Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Equality & Inequality

Finance

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:23:20 +0000

Village savings and loan group in Gulu District, Uganda in 2016. Picture by Kristina Just, CARE International and CARE Denmark

Daromir Rudnyckyj

University of Victoria

Initially published 7 Feb 2025

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

Abstract:

Finance is a critical dimension of life for most contemporary human beings. Finance refers to the management of money as debt, credit, or capital. Financial practices and techniques date to the dawn of human communities characterised by the division of labour. Indeed, the earliest written records kept in ancient Mesopotamia are records of credit and debt. As such, finance should not be understood as a synonym for capitalism or modernity, but rather as means of administering populations through the management of money. Financial instruments have been deployed in economic systems based on both markets and redistribution. More recently finance has become increasingly indispensable to the organisation of human life, an essential economic sector, and a key domain of employment. As such, it has attracted the attention of anthropologists seeking to understand the systems and practices that undergird human organisation, production, and motivation. Historically, anthropologists have focused most intensively on personal finance, beginning with rotating credit associations and continuing through development initiatives premised on microfinance. More recently, corporate finance has come into focus, with critical work on the discursive practices of market traders, investment bankers, and financial analysts. Less attention has been paid to public finance, with the notable exception of ethnographic research in central banks and newer work on pension funds and municipal bond markets. Anthropology has played a critical role in understanding the black box that is contemporary finance by addressing its practices and its effects on human beings today.

Introduction

Finance has become a critical, if often unremarked, dimension of life for most contemporary human beings. Anyone who borrows money, uses a public road, attends a school, has a cell phone, or plans to retire, is affected by finance. Finance can be broadly glossed as the management of money as debt, credit, or capital. It has been defined as ‘the management of money or other assets, and, in particular, the management of debt and equity as a means of raising capital: making money with money’ (Maurer 2005, 178). Leaving aside the question of what money is, such a definition draws attention to the temporality of money (Miyazaki 2013), or how the value of money changes over time. This is evident, for example, in interest-bearing debt in which the value of money today is greater than its value in the future. Furthermore, finance presumes a community that relies, at least in part, on money or money-like objects and has developed techniques to manage those objects through the processes of organising and allocating labour and resources.

In approaching finance, it is useful, on the one hand, to distinguish it from capitalism, and on the other hand, to understand that there are at least three broad categories of finance with distinct particularities: personal, corporate, and public. ‘Personal finance’ involves the saving, borrowing, and investment decisions of individuals and households. Much of the early work in the anthropology of finance, especially that examining financial institutions and practices, falls under this rubric. Anthropologists examined practices like rotating savings and credit associations (RoSCAs) in Asia and Africa, where a group of individuals contribute a fixed amount of money to a common pool at regular intervals, and each member takes turns to receive the pooled funds (Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962). Personal finance also includes home financing, mortgage schemes, and student loans (Stout 2019; Zaloom 2019) as well as efforts to finance small-scale enterprises through techniques such as ‘microfinance’. Through microfinancing, low-income individuals or business who lack access to traditional banking are provided with small-scale financial services, such as loans, with the aim of promoting financial inclusion and to reduce poverty (Elyachar 2005; Kar 2018; Schuster 2015). ‘Corporate finance’ describes how firms procure capital through equity investment or credit devices (Lepinay 2011; Ortiz 2021; Souleles 2019) and the analysis of these arrangements (Ho 2009; Leins 2018). It further entails how the instruments and contracts devised to facilitate these sorts of commercial relations themselves become the object of investment and speculation (Hertz 1998; Zaloom 2006). ‘Public finance’ examines the role of states in managing economies through financial techniques as well as the deployment of finance for broader collective goals (Peebles 2021; Riles 2011). This includes activities such as managing inflation (Holmes 2023) or raising funds for public projects (Mizes 2023). Monetary policy, the management of national currencies executed by central bankers and other financial experts, constitutes fertile ground for anthropological analysis of public finance (Abolafia 2020). Taxation represents another emerging domain in which critical anthropological questions regarding finance and the public might be asked (Kauppinen 2020; Mugler, Johansson, and Smith 2024).

The importance of public finance, even in economies organised primarily around market action, illuminates the distinction between finance and capitalism. Given that capitalism relies on the management of money to facilitate the pursuit of profit, finance is essential to it. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conflate finance with either modernity or capitalism, as finance is also indispensable in any monetised economy whether based on redistribution or the pursuit of profit. Ancient Mesopotamian communities in which redistribution served as the primary mode of exchange required financial mechanisms to ensure the equitable allocation of resources and the preservation of public order. Indeed, the earliest complex human communities that left written records in Mesopotamia developed their systems of writing to initially serve financial purposes, such as the allocation of grain, which was made equivalent to monetary units (Hudson 2004). The vast