio-Whitaker 2019, Dhillon 2019, Gilbert 2021).

Conclusion

Sustainability is historically tangled with colonialism and imperialism, dispossession and land grabbing, as well as managerial approaches to conservation that tend to make ‘nature’ into a resource subsumed by economic concerns. It has been ‘riddled with tensions and contradictions from the outset’ (Escobar 2011, 137), often working more to sustain the global status quo than achieving meaningful environmental and social justice and flourishing in the context of climate breakdown.

Anthropologists, through attention to the moral boundaries and borders produced by sustainability, have shown how dominant paradigms of sustainability produce ideas of ‘too many people’ or ‘not the right people’. Such paradigms often present ideas of the need to limit the behaviours of some to grow the wealth of others, or of the need to control and manage people and their lands in the interests of the global elite, as self-evident moral goods. Sustainability’s institutionalisation as a moral good through its coupling with development has reinforced these issues: constructing the environment as a technical problem to be managed through carbon credits, risk management, fortress conservation, or exclusionary land management initiatives.

Against this backdrop, anthropology has sought to explore both the construction of difference through sustainability and the complex and thorny work of navigating difference in sustainability projects. Not only does this challenge sustainability’s ‘ideology of progress and development’ (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 2), but it also forces us to value the plurality that characterises the landscapes into which sustainability lands, that goes into constituting sustainability initiatives, and that marks definitions of sustainability itself. Thereby, anthropological work often has a keen eye for the workings of power. It highlights power relations in the reduction and streamlining that goes into making things (carbon, people, forests) commensurable, and in the forms of governance reliant on secrecy and hierarchy that actively work to hinder the achievement of environmental justice and further the profits of extractive corporations (Anbleyth-Evans and Gilbert 2020).

In revealing these workings of power, anthropologists have forced attention to alternative and more radical modes of sustainability beyond dominant paradigms, grounded in environmental justice and grassroots solidarity (Checker 2020). Together, these studies form a body of work that refuses to take high-level discourses on sustainability and their false promises for granted. They push anthropologists to ask how attention to on-the-ground realities might offer glimpses of meaningful sustainable flourishing that may pose alternatives to futures defined by growth, extraction, and profit, and encourage us to hold power to account so as to hold on to the goal of environmental justice.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks are owed to Prof David Mosse, Dr Saad Quasem, and Dr Katie Ulrich who generously offered comments on drafts. All mistakes remain my own. Thanks also to the 2023-2024 cohort of SOAS’s Anthropology of Sustainability class, for their thoughts and insights that helped to shape these ideas. Finally, I am very grateful to Riddhi Bhandari, three anonymous reviewers, Felix Stein, Rebecca Tishler, and the team at the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology for their generous insights and support.

Note on contributor

Alice Rudge is a Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, where she co-convenes the MA Anthropology of Global Futures and Sustainability. Her research examines Indigenous politics across plantation and rainforest contexts in Malaysia, as explored in her book Sensing others: Voicing Batek ethical lives at the edge of a Malaysian rainforest (2023, University of Nebraska Press).

Alice Rudge, Lecturer in Anthropology, SOAS University of London. Twitter: @Alice__Rudge / Bluesky:@alicerudge.bsky.social

[1] Anthropological interventions into this landscape of international aid and development are worthy of their own encyclopedia entry, and have focused on its discursive power, geopolitical implications, institutional practices, and neoliberal transformations. Some key texts are Crewe and Axelby 2012; Dolan 2005; Ferguson 1994; Gardner and Lewis 2015; Li 2007; Escobar 1995; and Mosse 2004; 2011. For a review of the topic, see Mosse 2013.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Commodity and supply chains

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:31:24 +0000

Dried chillies are loaded on a truck to send them to further processing in Sindhanur, Raichur district, Karnataka, India. Picture by Rakesh Sahai, Asian Development Bank, 2015.

Dagna Rams

London School of Economics

Initially published 19 Dec 2024

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

Abstract:

The global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity means that cultures and places around the world have become interdependent. People’s desires in one place organise work and landscapes elsewhere; seamless flows of goods create new infrastructures; and places become united by an exchange of commodities and differentiated by the unequal distribution of profit and power. Anthropologists have traced these connections by following commodities along their international journeys, conducting fieldwork at crucial nodes like international ports. They have examined how global forces interact with local economies and vice versa. Through elaborating concepts like ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘global networks’ or ‘the social life of things’, they have revealed legacies of global inequality, cultural exchange, trade infrastructures, and their impacts on environments and lives. Anthropologists have shown that global flows of goods and services are more than a simple correlation of supply and demand or a mere opportunity for economies to grow. Rather, they represent rich sites in which values of people, places, and things are negotiated, and where relationships of inequality are created, maintained, or undermined.

Introduction

The global circulation of goods weaves local work and raw materials together into the vast tapestry of the global economy. Food grown in one place may feed a stomach many kilometres away. Producers of consumer goods cater to the tastes of people they have never met. Any sudden local process—an ecological disruption, a change in state regulation, skyrocketing demand—can have effects far beyond its locality. Yet, people joined by this global exchange rarely share the same political institutions, landscapes, or the power to define how profits get distributed. As geographic distance and socio-cultural differences hide actors from one another, anthropological research uncovers the interdependencies between capital, labour, and consumers. It shows how the global economy creates room for unchecked accumulation, exploitation, misrepresentation, and delusion about planetary futures.

To represent these global webs, anthropologists and other social sciences have used different terms: ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘commodity ecumene’, ‘the social life of things’. Each builds on a different intellectual tradition. ‘Commodity chains’ describe a sequential transformation of raw materials into consumer products through the stages of extraction, refinement, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. Such chains, once mapped onto the world, represent a regional division of labour, often derived from colonial legacies in which (former) colonies supply raw materials to the metropoles (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). Meanwhile, economic fluctuations—expansions or contractions— are due to the interdependence between various locales, rather than isolated state-level reforms. ‘Supply chain’ in turn is a management term to describe networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distance to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Focusing on supply chains foregrounds developments in logistics such as tracking systems and legal arrangements such as contracts between business partners. They enable economies of scale. The terms ‘commodity ecumene’ and ‘the social life of things’ are anthropological concepts that emphasise the rich cultural life of economic exchanges, where value attached to things is not solely an expression of economic laws but of cultures of valuation (Appadurai 1986). Sometimes used interchangeably, all of these terms draw attention to various qualities brought by the exchange of things across distance and difference. In using any one of them, researchers might emphasise the sequential nature of commodity exchange from extraction to consumption and the unequal distribution of power and capital across the commodity chains, the infrastructures that facilitate global flows and create profits out of ‘location advantage’ within supply chains, or the emergence of value and meanings as objects and social practices lead their social lives.^{^[1]}

Anthropologists are not the only social scientists to take interest in the circulation of goods. Other disciplines have been interested in mapping global commodity and supply chains in order to compare different forms of their governance (Bair 2005). Likewise, they asked questions about the relative importance of national policy vis-a-vis the country’s position in the commodity chain (Gereffi 1996; Bair 2005; Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005). Compared to these approaches, anthropology’s distinct method of fieldwork has allowed us to observe global exchanges as rich sites of human encounters. Anthropologists have worked in locations consequential to the global circulation of goods such as borders or ports (Chalfin 2010), places marked by global economic connections such as American towns where pigs are slaughtered to meet mass demand (Blanchette 2020) or in the Congolese rainforest where labourers search for cobalt to power electronics (Smith 2022). Anthropologists have also followed commodities like coffee or mushrooms around the world to understand how far these exchanges connect or disconnect people and places (West 2012; Tsing 2015).

Power and inequality

Classical and neoclassical economic theories consider global trade to be a driver of prosperity and the efficient allocation of resources. They foreground how trade overcomes the whims of seasons, the limitations of regional soils, and differences in talent to meet needs and desires at an unprecedented scale. Seminal economic theorists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the late eighteenth century, and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in the early twentieth, formulated such laudatory views of global trade during various phases of imperial and colonial expansion and yet their works paid little attention to the resource exploitation and purposeful underdevelopment of the colonies.

Contrastingly, critical perspectives in history, political economy, and anthropology sought to centre the (post-)colonial experience, challenging the notion that the global marketplace is a realm of nations trading their advantages and surpluses according to free and equal exchange. These genealogies highlight the violent histories of extraction, compelled labour, and landscape devastation. With key references like The Black Jacobins (James 1938), Capitalism and slavery (Williams 1944) and The Negro in the French Revolution (DuBois 1962), this intellectual lineage locates the origins of global capitalism not in Western Europe but in its colonies, notably the Caribbean islands—conquered and settled for cash crops and worked by slave labour. These authors focus on how profits from plantations in the Caribbean fuelled wealth in the metropoles, establishing fortunes that developed Britain’s ports and factories, for example. They emphasise that development in one place and under-development in another, and the wealth of some and deprivation of others, are concurrent processes. And, moreover, the reason why they had not been viewed as such is due to racialising ideologies that see underdevelopment as a mostly inherent failure to advance rather than an exogenous effect of political intentions and structures.

One of the texts that inaugurated anthropological interest in commodity and supply chains is Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history (1985), a historical study of the sugar trade from the Caribbean to the European metropoles—linking ‘the Enslaved Africans who produced [sugar]’ and ‘the British labouring people who were learning to eat it’ (175). Sugar gave rise to radically different political economies and social lives—plantations and toil versus a consumer good providing a moment of sweetness at the end of a long workday. Rather than being an abstract phenomenon, Mintz shows that the sugar trade shapes bodies and tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. His study was not only a proposition about how commodities connect places whilst disconnecting economic regimes and human experience; it also suggested a new disciplinary approach. The anthropological interlocutor was no longer someone leading a remote and culturally particular life, but rather an actor from whose labour anthropologists and audiences of their work had long been profiting. Through existing commodity and supply chains, the researchers and interlocutors are already in a relationship—a relationship often premised on a fundamental inequality in which one side gets the short end of the stick.

Further inquiries sprang out of this early work. Some of them asked whether imperial and colonial divisions of the world into zones of production in the ‘peripheries’, and zones of consumption in the ‘metropoles’, still mattered. A crucial reminder of this past is that not all economic actors today have the same power to benefit from the global marketplace, possess enough capital to direct the flows of goods, or indeed even perceive the market’s actual breath and width: not least because not all people have the same power to move around the world or access basic banking services, or make use of credit. Addressing this gap, anthropologists have positioned their fieldwork at different ends of the hierarchy of economic power and profit—fleshing out the processes that create a ‘divide’ between the Global South and North (Hickel 2017). They have followed both multinational companies with international presence and influence, as well as small-scale producers and labourers in plantations and industries who, while connected to global flows, have little power to negotiate prices or work conditions.

Some works have looked at the enduring nature of global divisions into producers and consumers, noting that people in the Global South rarely get to be considered consumers in the first place (Freidberg 2004). What’s more, it is often consumers and distributors in the Global North that define the terms of producers’ inclusion in global capitalism. Susanne Freidberg (2004), for example, compares Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial commodity and supply chains in green beans. She focuses on connections between Zambia and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Burkina Faso and France, on the other. British supermarkets required their Zambian partners to follow auditing and certification standards that effectively advantage white entrepreneurs who are familiar with British norms and able to pay for audits. In comparison, French buyers were more appreciative of the skills of Burkinabe farmers, yet their appreciation was not reflected in price, as Burkinabe farmers, just like their Zambian counterparts, had lower profit margins than distributors in Europe.

Typically, states positioned in the first node of commodity and supply chains—that is, specialising in natural resource extraction and agriculture—struggle to ‘add value’ to their production, remaining dependent on slim profit margins and precarious terms of trade. Anthropologists bring attention to the various mechanisms that maintain such a state of affairs. Following metals across commodity and supply chains, for example, highlights the importance of places like Switzerland where favourable tax regimes, lax corporate regulations, and the power of banks and investment companies enable trading companies to buy and sell commodities around the world (Dobler and Kesselring 2019). Outwardly, they connect global demand and supply, yet in doing so they also render specific places substitutable and disposable. Thus, for example, when Zambia increased electricity rates for its foreign-owned copper mines, Swiss trading companies temporarily stopped operations, substituting their quotas with copper sourced elsewhere (Kesselring 2017).

This economic inequality pokes holes in capitalist notions of economic exchange as being voluntary or equal. Markets do not only deepen colonial inequality, but rather ‘they are made by that inequality’ (Appel 2020, 2). US oil companies, for example, are able to make substantial profits in Equatorial Guinea, a country run by an authoritarian government where the majority of the population lives in poverty. Arrangements that sell raw materials at marked-down prices are sealed by contracts between ‘states’ and ‘companies’— abstract concepts that ‘[mask] the “specific” parties who, in fact, sign the contract’ (Appel 2020, 145). Symbolising legality, such contracts are invoked to halt debates about whether or not profits are shared equitably. They obfuscate that the involved parties are fundamentally different: while states answer to citizens to meet their fundamental needs, many companies work for shareholders to increase their wealth. Power differentials between underfunded states and much wealthier companies can be staggering. In such situations, government workers, though supposedly representing their citizens, can see their job as ‘making things easy’ for the company in order to provide a ‘better business environment’ than other countries in the region (Appel 2020, 157).

Scholarship has questioned the extent to which the colonial and postcolonial structures limit entrepreneurial agency. Openings for breaking free from economic constraints have been described as ‘motion in the system’ (Trouillot 1982). Such motion may mean the relative ability to choose business partners and negotiate prices, acquire reliable market information, and accumulate enough capital to invest into projects that shape political and social institutions. ‘Motion in the system’ could be found in both colonial and postcolonial circumstances. For example, gens de colour, descendants of interracial couplings in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), were able to corner the market for coffee by growing it in mountainous and inaccessible areas that white settlers shied away from (Trouillot 1982). Whilst initially a niche product, coffee grew in importance amid the eighteenth century anti-British sentiment in North America which affected sales of British-controlled tea. These climatic and geopolitical circumstances created openings for new mixed-raced entrepreneurs. In a different historical moment and geographic place, the bifurcation of the shea market in postcolonial Ghana into export and domestic markets meant that female shea producers and market women in the West African country’s savannah were less beholden to exporters’ expectations as they could rely on domestic demand to sell their produce (Chalfin 2003; 2004). What’s more, they could off-load lower quality shea onto exporters, leaving better nuts for their local base and greater certainty in negotiating prices.

Important recent interventions in commodity and supply chains that anthropologists are following are fair trade schemes promising to improve labour conditions. Fair trade schemes principally imagine change as occurring on the level of contracts between individual producers and buyers, rather than on the level of international terms of trade, treaties, or international producer alliances (Besky 2014; West 2012). In consequence, they have been criticised for favouring established and richer producers, who have the financial and cultural capital to enter fair trade certification schemes (Besky 2014; Fischer 2022). Fair trade schemes also rely on a generalised context of unsustainable and exploitative modes of production from which fair trade participants are the honourable exception (West 2012). Sometimes, fair trade schemes even obfuscate larger socio-political structures that influence the lives of labourers. For example, Darjeeling tea plantations in India are certified as ‘fair trade’ based on small-scale interventions that aim to ‘empower’ workers through micro-loans (Besky 2014). Such interventions aim to soften the otherwise tough and unequal reality of plantation work as a largely immutable economic form, complete with impermeable social hierarchies. Plantations are here recast as a way of life, rather than a system of exploitation, and workers’ identities are fetishised with romantic images of working hands obfuscating injurious conditions of bonded labour. The grinding aspects of this labour are put on display in the photography collection Dark garden by Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq, for example, where the artist documents the influence of pesticides on workers’ eyes and the disfigurement of hands from the work of plucking leaves.^{^[2]}

Infrastructures of connection

The focus on commodity and supply chains may strike some readers as limiting. It tends to privilege a sequential transformation of commodities, and presumes a linear accruement of value along postcolonial economic divides. Others also critique some of the scholarship for not paying attention to the actual processes of chain-making (Caliskan 2011). Therefore, researchers have also studied international economic exchange beyond colonial and postcolonial geographies and frameworks. They have followed, for example, trade between Asia and the rest of the world and exchanges in the context of South-South relations (Dirlik 2007). They also have looked at the multitude of actors such as distributors, brokers, and exchanges that weave the global web of production, consumption, and discarding. Such new approaches build on the basic insights of the previous literature, namely that the global economy is interdependent, but they equally show that global connections are non-linear, multi-directional, actively constructed, and reconstructed.

The recent anthropological theorising along these lines has emerged from closer scrutiny of the term ‘supply chain’, which describes networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distances with the aim of increasing the efficiency of production while reducing its costs. Two types of supply chains are common—buyer-driven or supplier-driven—in which firms with superior capital and power organise traffic in commodities through buying components from suppliers or supplying goods and services to a range of distributors. These byzantine arrangements mean that identifying ‘lead firms’ and understanding the nature of relations between actors in these chains can be akin to detective work. A vivid example of this is the production of seatbelts for American cars with ‘fibres manufactured in Mexico, woven and dyed in Canada to take advantage of the abundance of water, sent back to Mexico to be sewn up, and then installed somewhere at a plant in the United States’ (Klein and Pettis 2020, 28).

Commodity and supply chains embody the ‘bigness’ of global capitalism (Tsing 2008). Through ‘outsourcing’ (i.e. contracting suppliers for goods and services) and ‘vertical integration’ (i.e. taking ownership of key stages of a supply chain), they incorporate heterogeneity. These chains are instrumental in understanding the simultaneous increase in global standardisation and the growing inequalities of contemporary capitalism. Lead firms ensure that commodities meet uniform health and safety standards enforced through auditing checks. While outsourcing is justified by economies of scale and specialisation, it often relies on differences in regulation and labour conditions to make goods cheaper. This can maintain or exacerbate inequalities between people across the difference of class, race, culture, and the North-South divide. A key process here is ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2008); that is, profiting from skills, competences, and forces existing outside capitalist exchange, for example a company making profits from cheap labour motivated by an appeal to Christian work ethics (Tsing 2008). While primarily serving as a basis for exploitation, heterogeneity within supply chains can also function as a source of contestation. Encounters within supply chains may generate or maintain different values, ideas of utility, or philosophies of labour (Bear et al. 2015). For example, Asian refugees scavenging for mushrooms in US forests may choose such a livelihood because it provides them with a sense of freedom and a connection to nature (Tsing 2015).

Outsourcing is a crucial mechanism for extending the global economy. International companies strategically locate their factories across Asia and Latin America, capitalising on cheap labour and lax regulations. The global supply chains have intensified due to trade developments, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s. Anthropological studies conducted in factories across India, Mexico, and East Asia illuminate the human costs associated with these regions' transformations into global hubs of cheap and flexible labour. Indian consultancies, for example, now recruit and ‘bench’ labour on a short-term project basis, effectively relying on workers' rural kin to sustain them during periods of unemployment (Xiang 2007). Anthropologists have also traced the psychic imprint of trade liberalisation, which cast some regions as powerhouses of efficient and just-in-time production. Malay women who are employed in factories serving the global market, for example, are trapped between patriarchal management and demanding production quotas (Ong 1987). One ethnographic study showed that in the 1980s, these women frequently suffered from spirit possessions, which could be seen as a form of resistance, allowing women to channel rage and secure time off (Ong 1987). Such spirit possessions can be seen to reveal workers' contestations of oppressive outsourcing structures.

While the differentiation of labour can be grounded in outwardly racist or sexist ideologies (see Robinson 1983; Wynter 2003), contemporary managerial thought and practice tends to hold that a differentiated valuation of labour in global supply chains is the an outcome of economic policy, education, skills, and aptitude. As anthropologist Anna Tsing emphasises, ‘no firm has to personally invent patriarchy, colonialism, war, racism or imprisonment, yet each of these is privileged in supply chain labour mobilisation’ (2009, 151). In tune with this insight, anthropologists frequently reveal that differences between people are in fact the building blocks of profitability. Practices like ‘outsourcing in place’, whereby companies such as food delivery apps or hotels rely principally on migrants (Terray 1999) and ‘global care chains’, which stretch care work across national boundaries (Perreñas 2001), rely on precarious migrant workers to make up for the fact that in some sectors simply moving jobs abroad is not possible. The qualities of these workers—their gender, dependence on host families, having constraint options on the labour market, perceived docility, etc.—make them akin to the housewives and servants they have come to replace (see Ehrenreich and Hochchild 2004). Meanwhile, a common justification used by managers in Asian factories for underpaying female workforce is that the women are supplementary, and not primary, household earners. In this way, households are exploited for their kinship resources and their ability to provide psychological support to members (Dunaway 2001).

Anthropologists also examine the infrastructures that hold commodity and supply chains together. Commodity and supply chains can also be seen as infrastructures in their own right, often painstakingly created to ensure a smooth circulation of goods and services. Recently, anthropologists have scrutinised their global architecture by focusing on the actual material pathways taken and created by ships, containers, ports, and technologies that track the passage of goods (Chalfin 2010; Chu et al. 2020; Leivestad and Schober 2021). Such research also looks at how this global architecture creates inflection points around the world, such as at the Suez Canal, which has an outsized influence on global trade with any risks contained by militarised infrastructure (Cowen 2014). This shifts a conversation from commodity and supply chains as markets for the satisfaction of consumer needs and desires to considerations about supply chains as linked to survival, security, and military power.

People, exchange, and value

Global exchanges are rich sites of valuation. They can be teased apart not solely on the macro scale of global processes but also the micro scale of cross-cultural encounters between individuals and communities. To explore how exchange relates to value, anthropological researchers have drawn attention to the work of brokers, distributors, tastemakers, and experts; that is, all sorts of people who do not strictly produce commodities but rather make them accessible, meaningful, and valuable to consumers. Such intermediaries impart value on the exchange because of their social and cultural capital. For example, American mineral traders are able to negotiate higher prices compared to their Mexican counterparts as their expertise is more trusted and they are able to access markets in the US from which the others are excluded (Ferry 2013).

As global markets promote standardisation of commodities to make them commensurable, that very standardisation can also increase the power of middlemen. Coffee beans from Papua New Guinea, for example, were sold for $12.95 USD per pound in 2000s and yet the labour involved in producing them was remunerated at 0.33 USD per pound (West 2012, 16). Though there is no coffee without farmers, the standardisation of beans makes coffees from around the world substitutable for each other which in turn increases the value of creating distinction through branding, including storytelling. Coffee producers compete with each other on a market in which tastemakers, marketing agencies, and designers take the greater cut. What’s more, it is precisely the narrative of Papuans’ poverty and assumed ‘primitiveness’ that casts buying Papuan coffee as an aide to its growers, implying that ‘any money [the farmers] make is a vast improvement over their prior-to-capital lives’ (West 2012, 248). In a similar manner, the so-called Third Wave coffee—a coffee movement that emphasises quality, sourcing beans from individual farmers, and roasting to obtain distinct flavours—rewards those growers that are capable of ‘setting the terms for cultural narratives of [coffee’s] worth’ (Fischer 2022, 204).

Non-corporate middlemen and brokers act as agents of globalisation, connecting actors and places and exchanging across difference. Their work can be seen as enacting globalisation from ‘below’ as they extend distribution or source goods in a wide variety of places outside established networks that are already controlled by corporations and their licensed business partners (Matthews, Ribeiro and Alba Vega 2012). Because of the informal nature of such nascent networks, they become grounds for innovating cultures of trust, relations of credit and debt, and new technologies of pricing (Curtin 1984; Trivellato 2009). Such emerging commodity and supply chains include Chinese and Indigenous traders distributing cheap goods across Latin America (Pinheiro-Machado 2017). Here, brokers act as translators who appropriate foreign commodities for local markets, accessing places off-the-beaten infrastructure that companies may not have any proprietary market research about (Müller 2024).

These connections forge new models of creativity and partaking in the global economy. Asian manufacturing industries, for example, are contracted by African entrepreneurs to produce consumer goods responding to African tastes. In fact, much of the traditional West African wax cloth is now produced in China. Such trade connections are powered by, among others, the so-called Nanettes in Togo, a younger generation of women who hitherto lacked the capital to trade with companies located in Europe but are able to pioneer new exchanges with Asia (Sylvanus 2016). In a similar context, Igbo importers of foreign goods to Nigeria move between their home country, China, and the Middle East to source commodities and ship them to customers in West Africa. Every step of this inter-regional value chain has its own risks. Unlike multinational companies that rely on market research, established legal frameworks, or a regulated banking systems, Igbo entrepreneurs have to rely on mostly self-organised traders’ associations. To minimise risk, Nigerian traders curate containers sent from Asai, filling them with a great variety of goods. Once in Nigeria, they fight to seal their distribution networks from foreign competitors—especially as the latter have market advantages, such as access to foreign low-interest credit (Lu 2022).

Distributors not only reach consumers, but they are also powerful agents in the sourcing of commodities outside formal networks or the purview of corporations. People can forge connections to the global economy in the ruins of old commodity and supply chains or under the radar of the law as is the case for all sorts of pirates. Interrogating livelihoods forged in the ruins or in ‘grey zones’, as anthropologists have done, is a crucial counterpoint to the tropes of capitalist promise-making or state planning. In South Africa, for example, men searching for gold inside disused mines are known as zama zamas. They are often migrants and considered particularly ‘tough’ due to a lack of other economic options (Morris 2022). They descend into the mines to search for remaining sparse gold deposits. With death underground being a perceptible threat, days can go by until a sufficient amount of the ore is gathered. Shadowy middlemen then buy these finds, paying in cash, with zama zamas knowing as little about the buyers as their phone numbers. Here, migration, mining, and international commodity and supply chains work together, to create both a vague sense of opportunity and violent actual precarity.

Disembedding the environment

Similar to market economies becoming disembedded from social relations (Polyani 1944), the global circulation of goods and services arguably disembeds economic activities from local environments and labour. Commodity and supply chains hide consumers and producers from one another, heightening commodity fetishism, i.e. the mistaken belief that commodities exist independently of social relations. Relocating production to other regions means that consumers and investors may not experience or appreciate how their consumption affects natural environments. Urban economies in the Global North tend to specialise in research and development, finance, technology, and creative industries. Such ‘third sectors’ are heavily reliant on raw materials and invisibilised labour, but actors within them might see the global economy as a space of immaterial ideas, creativity, and innovation. This has psychic consequences: their ideas take shape in the material world, while they themselves do not have to attend to the material conditions and consequences of those ideas. Awareness about global commodity and supply chains corrects such anti-material bias. For example, the extraction of cobalt in the Congo is a crucial ingredient of cutting-edge electronics. Being blind to the inconvenient fact of cobalt mining’s pressure on the environment risks third sector actors sliding into a ‘self-congratulatory techno-utopianism’ of Silicon Valley, which often casts itself as singularly responsible for technological advances whilst remaining oblivious to its ecological consequences (Smith 2021).

Ecological considerations also matter when given that global commodity and supply chains have been crucial for realising economies of scale. As such, they raise questions about the ‘politics of scale’, i.e. the choices needed to achieve economies of scale (Blanchette 2020) and about ‘de-growth’, which is a broad proposition to create economies that are mindful of nature’s limits (Livingston 2019; Hickel 2021). While economies of scale have enabled cheapness, they rely on things, labour, and land that are not straightforwardly scalable. As such, economies of scale are experiments with profound environmental consequences. Producing cheap pork (as well as by-products such as pet food, methane gas, and gelatine) in a town in the US Midwest, for example, requires killing a pig every three seconds (Blanchette 2020). The companies that produce pork at scale replace individual pigs, capricious animals marked by idiosyncrasies, into ‘the pig’: a predictable commodity that enables calculating costs and profits. The latter requires interfering with pigs’ bodies, including adjusting sows’ reproductive drive and fertility through hormone therapy. Meanwhile, dealing with extraordinary events, such as a sudden death of thusly modified sows and their piglets, falls onto the shoulders of an undervalued workforce, who may find themselves needing to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on dying piglets (Blanchette 2020, 153).

Economies of scale are not just corporate policy; they are also promoted by states as ways to attain economic growth. They represent a ‘self-devouring’ drive to produce evermore while in the long term undermining the very conditions of production, like access to clean water and fertile land (Livingston 2019). In Botswana, for example, cattle, which used to be appreciated in poetry, prayer, and ritual, are turned into a mere ‘techno-economic’ objects as part of mass beef production. Among the Tswana people of Botswana, cattle used to represent the family, was only killed towards the end of its life, and the resultant beef was ritually divided between its members. Industrial beef production, on the other hand, calls for higher levels of consumption to perpetuate higher levels of production and evacuates questions about nature into the future.

The study of commodity and supply chains has recently been complemented by anthropologists’ increased attention to more-than-human worlds. The production and consumption regimes that commodity and supply chains enable are not just violent to the environment, but also such violence can be displayed by the physical matter, such as oil palm trees, that they unleash onto the world. In villages of the Papua province of Indonesia, for example, Marind people witness how oil palms ravage biodiversity and landscapes (Chao 2022). They see their world become hostage to a quickly spreading plant that ‘kills the sago, murders their kin, chokes the rivers, and bleeds their land’ (Chao 2022, 11). Palm in these cosmologies has its own distinct, more-than-human agency and becomes a target of resistance. Here, the plantations are contact zones between the locals’ lifeworlds, based on the cultivation of sago, and agro-industrial capitalism which relies on palm as a plant suitable for economies of scale and useable across different foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, economies of scale create waste at a level that may be reaching its global ‘apotheosis’ (Hecht 2018). Landfills and dumpsites can be thought of as nodes in supply chains, even more so in the context of emerging circular economies that promise to recast waste as a raw material for production (O’Hare and Rams 2024). Acting as places in which waste is temporarily stored away and managed, they contribute to the status quo of overproduction (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022). Beyond these localised waste sites, research also points to substantive movements of waste to the Global South as second-hand products. As such, consumers in these parts of the world both rely on and are inundated by waste-laden second-hand imports of electronics, clothes, cars, and other consumer products from Western countries. Such second-hand economies contribute to local environmental damage as they surpass the capacity of local waste infrastructures. While second-hand markets create economic opportunities for traders and provide choices to consumers, these benefits are complicated by the way second-hand buyers may feel lesser than consumers in the Global North who can afford new goods (Burrell 2012).^[3]

Economies of scale and their impact on the environment have met resistance. Anthropologists document the ways in which people practice opposition to what some have called ‘plantationocene’ or ‘capitalocene’, terms proposed as historically and contextually situated modifications of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to emphasise that the responsibility for planetary damage is unevenly distributed (Haraway 2016; Sapp Moore and Arosoaie 2022). They have explored histories of cooperative farming adhering to notions of wellness and self-reliance and thus away from capitalist models that promote reliance on food produced elsewhere (Reese 2019; White 2018). Anthropologists have also focused on examples of human and more-than-human resistance to mono-crops and their scalar logic (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017). Such works also document human resistance to projects of extraction in which ordinary people can be seen to disrupt extractive infrastructures such as pipes and expose their fragility (Mitchell 2013).

Conclusion

Anthropological scholarship explains some of the confusing and uneasy aspects of global commodity and supply chains: how they connect people as commodities pass from one hand to another and yet disconnect them when it comes to distributing the resultant power, profit, and hazard; how they mobilise people across difference—speaking different languages, living across economic divides, perhaps espousing different values—whilst exploiting that very difference for profit-making; and how all this worldly architecture sinks into the background, seamlessly rearranging what people come to expect as their economies get divorced from the local soils and workforce. This is a crucial effort because some of the most common ways of thinking about global trade—in economic theories or policies of international organisations—see the trade as happening between nations that are free to choose policy or specialise economies to their advantage. Anthropologists show how this economic calculus makes assumptions about the worth of other humans and cultural beliefs that reflect long and on-going legacies of global inequality. The study of global circulation allows us to interrogate the connection between growth and ecological and cultural devastation, accumulation and dispossession, and profit and exploitation.

As we look into the future, a multitude of new perspectives and potential areas for research emerge, especially when it comes to integrating global commerce within environmental limits. The integration of a circular economy could fundamentally reshape geographies of resource circulation, possibly creating new relationships between waste and production. Elsewhere, some view the advent of blockchain and other digital technologies as having promise for transforming transparency and trust within global networks whilst creating new forms of value, for example by tying the labour of farmers to carbon trading (Barbato and Strong 2023). Simultaneously, there's a growing interest in localising production and shortening commodity and supply chains, a trend that might have profound implications for global markets as it spurs new communities organised around principles of relative self-sufficiency. Such interventions could entail redesigning commodity and supply chains in dialogue with the environment. Rich existing anthropological research already draws insights from Indigenous knowledge systems about, for example, mining traditions aware of ‘sharing’ resources with nature (D’Avignon 2023) or approaches to food that promote diversified cultivation and food access (Reese 2019). These approaches suggest multiple pathways forward for reimagining resource flows and human-environment relationships.

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Note on contributor

Dagna Rams is a Visiting Research Fellow based at London School of Economics (Department of Anthropology). Her research is sponsored by the post-doctoral mobility scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has completed her doctoral fieldwork in scrapyards, e-waste sites, smelters, and metal buying companies in Ghana. Her post-doctoral fieldwork investigates how metal markets and technological companies conceive of metal supply and its sustainability, and factor those considerations into their operations. The research speaks to her interest in the resource limitations to economic, environmental, and technological future-making.

^{^[1]} For reasons of simplicity, this entry will use the term ‘commodity and supply chains’ throughout.

^{^[2]} Fatiq, Md Fazla Rabbi. 2023. Dark garden. https://mdfazlarabbifatiq.com/dark-garden/

^{^[3]} See also Kolade, Bobby, and Nikissi Serumaga. 2021. Vintage or Violence Podcast. https://www.vintageorviolence.com/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Work/labour

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

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

Jasmine Folz Rachel Smith

University of Manchester, University of Aberdeen

Initially published 1 Jul 2024

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Foundational approaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

Division of labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frontiers and margins of capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industrial labour

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

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

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

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

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

Transformations of work under late capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Note on contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Surveillance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:21:46 +0000

Activists from No CCTV stage a 2013 anti-surveillance protest in Birmingham. Photo by Brett Wilde.

Vita Peacock Mikkel Kenni Bruun Claire Elisabeth Dungey Matan Shapiro

King's College London

Initially published 5 Dec 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23surveillance

Abstract:

Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or reversed. Surveillance can take place from above (‘panoptic’) but also laterally (‘synoptic’), or from below (‘sousveillance’). Indeed, in the field of human relationships it is not always apparent who is watching who. Because of the vast range of human response to being monitored, surveillance infrastructures—particularly when implemented at scale—often do so within moral discourses that are regionally specific, and vital to their legitimacy.

The field of surveillance studies has extensively explored surveillance as a mode of security and policing, and this emphasis has shaped early anthropological engagements with the subject. With the growth of computerisation, surveillance has become more relevant to a variety of other ethnographic contexts. Digital monitoring now plays an expanding role in forms of care, public and private health, communication, and the management of work, in which the harvesting of data for profit always remains a near or distant possibility. An emerging ‘anthropology of surveillance’ invites us to consider not only conditions of visibility, but also their perpetual relation to what is not seen. Here the moral question is not whether surveillance itself is good or bad, but how and why are human beings rendered visible through technology, and under which circumstances do they seek to remain opaque?

Introduction

In its popular form, surveillance often connotes a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Significantly inflected by George Orwell’s parable of totalitarianism, 1984 ([1949] 1990), in which citizens are watched and listened to at all times through telescreens, this imaginary surfaces at moments of social tension around new intersections between power and information collection. In scholarship, this connotation was given a paradigmatic and enduring shape by Michel Foucault’s influential text Discipline and punish ([1975] 2019). In it, Foucault introduces the image of the Panopticon: a series of architectural designs by English reformer Jeremy Bentham for controlling the behaviour of their occupants through the suggestion that they were being observed (Galič, Timan and Koops 2016). The Panopticon was at once an actual historical phenomenon as well as a theory for the coercive effects that could be exerted over human beings through practices of unequal exposure, and it was in the latter sense that the image shaped the field of surveillance studies. The ‘panoptic’ paradigm of the 1980s and 90s theorised how new technologies were reinscribing old asymmetrical relationships between observer and observed, while a subsequent ‘post-panoptic’ paradigm (Deleuze 1992) explored how surveillance has become multi-directional and mobile, with overlapping state and capitalist incentives (Bauman and Lyon 2013; Zuboff 2019).

‘Surveillance’ is a modern word that has been increasingly used in English from the nineteenth century onwards. An anglicisation of the French surveiller—to watch (veiller) over (sur)—both the English and the French derive from the Latin verb vigilare, to keep watch. As a concept, surveillance has been defined many times with different connotations in different scholarly traditions. A particularly influential definition describes surveillance as ‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon 2007, 14). In anthropology, however, a focus on the ‘personal’ is problematised by how the very concept of the person varies historically and culturally (Carrithers 1985; Strathern 2018). Therefore, in anthropology, another definition of surveillance is worth pursuing: watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose. This lays more emphasis on an understanding of ‘technology’ which, following the French tradition in which Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze were operating (Behrent 2013), derives from the French techniques. Conceived broadly as a set of practices, techniques include material culture but are not limited to it. These encompass social activities like guarding, spying, or undercover policing, as well as the use of analogue or digital devices to collect, store, or process information.

Anthropology has been a relative latecomer to the study of surveillance. This may be partly because it entails naming a relationship as surveillance, while anthropologists may prioritise other definitions. In this growing body of work, however, anthropologists have analysed surveillance as a technology of state security, policing, and capitalist accumulation. They have also shown that within these instantiations lie possibilities for political reciprocity and reversal, for dynamics of care, and for a reappropriation of technology (known as ‘function creep’) from above and beneath. As a way of making visible, surveillance is also in continual conversation with non-surveillance: whether through invisibility, anonymity, or concealment. In general, an emerging anthropology of surveillance considers the unfolding of relationships among and between ‘surveillors’ and ‘surveillands’ as a situated encounter. This encounter draws on historically constituted categories, relationships, and moral orders, in which it finds—or fails to find—its own legitimacy. As the proliferation of computing continues to enable the expansion of surveillance, anthropology invites attention to the conditions of visibility, and the purposes to which rendering subjects visible through technology is put.

Security, policing, and morality

A conversation across the social sciences began to take shape in the 1980s and 90s in response to the growing use of electronic monitoring in Europe and North America (Bogard 1996; Gandy 1993; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Lyon 1994; Marx 1988; Norris and Armstrong 1999; Whitaker 1999). Scholars in the emerging field of surveillance studies were concerned with how new forms of information-gathering were transforming existing social institutions, particularly the police. Anthropologists entered this field from the side sometime later by way of a burgeoning interest in security (Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Goldstein 2010; Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014; Maguire and Low 2019).

Seen broadly as the promise of protection against some real or imagined existential threat, surveillance has been observed as an outcome of wider dynamics of securitisation that have intensified since the events of 9/11. In European airports, for example, increasing counter-terrorism measures have entailed new intersections between human and machine surveillance (Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014). Assessing the threat of would-be passengers, machine-screening of physiological clues operates alongside the ‘skilled vision’ of security personnel—an intuitive technique gained through experience (Grasseni 2007, cited in Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014, 127). The surveillance that is justified by a logic of security can be prone to a function creep that goes well beyond its overt purpose (Frois 2019; Maguire 2009). In Egyptian-ruled Gaza between 1948-67, police surveillance served not only to protect the Palestinian population from threat, but also to enforce its own standards of propriety in gender relations, or to inhibit residents from joining dissident organisations (Feldman 2015).

In the context of security, surveillance is often intended to produce effects on the affective and mental life of the surveilled. Foucault emphasised the capacity of surveillance to render a self-regulated conformity to established rules, a phenomenon now referred to by journalists and privacy activists as ‘chilling effects’. Yet self-regulation is one of a panoply of responses that the idea of being watched may yield. Among the most common is a generalised suspicion of others, bred by the uncertainty of whether one is really being watched or not, which can spiral into paranoia (Masco 2017; Verdery 2018). For instance, in left-wing radical activism, the potential for undercover police surveillance can produce distrust of fellow activists that can inhibit the development of solidarity (Krøijer 2015). Sometimes cause-and-effect happens in an inverse way, as when certain affects, particularly fear, are mobilised at scale by media producers to justify the need for more surveillance (Masco 2014; Massumi 2015). But not all experienced affects are negative, and, in some contexts, surveillance may indeed deliver the feeling of security that it promises (Feldman 2015).

As a modality of security and policing, surveillance enables control over a bounded space (Levin, Frohne and Weibel 2002; Frois 2013; Maguire and Low 2019). Often this is commensurate with the territoriality of the state, in which national borders become sites of heightened surveillance, historically through an alliance of sensory and documentary forms (Baĭburin 2021; Breckenridge and Szreter 2012), which are increasingly automated through cameras, scanners, and biometric databases (Breckenridge 2014; Boe and Mainsah 2021). Sometimes it is internal boundaries within states that matter. In predominantly Alevi working-class neighbourhoods in Turkey, spatial control is achieved through a mixture of identity checks and interrogations at entrances, alongside the perambulation of armoured vehicles and undercover police inside the neighbourhood (Yonucu 2022). Here, surveillance becomes a tool of spatial isolation to keep outsiders out and residents in. As surveillance becomes increasingly digitalised, the question arises over whether its traditional production of spatial enclosure is substituted for a diffuse ‘digital enclosure’ (Andrejevic 2007), where access is mediated through data stored in distributed drives. In the Xinjiang province of China, interoperability between facial recognition systems at security checkpoints with other forms of data collection segregates speed and access to space in real time, as Han residents move frictionlessly while Uyghur residents may be detained and diverted (Byler 2021). Yet even in the digital enclosure the question of spatiality never completely disappears.

Surveillance may be less a matter of observation than of ‘sorting’ populations (Gandy 1993; Bowker and Star 1999). In the context of security and policing, though the effects may be experienced individually, it may not be specific people but rather categories of people who are placed under suspicion. Among CCTV operatives in Britain in the 1990s and 2000s, subjects of interest frequently fell into raced, gendered, classed, aged, and other demographic categories (Goold 2004; Norris and Armstrong 1999). In Kenya, China, or the US, falling into the category of ‘Muslim’ may be sufficient to constitute a police suspect (Al-Bulushi 2021; Ali 2018; Byler 2021). This association between surveillance and sorting is deeply rooted in the colonial past and is carried into the present through digital media (Jefferson 2020; Udupa and Dattatreyan 2023). The institution of the census across the former British Empire is a case in point (Breckenridge 2014; S. Browne 2015; Rao and Nair 2019). Processes of registering and categorising were normally linked to forms of identification that determined the ambit of a person’s movement. Among these was the slave pass of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, which combined with differently mediated forms of surveillance to racialise certain bodies and render them legible as property (S. Browne 2015). These categories do not necessarily fall, however, along religious or racial lines. Anthropologists themselves have fallen into categories of suspicion throughout the discipline’s history (Sökefeld and Strasser 2016): whether as communists in the US (Price 2004), or as foreign agents in the former Socialist states (Sampson 2022; Verdery 2012, 2018).

Although the surveillance performed by human and machine agents of the state continually seeks to solve the problem of large datasets by classification and sorting (Bowker and Star 1999), there is normally a much messier and more complex picture that exists on the ground or behind the scenes of any state surveillance project (Frois 2013; Jacobsen and Rao 2018). On the ‘friendly’ border between India and Bangladesh, curious political reversals occur between the Indian border soldiers, lonely and far from home, and the women and men seeking to carry contraband across the border. While the military officers enact the authority of the state’s surveilling gaze, they are also subject to a ‘counter-gaze’ by these travellers, scanning for vulnerabilities or openness to illicit transactions (Ghosh 2019, 447). Not only might the gaze be met and even directed by a possible counter-gaze, but the act of being surveilled by the state may in some contexts be a conduit through which the state becomes aware of political grievances and acts on them. This happened routinely in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, when grassroots complaints about the lack of currency in circulation led to behind-the-scenes instructions for banks to produce more (Feldman 2015) .

This leads to an aspect of surveillance that anthropology is well placed to address: namely, the ways in which monitoring technologies are introduced within moral discourses essential to their appropriation and acceptance. When video surveillance was installed in public areas in Portugal, it was driven by an apparent need to modernise the country to become more like its northern European counterparts (Frois 2013). In this discourse, surveillance becomes commensurate with development, an association that can be witnessed more widely. The most prominent example of this is India’s Aadhaar system, the largest biometric identity project in human history (Nair 2021; Rao and Nair 2019). Fingerprints, iris scans, and other physiological information are collected alongside demographic details, which are matched to the holy grail of any mass surveillance project: the unique identifier (Clarke 1988), in this case a twelve-digit number. From its inception, Aadhaar has been rationalised through its provision of multiple goods (access to welfare, financial inclusion, digital literacy, and accessibility among others) and its elimination of undesirable phenomena such as poverty, corruption, and fraud. Yet for critics, Aadhaar constitutes the infrastructure for the biggest surveillance apparatus ever implemented. This antithesis touches on a paradox of modernity itself, that the history of surveillance is entwined with the history of the state and its capacity to institutionalise care on a very large scale (Dandeker 1990; Higgs 2003). In the UK, for example, the foundation of the National Health Service (NHS) was also the foundation of an information apparatus that could serve other ends (Rule 1973). The question, for any citizen, is that of reward for their enforced visibility. Are Indian citizens really being compensated by Aadhaar, or is this the final frontier in the state’s appropriation of the citizen’s body (Kapila 2022)?

Health surveillance and care

Surveillance is often justified through the interests of the common good, such as safeguarding those deemed to be vulnerable, caring for patients, or stopping the spread of disease. While health monitoring, in this logic, may be enacted as a ‘caring’ practice (Mol 2008), it now increasingly involves the collection of data stored on servers that are not always known to those who are being monitored (Sandvik 2020; Lyon 2021). Health surveillance is commonly defined as the systemic collection, analysis, and dissemination of health data for the implementation and evaluation of public health action (Choi 2012).^[1] In more general terms, it can be understood as the practice of watching over health, from the perceived ‘health’ of populations and individuals to that of communities and nations.

Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has reinvigorated health surveillance as a matter of political and public concern (Kim and Chung 2021). Political responses to the pandemic were shaped by a range of moral rationalities that introduced and justified new modes of public health surveillance (Lyon 2021). Public health interventions across the world sought to control and mitigate the outbreak, such as by responsibilising citizens to act in the interest of the state and to install contact tracing apps to curb infection rates. In places such as Germany and the UK, state-sponsored contact tracing apps received media criticism due to privacy concerns, as well as technical concerns over their ability to act as a public health measure (Laptander and Vitebsky 2021).

Monitoring populations for the purpose of controlling and caring for citizens is not a new phenomenon. It was partly through shifting modes of governance in Europe from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards, with the monitoring of populations and publics, that practices of health surveillance took shape. Health surveillance has therefore historically played a key role in constituting not only visible, measurable, and governable spaces, but also governable persons willing to self-monitor in the name of their own health (Foucault 1973; Rose 1989). In many parts of the world, the provision of public health services, including their administration and governance, have become increasingly digitalised through practices of ‘datafication’ in which the mass collection of personal health data informs interventions (Hoeyer, Bauer and Pickersgill 2019; Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017). Surveillance, in this vein, unfolds through a range of monitoring practices that claim to sustain human life in different ways. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, health surveillance can thus be seen to form part of a ‘politics of life itself’ (Rose 2006), in which bodies and minds have become ‘vital’ objects of observation and intervention. Such practices rely on people’s capacity and willingness to engage in forms of everyday self-monitoring in the service of care (Weiner et al. 2020; Kent, Lupton and Zeena 2020).

In surveillance studies, care and control have been described as two entangled interests driving practices of monitoring. Watching over children, for instance, may be intended with their protection in mind but can also be motivated by other intentions, such as direction and control (Lyon 2003; Widmer and Albrechtslund 2021). In many contexts, people actively participate in the monitoring of their bodies but in ways that are not always known to them. In rural India, for example, the ‘Khushi baby necklace’, a tracking device presented as a piece of jewellery, was trialled as a digital tool of recording and storing immunisation records (Sandvik 2020). More recently, it was also used to collect other health data such as HIV medication records. Developers attempted to make it locally ‘appropriate’, designing it with a black thread to ward off evil spirits, showing how such technologies are incorporated within cosmological systems (Sandvik 2020). While the necklace can be seen as ‘doing good’—as a caring technology—digital health data also has the potential to be exploited and commodified without people’s consent or knowledge in the service of corporate interests.

Dynamics of care and control were simultaneously at work in the 1950s, when a team of doctors brought an antibiotic to the Navajo population in Arizona to treat tuberculosis (Jones 2001). When patients failed to take their medications, healthcare professionals regarded them as non-compliant, and responded by implementing powerful technologies of surveillance: random tests were performed, such as urine testing or radioactive pill clocks^[2], often without patients being informed about their purposes. These interventions introduced distrust into doctor-patient relationships and many feared participating as the urine sample testing could potentially expose their ceremonial use of the peyote plant, which had been prohibited by the tribal council. In this case, medical surveillance as a tool of control was operating within existing political structures of colonisation and racialisation, and it is unclear what opportunities the Navajo had, if any, to resist these medical interventions.

Health technologies are sometimes welcomed and appropriated in new ways beyond the way they were intended (Stadler 2021). Digital health technologies of surveillance, such as the MERM (‘medication event reminder monitoring’) device, have been introduced to persuade and remind ‘non-compliant’ tuberculosis or HIV patients to take their medications. Some patients referred to the device as ‘the box’, whereas others gave it affectionate nicknames such as ‘my child’, which one user explained was due to the box containing pills that would give her access to a healthy life. Some stored their boxes safely for this reason, or wore clothes that would match the box, hence trying to transform it from an adherence-monitoring device to a person-entity that represented hope.

Health surveillance technologies have often been used as mechanisms of governance, but it is important to emphasise that people might actively use monitoring technologies in the name of improving their own health or in the interest of looking after others. The past two decades have seen an intensive proliferation of, and investment in, digital monitoring technologies that claim to improve our physical and mental health, as well as offer care and support for others (Lupton 2016; Neff and Nafus 2016; Ajana, Braga and Guidi 2022). For example, physical rehabilitation apps can monitor exercises done at home (Schwennesen 2019), and smartphone apps and ‘wearables’ can be used to track children’s locations (Widmer and Albrechtslund 2021). Self-monitoring in the context of health can therefore foreground more intimate and subtler aspects of monitoring effected by everyday acts of self-surveillance. Wearable self-tracking technologies such as Fitbit and Apple Watch enable people to monitor a range of activities and functions associated with their bodies and minds. These practices might include tracking exercise and steps (Brüggen and Schober 2020), menstrual cycles (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021), heart rates, and sleeping patterns (Hardey 2022). Digital wearables also increasingly allow people to report on, quantify, and monitor various ‘mental and emotional’ experiences and sensations, from stress and anxiety to mindful moments and other perceived states of well-being (Gregory and Bowker 2016; Schüll 2016; Davies 2017; Minozzo 2022).

Self-monitoring emerges here as a way of caring for, and knowing about, bodies, such as in the management and understanding of pain, affects, and medical uncertainties. For example, health monitoring technologies can figure as practices of self-knowledge in the hands of menstruating people, as an ethnography of period tracking apps in the context of the FemTech^[3] wave in the US describes (Ford et al 2021). Yet these health tracking apps can also be situated and critiqued within a political frame of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019) that raises concerns about the ethics of data sharing and its potentially discriminatory ends, such as limited access to healthcare services (e.g., abortion). For example, one user in favour of menstrual tracking but critical of the harvesting of personal data describes her circumstance as a ‘no-exit situation’ wherein one just tries to ‘limit the damage’ of self-tracking in the face of corporate profit-making (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021, 59). While users are ‘empowered within conditions not of their choosing’ (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021, 58), Andrea Ford and her colleagues argue that self-monitoring nevertheless offers a way for women to recognise, and in turn exercise, a mode of control over affective and bodily experiences that have been historically, and are still routinely, neglected in healthcare systems.

Within circumstances of what is now commonly termed ‘digital health’, the use of self-monitoring technology constitutes the very body-self it assumes: subjects that are capable of self-checking and self-reporting (Bruun 2023). The notion of the reflexive, measurable, and quantifiable self is in many ways built into the design and operation of health trackers, which in turn shapes users’ experiential realities of what it means to be ‘healthy’, ‘fit’, and ‘well’. Digital self-monitoring can thus be seen to constitute new caring and corporeal capacities that can be extended to self and others (see e.g. Davies 2017; Bergroth 2019; Kent 2023). Yet these new modes of monitoring demand that we constantly ‘watch our selves’ in ways that construe people as objects of self-observation and self-inspection in pursuit of particular health goods.

Monitoring labour

Labour has always gone hand-in-hand with some form of surveillance—whether understood as such, or in the more benign language of monitoring or supervision. Because employers have legitimate goods to protect, for instance regulatory compliance or productivity, surveillance is often accepted by employees as a ‘taken-for-granted’ element of working life (Ball 2010, 19). How this takes place, however, varies greatly according to historical, regional, and technological conditions. In anthropological terms, there are certain analytical points to consider. The first is whether the surveillance in question is happening through social relationships or is construed as abstract from relationships. Both can occur through old and new forms of mediation. On the former side, overseers, foremen, drivers, or other figures to monitor or coerce workers extend deep into the history of agricultural and industrial economies (R.M. Browne 2024; Thompson 1967), and persist in the present through forms of in-person or camera-enabled visual supervision. On the latter side, technologies of quantification developed in the early twentieth century through Frederick Taylor’s principles of ‘scientific management’ (Taylor [1911] 1993), which incentivised workers to manage themselves, and are evolving in some contexts into what is known as ‘algorithmic management’. In addition, because some form of surveillance is an accepted part of working life, it plays a more-than-usual role in constituting working life, communicating to workers—like a ‘paralanguage’ (Ball 2010, 97)—about what tasks are valued. Lastly, because the workplace is a peculiarly purposeful setting, the increase of digital surveillance in recent years appears to be transforming these domains at the highest pace, as new configurations between work and non-working life are negotiated, new ethical norms around personal information tested, and new working identities made.

In examining the nature of monitoring at work, anthropologists have looked towards their own institutions. Higher education reforms across the world in the 1980s and 90s transformed monitoring in the academy, as part of a wider shift in public institutions more generally, towards external auditing (Born 2004; Harper 1998; Strathern 2000b). Financial concepts were imported to assess academics and their work in terms of ‘outputs’, ‘impact’, and ‘efficiency’—using much of the language developed by Taylor—in ways that supplanted older social and qualitative forms of evaluation. While the new regime of ‘audit culture’ was coercive to the extent that there was no opt-out (Strathern 2000a), and academics became compelled to monitor themselves and each other in quantifiable, ends-orientated, and often labour-intensive ways, it also became constitutive, to some extent, of academic work and workers. Departments and universities were collectivised as subjects of surveillance into the bodies in which they were assessed; meanwhile, some academics learned to refer to themselves using the terminology of the ‘h-index’, the ‘i-index’, or the numerical values of audit criteria, as these became avenues for promotion or job security (Shore and Wright 2000; Lazar 2022). As a form of bureaucratic surveillance, audit or ‘metric culture’ (Ajana 2018) functions like bureaucracy more generally, effacing its own political basis (Ferguson 1994; see also Bear and Mathur 2015). One of the ways in which anthropologists have critiqued these developments is by reinscribing this politics through acts of extra-institutional writing. In this, they dovetail with a wider phenomenon in workplace surveillance, when workers turn to anonymous blogs, forums, Facebook, or WhatsApp groups beyond the surveilled domain, to forge critical identities and find workarounds (Ball 2010; Lazar 2022).

Surveillance scholars have observed the gendering of surveillance relations in some labour contexts, as women perform before a mediated male gaze (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015; Meulen and Heynen 2016). Anthropologists examining care work, which is disproportionately gendered female, have encountered the increasing use of surveillance technologies (Johnson 2015; Glaser 2021). Here, gender asymmetries frequently intersect with class and ethnic asymmetries, dynamics all being remediated through location tracking and CCTV, among others. In Hong Kong, for example, migrant Filipino women are employed by high- to middle-income families to care for children and perform domestic chores, labour that is increasingly scrutinised through so-called ‘nanny cams’ (Johnson et al 2020). Because of the informal nature of much of this work, the use of surveillance can also be less formal, as workers are not told in advance that they would be filmed, nor where and for how long the data would be stored. In some cases, they report discovering hidden cameras in the process of cleaning, or being called to task for activities that could only have been observed remotely—only realising in hindsight their exposure to a male employer. To avoid these gazes, they might respond tactically by ‘accidentally’ dropping their cleaning cloths on the lens or spending more time in unmonitored areas like the bathroom. In care settings, the presence of surveillance technologies can interrupt or even substitute for care itself and thus jeopardise important wells of trust. On the other hand, they may also manufacture it, as hours of labour that would have otherwise gone unrecorded are captured on camera for their employer to see.

While surveillance happens at work, it can itself be a form of labour and subject to the imperatives that shape labour: namely, a drive towards automation and outsourcing to reduce costs. It is in this context that labour monitoring is increasingly taking place through enhanced forms of datafication and algorithmic management. This can be understood as an extension of scientific management, to the extent that algorithmic management involves a calculation of time and resources needed for tasks (Lazar 2022), such as picking up a box in an Amazon warehouse or delivering meals across a city. However, this form of monitoring also greatly reduces the presence of employed overseers. In these new constellations, surveillance becomes ‘multimodal’, assembling mathematical calculations, customer ratings and reviews, and a small number of human dispatchers or ‘rider captains’ who play a supporting role in the work of overseeing (Newlands 2021, 725). Though these new relations are sometimes represented as replacing ‘bosses’ with algorithms, anthropologically it is more accurate to think of these as ‘human-in-the-loop’ systems that depend much more heavily on computing (Newlands 2021, 724). If a food delivery driver does not have access to a functioning smartphone, not only are they unsupervised, but they cannot work at all (Duus, Bruun and Dalsgård 2023). With these techno-orientated systems arrive new technical vulnerabilities, as well as new possibilities for worker reappropriation or resistance. Some Deliveroo drivers in Brussels, for example, found ways to ‘hack’ the employee app to circumvent the performance score system (Duus, Bruun and Dalsgård 2023), while truckers in the US have applied a number of methods to ‘beat the box’ of newly installed Electronic Logging Devices, for instance by covering GPS masts with tinfoil or shattering their interiors with a rubber hammer (Levy 2022). Despite the social and legal risks that emerge from the rise of ‘smart’ surveillance in workplaces, because of the role of capital incentives this area looks set to expand, particularly with the growth of generative AI (Ball 2022; Duke 2023).

Participatory surveillance

Social vigilance, understood in the broadest sense, has long been a subject of anthropological inquiry. During the first half of the twentieth century, some anthropologists construed ritual action as a matter of ‘watching over others’ (Bateson [1936] 1958; Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1993; Leach [1964] 1970). For example, the Azande of central Africa conducted divination ceremonies to ‘see’ and expose suspected witches (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1993). Similarly, ‘bewitchment talk’ in the French Bocage, or rural Normandy, included secret malicious spells or even the transfer of ‘power’ through gazes, causing serious misfortune in the lives of those affected (Favret-Saada 1980). Consequently, bewitchment in the Bocage sustained a pervasive sense of fear and suspicion, which intensified and at times escalated the constant monitoring of social rivalries in the village.

Neighbours, spouses, kinsfolk, and peers all frequently and regularly engage in vigilant behaviour as part of ordinary life. For example, self-presentation in different social contexts is often based on the monitoring of others’ behaviour and the ‘alignment’ of one’s own behaviour with the expectations of others (Goffman [1963] 1990). Similarly, the spread of gossip and rumour in an English council estate was used to limit the level of prestige that people could gain in the community (Gluckman 1963). Yet, gossip can also serve to build prestige. Some women in the Polynesian Nukulaelae Atoll, for example, may use gossip to reinstate broken social hierarchies, resist negative stigma, and negotiate power imbalances (Besnier 2019). In all these cases, mundane monitoring is a ubiquitous form of social control involving the relational negotiation of reputation and respectability.

The advent of social media has taken these monitorial negotiations into new territories. Practices of ‘lateral surveillance’ (Andrejevic 2004) are an integral aspect of peer-to-peer monitoring in online social worlds. Lateral surveillance can be imagined as surveillance that is enacted in many directions simultaneously, including ‘sideways’, as opposed to the linear ‘top-down’ monitoring famously associated with the Panopticon.^[4] Contrarily, lateral monitoring sometimes produces an empowering process of identity construction, of which surveillance is an important positive element (Koskela 2018). Since the ability to ‘follow’ others is intrinsic to the exchange of information on social platforms, users actively take part in practices of mutual surveillance (Albrechtslund and Lauritsen 2013). On Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or TikTok, for example, online users voluntarily enable others to monitor their accounts in different ways, including the ability to download and share their photos, locate them geographically, or track their whereabouts (Trottier 2013). While social media acquires distinctive characteristics in different social contexts, these forms of sharing and mutual exposure are basic communicational features that enable rather than restrict dialogue (Miller 2011; see also Widlok 2021). The term ‘participatory surveillance’ (Albrechtslund 2008) highlights the customary rather than coercive nature of such practices.

One important feature of participatory surveillance is its ‘synoptic’ nature: an inversion of Bentham’s Panopticon, the concept of the ‘synopticon’ refers to surveillance of the few by the many (Mathiesen 1997). Unlike the linear, demarcated, and clearly defined form of control produced in panoptic realities, power in synoptic realities is dispersed across society in multiple directions.^[5] One of the consequences of a synoptic reality is that individuals can profit from the monitoring of their own lives. At the end of the 1990s, ‘everyday surveillance’ became linked to new flows of capital in the emergent online market economy so that, for example, a college student in the US could instal a webcam in her apartment and charge subscription fees from internet users for viewing access (Staples 2013). Over the past two decades, ‘web-camming’ has become a lucrative business in the online sex industry (Van Doorn and Velthuis 2018). While such sites as Only Fans operate under little or no ethical regulation, they continue to thrive (Stegeman 2021). Rather than initiating traditional ‘top-down’ publicity campaigns, which target vast numbers of potential customers through mass visibility, commercial companies increasingly hire social media influencers, YouTubers, or vloggers to recommend products and services to their followers (Lange 2019). In this process, the companies behind these products also gain access to the followers’ data (see Clarke 1988 on ‘dataveillance’), thus complicating the notion of synoptic surveillance as purely lateral.

Participatory surveillance does, however, include a ‘vertical’ dimension, in the sense that people can monitor the authorities ‘bottom up’. For example, civil society ‘watchdogs’, non-military use of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques (wherein civil society actors identify crimes or human rights abuses [see Trottier 2015]), and smartphone apps that enable drivers to detect speeding cameras, all invert the ‘top-down’ monitoring used by those in power. The term ‘sousveillance’ (from French sous, ‘from below’) characterises this form of monitoring (Mann, Nolan and Wellman 2003). While surveillance may convey the idea of the omnipresent, overarching gaze, sousveillance indicates grassroots resistance to state or corporate monitoring powers by which people attempt to defy and deter potential privacy infringements (Garrido 2015). Sousveillance is not antithetical to synoptic surveillance, however. CCTV gadgets, recording devise, and mobile tracking applications can all be used ‘laterally’ to document or monitor peers at work, at home, or in public spaces (Lyon 2007).

Both in its synoptic (lateral) and sousveillant (vertical) manifestations, participatory surveillance now seems commonplace. Depending on the mundane settings in which it is being implemented, this sense of immanent and constant surveillance could blur the distinctions between those who monitor and the subjects of monitoring. In some digital contexts, every person is turned into an observer who must assume that they are simultaneously always being observed. Participatory surveillance thereby prompts fresh discussions about power and sovereignty, visibility and opacity, as well as the role of individual and collective agency, in a world characterised by ubiquitous surveillance.

Non-surveillance

Any anthropology of surveillance must reckon with its inverse and counterpart: non-surveillance. Non-surveillance can be understood as the broad spectrum of individual and collective activities that seek to resist or reimagine visibility before a surveilling authority. This frequently takes on a moral force. In a world where even deserts are technologically monitored, their sands mapped by satellites and scanned by drones, the idea of anonymity has become a value around which new kinds of collectives have gathered (Anon Collective 2021; Coleman 2014; Comité invisible 2009). One of the most renown is the Anonymous movement, in which participants could be identified by the wearing of homogenous Guy Fawkes masks. In Britain, becoming ‘Anonymous’ paradoxically became a strategy of hyper-visible protest, in order to oppose an invisibilisation by the state enacted through the discourse of austerity (Peacock n.d.). Indeed, any reflection on surveillance in relation to the state soon upends any straightforward moral binary between surveillance and non-surveillance (Birchall 2021). If making their citizenry legible is an essential part of the state’s capacity to enable them to live, its obverse allows the state to let others die (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). Deliberate forms of ‘looking away’ from people on the margins (Kalir and Schendel 2017), such as migrants and refugees passing through or around national borders, permit these polities to absolve themselves of duties of care (Yarbakhsh 2018).

It can be argued that these dynamics of revelation and concealment lie at the very heart of the anthropological enterprise (Göpfert 2020). Ethnography, anthropology’s flagship method, involves forms of data collection through technologies that can, and have been, compared to surveillance. As she examines the eleven-volume file collected on her by the Romanian Security Services (Securitate) in the 1970s and 80s, Katharine Verdery asks herself, ‘When I read in the file that I “exploit people for informative purposes” can I deny that anthropologists often do just that as Securitate officers do? Isn’t this part of the critique of my discipline that likens it to a colonial practice?’ (2018, 18). These existential doubts about anthropology are important to address^[6] (cf. Boas [1919] 2005; Price 2016), and one response is to return to our opening statements: that what matters are the conditions and purposes in and for which human subjects become visible through ethnography. In the 1930s, Bronislaw Malinowski advocated for the creation of a ‘nation-wide surveillance network’ through forms of mass ethnographic observation (1938), which would address the ills of society. Similarly, for other anthropologists, refusing to collect or include information that could serve structures of domination becomes a political act (Price 2011; Simpson 2014; Yonucu 2022). The questions that anthropologists often ask themselves are those that must also be asked of surveillance: how are human beings becoming visible through monitoring technologies, and why?

Conclusion

The anthropology of surveillance is a relatively new area of inquiry that looks set to expand as relations that can be named as surveillance do. Anthropology has the potential to demonstrate the social and cultural complexity of these relationships as historically constituted ways of seeing interact with new technologies. While public discourses may continue to express alarm at the growth of ‘Orwellian’ societies, it is worth remembering that 1984 was written partly in protest at new forms of identification in Britain that came to underpin the NHS (Higgs 2003). Anthropology shows us that it is the social projects around monitoring, whether large or small, that define what the qualities of these relationships are.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article draws was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 947867).

Note on contributors

Vita Peacock is an anthropologist in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and PI on the ERC project: Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain (SAMCOM) (2021 – 2025). She is an affiliate member of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5645-3242

Vita Peacock, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. vita.peacock@kcl.ac.uk

Mikkel Kenni Bruun is an anthropologist and research associate at King’s College London. He currently researches health surveillance and digital self-monitoring in Britain, as part of the SAMCOM project. He also teaches medical anthropology at Cambridge University. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book titled Towards an anthropology of psychology. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1814-294X

Mikkel Kenni Bruun, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kenni.bruun@kcl.ac.uk

Claire Elisabeth Dungey is an anthropologist and research associate at King’s College London and currently researches the relationship between surveillance, care and family life in Germany, as part of the SAMCOM project. Her research interests cover the anthropology of childhood and education, mobility and future aspirations. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1432-9096

Claire Elisabeth Dungey, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. claire.dungey@kcl.ac.uk. Claire is also honorary fellow at Durham University: claire.e.dungey@durham.ac.uk

Matan Shapiro is an anthropologist currently working as a research associate in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, as part of the SAMCOM project. He studies how the practice of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and related forms of monitoring help shape new online spaces of moral consent. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2655-7467

Matan Shapiro, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. matan.shapiro@kcl.ac.uk

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[1] The World Health Organization (WHO) defines public health surveillance as ‘the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data.’ World Health Organization. 2023. “Surveillance.” https://www.who.int/emergencies/surveillance. Accessed 23 March 2023.

[2] A radioactive pill clock was a cylindrical block drilled with a number of holes that could hold a daily supply of pills. The pill clock had a cover that allowed the removal of only one set of pills at a time. A patient would rotate the device and remove the daily pills. Yet it was unknown to the patient that the device had a small piece of photographic film and a radioactive emitter embedded in plastic that could determine time intervals and hence a patient’s irregularity.

[3] FemTech, short for ‘female [health] technology’, is a fast-growing women’s health movement in the digital health industry and beyond. The term was coined in 2016 by the Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin, co-founder of the period-tracking app, ‘Clue’.

[4] The term ‘lateral’ should not be taken literally as 'sideways'. Instead, the idea of ‘lateral surveillance’ involves looking around in all directions and being able to survey peers as much as subordinates or superiors. Within this perspective, which is endemic to any form of participatory surveillance, there is little qualified difference between lateral, synoptic and sous-veillance, all of which express the same fluidity as a response to the relative rigidity of Foucault's analysis.

[5] Thomas Mathiesen attributes this to the emergent construction of new moral sensibilities involving three types of synoptic surveillance techniques: 1) the ability to see everything (‘syn-opticism’); 2) the ability to make everything visible (‘syn-omorphism’); and 3) the ability to communicate information (‘syn-noetics’). When these elements are combined, he argued, power can be produced, diffused, and obtained in unexpected ways.

[6] Price, David. 2000. “Anthropologists as spies.” The Nation, November 2. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/anthropologists-spies/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Race and racism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:30:34 +0000

Photo: Ernest Cole: Segregational signs at a South-African train station, before 1972.

Sindre Bangstad Agustín Fuentes

KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Princeton University

Initially published 30 Nov 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23raceandracism

Abstract:

Racism is premised on the idea that humanity could and should be divided into distinct biological groups or ‘races’, and that different races stand in a ranked and hierarchical relation to one another. Racism understands human races to be separate and clear-cut clusters of people, based on biological criteria that are fixed and relevant for their behavior. While humans do vary biologically, their variation does not fall into such clusters that correspond to racial categories. Speaking of human races thus ignores the contemporary science of human variation, whilst intimately mixing the study of human biology with hierarchy, stigma and prejudice.

As a worldview, racism was historically pervasive in the academy and in anthropology, a discipline that emerged in the context of colonialism, colonial discovery, and the exploration of human diversity. While the concept of race was in many respects foundational to the development and practice of anthropology it is now contested. As we will discover in this entry, the concepts and definitions of race, and their applicability, have changed greatly over time. Drawing on ethnographic material from various social and political contexts, and attempts at theorising race and racism, this entry will discuss important ways in which anthropologists have shaped both concepts in the past and in the present. Their work contributes to the important insight that race is not biologically but socially constituted. ‘Race is the child of racism, not the father’ (Coates 2015, 7).

Introduction

There are no biological races in humans. This is the conclusion of scientific bodies such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as well as the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA; formerly the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, or AABA). As the 2019 AABA statement makes clear, ‘no group of people is biologically homogeneous’, and human populations are ‘not biologically discrete, truly isolated or fixed’.^[1] The 1998 AAA Statement identifies ‘race’ as ‘an ideology about human differences’, and states that physical variations in the human species have problematic non-biological meanings culturally and politically ascribed onto them.^[2] These anthropological associations are not alone in rejecting the biological nature of racial groups, with genetic, psychological, and other scientific associations also publishing concordant statements.^[3]

Yet, one need only look at news items about police violence towards African-Americans in the US; ethnic minority mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK; xenophobic violence against African migrants in South Africa; or the on-going hardening of borders of Europe to prevent the resettlement of migrants and refugees from African and Asian countries (de Genova 2018), to understand why race and racism remain such important topics in our time.

Knowledge about race and racism is produced in the interstices between popular and scientific ideas (Reardon 2005). Anthropology is one of the social sciences that has a contradictory disciplinary heritage (Mullings 2005, 669). ‘Anthropology’s early professionalization as a science was associated closely with the elaboration of typologies and techniques for classifying and operationalizing the discrete “races of man”’ (Harrison 1995, 50). Historically, the discipline has been involved in and complicit with white supremacy, racism, and colonialism (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023; Asad 1973). We may even regard the concept of race as a ‘master concept’ in anthropology, emerging from the context of colonialism and settler colonialism and continuing right until the emergence of powerful critiques of the concept of race in the twenty-first century. Recent anthropological critiques of race grew out of a long-standing concern relating to the origins and uses of the concept in the era of so-called ‘scientific racism’. Scientific racism tried to prove the existence of distinct human races by seemingly scientific means, building on biological concepts of race that had been in existence since the sixteenth century. It reached its heyday from the late 18th century, and was disproven in the early 20th century.^[4]

The ideas which underpinned scientific racism were anything but scientific. They flowed from the very racism they were evoked to support. Its lingering effects are still with us, and its central tenets of hierarchical biological difference between human groups have made a disturbing return in recent years (Saini 2019). Concern with scientific racism, and against race as a fixed socio-biological category, was spurred by some anthropologists gradually adopting explicitly anti-racist positions, in line with insights from biological and socio-cultural studies: all humans are now seen as belonging to one and the same human race, thus being endowed with the same inherent value, and the same right to life and dignity. This perspective is broadly recognised as socially and biologically accurate by much (but not all) of the academy and a smaller portion of the broader public. It took long and protracted struggles to undo racist understandings of human groups. The term ‘racism’ was coined in the late nineteenth century, but only adopted in the twentieth century (see below). It provided a starting point for what would mature into a critique of the concept of race both in anthropology and beyond.

Race does not reflect biological reality

Humans vary biologically and that variation is important in understanding the human experience. However, that variation is not distributed in clusters that correspond to racial categories based on phenotype (e.g. Black, white, Asian, etc.) or continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) (Lewis et al. 2022). In the context of human variation, it is often assumed that specific physical differences attest to specific racial, biological, or evolved group differences between racial categories of people, but they do not. In spite of over 300 years of trying to classify humans into mostly distinct biological units, human genetic, morphological and physiological variation does not correspond to racial categories such as Black, white, Caucasian or Asian. Instead most evolutionary scientists today think of human group variation in terms of existing populations, i.e. groups of people who either live in the same place or share other connections such as eating similar food or having children together. Human blood groups, body sizes, immune systems and skin colour simply do not map onto racial categories (Fuentes 2022, 74-91). The vast majority of genetic variation does not even occur across human populations but within them, as different parts of the human genome have different ancestral histories. In fact, there is nearly twice as much genetic variation among human populations in Africa as among all populations elsewhere (Fuentes 2022, 74-91).

This has not stopped humans in the past from trying to impose hierarchical social orders based on assumed biological differences. For example, in the era of segregation in the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ meant that a person known to have one ancestor who was Black was, for the purposes of the law, considered to be Black. Under the racist regime of apartheid in South Africa (1948-1990), the authorities introduced laws which imposed a system of racial classification on the South African population in the form of the 1950 Population Registration Act. Under this and other South African apartheid laws, ‘coloureds’ were classified as an intermediate racial category, and deprived of many basic rights as citizens. In the context of the Population Registration Act, South African citizens whose racial classification was unclear to the authorities were subjected to the so-called ‘pencil test’. The pencil test involved running a pencil through a person’s hair to determine that person’s racial classification. If the hair was straight, and the pencil dropped out of the person’s hair, the person would be classified as ‘white’; if the person had curly, coily or kinky hair, the person would be classified as ‘coloured’ or in some cases as ‘native’ (i.e. Black). Long after the demise of apartheid, such apartheid categories of racial difference remain socially and materially salient.

The category of being ‘native’, also holds negative connotations in Europe. An ethnographic study of a small and mixed coastal community in Northern Norway in the late 1940s found that public identity markers of the Sami ethnic group carried with them a significant social stigma. Locals of Sami background avoided such markers by avoiding use of Sami language and attire in public, and making derogatory remarks about nomadic Sami as ‘primitive’, especially when in the presence of non-Sami Norwegians. Being Sami was associatively linked to ‘uncleanliness’, and some locals of Sami background even referred to Samis as forming part of ‘an inferior race’ (Eidheim 1966; Eidheim 1969). Even today, Norwegian Samis remain targets of discrimination. These few historical examples of which there are countless others testify to the persistence of official and popular beliefs about the existence of biological race.

But race has real social and material consequences

Race is not biologically real, but its social and material consequences surely are (Hartigan 2013, 188). Racist systems, processes, and structures create the linkages between non-biological racialised groups and specific social, political, economic, and health-related outcomes. For example, statistics pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US found that whilst average life expectancies had fallen by two years in the population at large as a result of the pandemic, that figure rose to seven years for Native Americans and Alaskan Americans.^[5] The social and material realities of racism can create specific biological consequences connected to racial categories, such as the reality that Black American women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than white American women.^[6]

Ethnographic studies from Brazil also point to the important effects of racism and discrimination on Black Brazilians. One early 1990s study of a small town in Rio’s coffee-growing interior, shows that racial inequality was upheld as the town’s inhabitants embraced aesthetic features that pointed to European ancestry, denigrated physical traits that point to African ancestry and wilfully forgot the non-white parts of their family histories (Twine 1998). Here racism endured, in part because commonsense definitions of it focused on direct human interactions. They excluded more complex and covert forms of racism, such as institutional racism or racist media imagery. As a result, Black Brazilians were routinely the subject of racist jokes, remained underpaid and were excluded from privileged social, educational and occupational spaces (Twine 1998).

While insisting on biological racial difference is not scientifically defensible, refuting the idea of biological race can also have negative consequences. In large parts of Latin America, the idea of mestizaje, or of people being biologically and culturally mixed, often serves attempts to whiten the population or to facilitate nation building (Hordge-Freeman 2015, 11-13). However, it is also part of more recent efforts to stop focusing on biological differences and to remedy centuries of racism and discrimination as part of democratic nation building (Wade 2017). Yet this emphasis on ‘mixture’ has its limits. It continues to provide a space within which Blackness, Indigeneity, and whiteness can implicitly be hierarchically valued. Insisting on people’s sameness may even blend into opposition to affirmative action policies. In Brazil for example, the insistence that race is not a primarily biological category has led some activists on the political left and right to argue against policies that explicitly recognised racial groups in society so as to give them special rights (Wade 2017, 129). This undermines efforts of those Black and Indigenous activists who are actively fighting to be recognized as racially and culturally distinct. The myth of a Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ thereby undercuts affirmative action policies, with the argument being that if race does not exist in Brazil, racial quotas should not either. It equally obscures the important processes of racialisation, which routinely lead to gendered racism and racialised sexism in the country (Caldwell 2007, 8).

Histories of race, histories of racism

‘The history of race and racism is a major component in the development of modern anthropology’ (Sussman 2014, 9). Anthropologists now generally contend that racism is epistemologically prior to race, or that ‘racism made race’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 5). This can be a bit confusing, because the term ‘racism’ is in fact a much more recent addition to the lexicon than ‘race’.

As a designator for biological ideas about human difference, the term ‘race’ emerged in the period of 1730-1790 in Europe (Bancel, David and Thomas 2019), whereas the first recorded instance of the term ‘racism’ in a Western language appears to be that of the French anarchist Charles Malato in his Philosophie de l’anarchie (1888), and in English that of the US military commander Richard Henry Pratt in Proceedings of the Mohonk conference (1902). Arguably the most central scholarly contribution to popularising the term came in the form of the exiled German Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s posthumously published monograph Rassismus (1938).^[7]It was not until 1942 that the term ‘racism’ appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for the first time.

A first clear-cut example of racism in Europe that historians tend to point to is the discrimination faced by Muslim and Jewish converts to Catholicism—moriscos and conversos—during the Catholic Reconquista of the Muslim-controlled al-Andalus area of the Iberian Peninsula from the twelfth century onwards (Bethencourt 2013). These converts to Catholicism and their patrilineal descendants were for centuries denied full civil rights with reference to their alleged lack of ‘purity of blood’ ('limpieza de sangre'). We may distinguish between biology as a science which assesses the organic dynamics of bodies, and biology as popular ideas about the body. Biology as a contemporary science did not exist in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Catholic Reconquista. And yet, the idea of an essential link between blood and descent appears to be already present, although there was no underlying concept of biological race involved: raza or ‘race’ in Spanish referred at the time to ‘noble birth’, rather than biological race.

The biological conceptions of race, in which skin colour and other phenotypical markers of human difference are made salient and prominent, are a product of the European Enlightenment. Enlightenment science enabled race to ‘become biological’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 21). For example, botanist Carl Linnaeus’ classified humans into ‘five varieties’ in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae from 1758 (Marks 2017; Blunt 2002). Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology linked skin colour to human character and intellect, describing humans of paler skin as superior to humans of darker skin (Mills 2017). ‘Skin colour is the primary criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition’ (Jablonski 2021, 437), but skin colour was only one of the criteria: physical markers such as hair texture, head size, bodily shape, eye colour and shape, and the size of one’s lips, nose, and sexual organs have at various times also been seen as marking race. What is rarely appreciated is ‘the extent to which current thought and research remain influenced by colour-based race concepts’ (Jablonski 2021, 437).

European colonialism was also integral to the development of racism, as European conquest sought to legitimate itself by recourse to arguments about human difference in an age of European discovery of other parts of the world. Given that anthropology emerged as a science intimately linked to European colonialism (Asad 1975, Trouillot 2003; Gupta and Stoolman 2022), it is hardly surprising that early anthropology would play a central role in the development and elaboration of ideas about human difference and otherness intrinsic to European colonialism that created ‘biological’ (but actually social) conceptions of race. These ‘biological’ understandings of human difference have adapted to highly variegated historical, social, and political contexts, and have adopted different forms. It is in reference to this that cultural theorist Stuart Hall referred to race as a ‘floating’ or ‘sliding signifier’ (2017) or a concept with no fixed categories or meanings. Hall’s is not an argument for the timelessness and universalism of all forms of racism but rather for the malleability of race concepts underpinning racism. According to him, race works like a language. The meaning of racial categories is not primarily defined by what they refer to. Instead, their meaning depends on other meaning making concepts. People’s different histories, experiences and modes of living determine which racial categories they may find convincing. For Hall, the study of how racial categories are made and remade is thus not primarily about human and scientific progress, but it is driven by socio-cultural ruptures and continuities.

For example, racial regimes of colonialism and settler colonialism varied according to time, context, and targets: the racism faced by African-Americans and Indigenous American Indians in the US differed from others in form and character. The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a racialisation whereby African-Americans were seen as property and sources of labour, while settler colonialism resulted in Indigenous Americans being viewed as obstacles to extraction and control of resources (Mamdani 2020). Simply subsuming them under the same umbrella of racism risks under-emphasizing the specific forms of violence that people in different times and places have had to endure.

Scientific racism

By the nineteenth century the idea that there were innate human differences attributable to assumed races was considered as established scientific knowledge, as well as simple common sense in large parts of the world (Saini 2019). Linnaeus, who laid the foundations for scientific racism, included humans among the animal species and divided them into different varieties based on skin colour as well as real and assumed behaviour (Kenyon-Hyatt 2021). Linnaeus’ contemporary, the eighteenth century biologist Comte de Buffon believed that an original white ‘Caucasian’ race had degraded into other races due to environmental factors such as difficult climates and poor diets. Though he admitted that humans were one single species and any classification of humans was bound to be arbitrary, he still held the view that there was a biological racial hierarchy. The biologist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) divided humans into ultimately five hierarchically structured races, based on people’s anatomy as well as their linguistic and psychological features (Bethencourt 2013; Gates, Jr. and Curran 2022). Race thinking in scientific racism cut across the divisions between ‘monogenism’, which posited a single origin of humanity, and ‘polygenism’, which held that human races had different origins. Historians have documented how the tenets of Western scientific racism were exported to other parts of the world and applied to local circumstances by local elites (see Skidmore 1993 for Brazil, Zia-Ebrahimi 2016 for Persia/Iran and Weaver 2022 for India).

Scientific racism also provided license and legitimation for eugenics (el-Haj 2007), the belief that human ‘stock’ could and should be ‘perfected’ by means of restricting the right to reproduce for certain categories of humans. Such reproductive restrictions were usually imposed on racialised others, the poor and people with mental or physical disabilities. Eugenics counted on widespread support from white academic, social, political, and media elites in both Europe and the US (Rutherford 2022). The eugenicist idea that humans could and should be ‘perfected’ was intrinsically linked to a racial hierarchy in which the supposed ‘white race’ was placed on top. ‘Miscegenation’ between supposedly different races of humans was declared either undesirable or outlawed. Moreover, the right to biological reproduction of people or groups of people of all colours was limited. In places like South Africa under apartheid, the US South in the era of segregation, and in Nazi Germany, sexual relations, co-habitation, and marriage between individuals deemed to belong to different ‘races’ was prohibited by state law. The obsession with ‘interracial’ sex, and the casting of hypersexualised Black and brown men, in particular, as sexual threats against white women, has been and remains an ever-recurrent facet of racist thought from slavery and colonialism to the present (Stoler 2010).

Arguments for eugenics often came wrapped in arguments about the supposed ‘superiority’ of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, and physical anthropologists provided data in the form of cranial and other physical measurements meant to lend credence to these ideas (Kyllingstad 2012). Given these ideas about alleged racial superiority of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, it should not be any surprise that the eugenicists’ calls for restricting the right to reproduce often also entailed calls to restrict ‘non-white immigration’ and interracial sexual relations in the name of ‘preserving racial purity’ both in the US and in Europe. There was in fact an extensive trans- and inter-continental traffic of racist ideas about the ‘white’ race and/or ‘Nordic’ and/or ‘Aryan’ racial superiority with the US white supremacist and eugenicist movement (Whitman 2017).

Though European colonialists legitimated any number of atrocities and violence inflicted on colonised peoples by recourse to ideas central to scientific racism—such as the transatlantic slave trade, genocide, and the forced removal of children from their families and communities—broader European and Euro-American popular recognition of how lethal and dehumanising these ideas actually were was catalysed by Nazi extermination policies. These views culminated in the Holocaust against - among others - Jews, Roma, queer, and disabled peoples from 1942 to 1945. The central role of some German anthropologists in this horror is well documented (Schafft 2003).

The Boasian turn

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ideas of scientific racism were dominant among liberal Western elites. They were also dominant and widely taken for granted among anthropologists—and not least in physical anthropology. Work by the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin (1885) directly countered and challenged 19th century racial typologies and their associated racism. He insisted on focusing on people’s moral and intellectual dimensions, rather than their physical attributes, leading him to argue for the essential equality of humans. His work did not make a global impact during his time or over coming decades, in part due to the racist biases of the academy. However, it did foreshadow later arguments about the social construction of race (Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his successors received the most attention in challenging the ideas about biological race so central to scientific racism. Influenced by and in dialogue with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Boas and his students took on key elements in the push against racial essentialism and the racism it supported (but not without issues: see Baker 2021 and below).

Physical anthropology in Boas’ time was wedded to the idea that one could derive conclusions about the mental and intellectual capacities of purportedly different races through determining physical attributes such as head size and shape. It was Boas’ 1912 monograph Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants that demonstrated that, contrary to dominant claims at the time, the lived human environment was a significant factor in the development of physical attributes among humans (Baker 2004; Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard 2003). The book showed that the physical aspects of European immigrants to the United States changed more drastically than expected, and more the longer their parents had been to the United States. Boas and his successors conducted this study in the context of struggles against eugenics and white supremacist movements in Europe and the US in the 1920s and 1930s, and not the least German Nazism (King 2019). Central in the new anthropological conceptualisation of what was and should be the focus in the study of human difference and variety was the concept of culture. Cultural differences were increasingly seen as being more important than biological differences. More specifically, the ‘Boasian turn’ in anthropology disrupted the ideology that biology underlay culture. Previously presumed biological traits and cultural phenomena were no longer causally linked (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997, 525), and one could no longer proclaim that ‘group X does this because of biological trait Y’.

Whereas Boas had hedged his bets, and retained the concept of race itself, his radical student Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) launched a full attack on the concept in anthropology (for a related, if somewhat more demure, anti-racism in mainstream physical anthropology, see Washburn 1963). For Montagu, race was a myth, and ought to be replaced by the concept of ‘ethnic group’. The ethnic group was not intended to merely ‘substitute’ for race; it entailed adopting an entirely new viewpoint (Montagu 1962, 926). Montagu, who during World War II published the seminal monograph Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race (1942), would later become the main author of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race, in which race was declared to be a non-scientific concept (Brattain 2012). The Statement foregrounded humanity’s common ancestry and genetic similarities across populations to argue that racism was nothing but an inherently aggressive ideology and a misguided feeling. Montagu believed that the concept of race was so intertwined with racism that one could not do away with the latter without first doing away with the former (Yudell 2014).

Though they have in time become part of the anthropological common sense, it often seems forgotten, even within anthropology itself, how radical Montagu’s ideas about race and racism were at the time. The years that followed the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race also revealed that Montagu’s radical anti-racist stance as a drafter of the statement had uneven support among the cross-disciplinary group of scientists involved in UNESCO: it would be followed by more anodyne UNESCO statements on race in 1951, 1967 and 1978 (Hazard, Jr. 2012). Another anthropologist involved in the 1950 UNESCO Statement, and critical of the concept of race, was Claude Lévi-Strauss (Rouse 2019). But in anthropology, Montagu, building on Firmin, Boas, Washburn, and the work of many others, won out, and the lingering effects of his contribution can also be found in the various institutional statements on race and racism today.

The critique of Boasian racial liberalism

Changes brought by the Boasian turn were incomplete. In the eyes of its detractors, the dominant Boasian ‘racial liberalism’ in anthropology in the post-World War II era turned out to be quite compatible with the continued exclusion and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and other racialised scholars (Baker 2021). The idea of racial liberalism foregrounds that liberalism has been racialised, as liberal theory long restricted full personhood to white men, and its insistence on liberal values trivialises white supremacy (Rana 2020). Liberalism has historically tended to describe white supremacist and racist imaginaries about state and nation as pertaining to the political fringes (Shoshan 2015). This is an analytical and conceptual move which often exceptionalises racism and reinforces notions of ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2015).

Radical critiques of Boasian racial liberalism starting in the 1960s, inspired by the nascent field of Black studies (Anderson 2019; de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023). They took aim at what they declared to be the fiction that anthropology itself and the societies it studies had become ‘post-racial’ by declaring race to be a social construct and adopting a ‘no race’ position. Boasian racial liberalism would also at times appear to efface the central role that transatlantic slavery played in the formulation of anti-Black racism (Harrison 1995, 52), and to have reduced racism to a matter of individual attitudes rather than social structures and systemic practice. Critiques of Boasian racial liberalism have also taken aim at the notion that replacing the concept of race with the concept of ethnicity—as popularised by the works of Montagu (1942) and anthropologist Fredrik W. Barth (1969)—would do away with racism. For turning ethnicity into the ‘master principle of classification’, in the words of its critics, ‘euphemized, if not denied race’ by not specifying the conditions under which racism emerges and persists (Harrison 1995, 48).

The radical critique of Boasian racial liberalism also took on board the empirically registrable fact that far-right and racist movements had shifted from a discourse highlighting immigrants and minorities’ physical and phenotypical features to a discourse about the culture and religion of ‘racial others’. They had done so in a very elaborate and conscious attempt at evading the very accusations of racism that often blocked their popular appeal. Diagnosed as ‘cultural racism’ by Frantz Fanon (1967), this was not so much a ‘new racism’ (Balibar 1991), as a return to the very origins of European racism by making culture and religion the central markers of exclusion of ‘others’ (Stolcke 1995). Peter Wade makes the important point that ‘race has always been seen as a natural-cultural assemblage in which “nature” and “culture” are always shaping each other and the differences between them are not always clear’ (Wade 2015, 53).

What this return to cultural racism translated into in practice was the racist and discriminatory treatment of Muslim and/or Black populations throughout Western societies in particular, a form of racism often described as ‘Islamophobia’ (Bangstad 2022). Islamophobia is by no means limited to the West. The new forms of racism represented a ‘racism without races’ or a supposedly ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Omi and Winant 1986). By the 1990s, it had arguably become a dominant form of racism in Europe and the US. Regardless of the elaboration and differentiation of the concept of culture in anthropology, out in the real world, ‘culture’ would, over the course of the 1990s, assume some of the very same essentialised properties as the concept of race once had. The new ‘culture talk’ was exemplified in the political construction of the category of ‘Muslim’ which followed in the wake of al-Qaida’s terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001 (Mamdani 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002).

Noteworthy in this context of racism against Muslims was also the ubiquity of racist stereotyping of Muslim males as existential sexual threats against women and women’s rights worldwide (Abu-Lughod 2015). That racist trope travelled fast and far and has been present in, for example, the anti-Muslim hate speech and rhetoric of Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar as well as among Hindutva nationalists in India in recent years. Darren Byler has also noted that the production of Uyghur Muslim men, in particular, as ‘subhuman under the sign of terror’ is characteristic of both state authorities and settler colonial discourse in Xinjang, China (2022, 9). Arjun Appadurai identified a ‘fear of small numbers’ (2006) as a central element of global racisms: with the rise, mainstreaming, and circulation of far-right and racist ideas about white ‘replacement’ or ‘extinction’ in various societies such as Europe, the US, India, and South Africa. Those fears have long since become global.

New frontiers in the anthropological study of race and racisms

Anthropology has been taken to task for largely ignoring race and racism as central to its history, practice, and development (Pierre 2013; Jobson 2020). That anthropological scholarship about race and racism has overwhelmingly focused on Western contexts should not blind us to the fact that while racism is not a human universal (i.e., found in all human cultures), it is certainly a global phenomenon (i.e., found in contemporary human societies in all parts of the world) (Hage 1998; Twine 1998; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2014; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Pierre 2012). Anthropological studies have also demonstrated that many societies that are profoundly multiracial and multicultural—such as in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa (Pierre 2012)—have developed and sustained elaborate racial hierarchies premised on the retention of privileges for the ‘least Black parts’ of the population (Wade 2017). Anthropologists have equally documented how racism can even pervade institutions in which there is a formal commitment to equal treatment or the eradication of racism (Rouse 2009; Shange 2019). Inspired by critical whiteness studies, they have also reversed the tendency to study race through the study of people of colour, and explored the intersections between class, gender, and race among white people (Hartigan 2005). In the ‘decolonizing turn’ in anthropology in recent years, critical calls to dismantle past and present structures of white privilege and white supremacy within anthropology (de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023) as well as to de-centre white epistemologies have been central (Allen and Jobson 2016; Gupta and Stoolman 2022).

Anthropological theories and analyses do not evolve in isolation from developments in society and politics at large. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has engendered a shift from definitions and analyses of racism premised on seeing it as the articulation of individual attitudes, to definitions and analyses with concepts such as ‘systemic’ and/or ‘structural’ racism. That shift now provides directions and new avenues for future research (see, among others, Gilmore 2022), and is discernible in Laurence Ralph’s study of the use of torture alongside everyday incidents of police violence against Black Americans in Chicago (2020) as well as in Ruha Benjamin’s studies of how digital technology structures (coders, developers, users) reinforce racial discrimination and biases that create and inform coded inequity or what Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code” (2019). Inspired by work on science and technology, anthropologists have also taken an interest in how the rise and popularity of modern and privatised DNA testing and the new science of genomics may re-inscribe racial frames and engender racism (M’charek 2005; el-Haj 2007; Fullwiley 2011; Nelson 2016; Abel and Schroeder 2020; Abel 2022). Yet, they have also discussed how the use of genomic analyses can be used to push against racist and colonial frames, for example by solidifying empowering forms of otherness (Benn-Torres and Torres-Colon 2021).

For what it will be worth, in an uncertain human future under conditions of man-made and intertwined ‘polycrises’ including global climate change and environmental destruction, increased migration flows coupled with the bordering of the richer parts of the world, global pandemics, and ravaging wars, anthropology seems in recent years to have taken more substantive steps in the direction of anti-racism (Mullings 2005). As anthropology helps us recognise and address racism, we may in turn be in a better position to deal with looming threats to the idea of a shared humanity.

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Note on contributors

Sindre Bangstad is a Research Professor at KIFO, Oslo, Norway. He was a Visiting Professor in Anthropology at Princeton University 2022-23.

Sindre Bangstad, KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Øvre Slottsgate 6B, 0192 Oslo, Norway. sindre.bangstad@kifo.no

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Agustín Fuentes, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, 116 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. afuentes2@princeton.edu

[1] ”AABA statement on race & racism.” 2019. American Association of Biological Anthropologists, March 27. https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/

[2] “AAA statement on race.” 1998. American Anthropological Association, May 17. https://americananthro.org/about/policies/statement-on-race/

[3] See, for example, ” American Society of Human Genetics statement regarding concepts of ’good genes’ and human genetics.” 2020. American Society of Human Genetics, September 24. https://www.ashg.org/publications-news/ashg-news/statement-regarding-good-genes-human-genetics/#:~:text=Genetics%20demonstrates%20that%20humans%20cannot,ancestry%20have%20no%20scientific%20evidence

[4] From roughly 1840-1945; see “Scientific racism.” Confronting anti-Black racism resource, Harvard Library. https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism

[5] Rabin, Roni Caryn. 2022. “U.S. life expectancy falls again in ‘historic’ setback.” The New York Times, August 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-covid-pandemic.html

[6] Population Reference Bureau. 2021. Black women over three times more likely to die in pregnancy, postpartum than white women, new research finds. Washington, D.C.: PRB. https://www.prb.org/resources/black-women-over-three-times-more-likely-to-die-in-pregnancy-postpartum-than-white-women-new-research-finds/

[7] The authors would like to thank Dr. Tobias Hübinette, Karlstad University, Sweden for information on this.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave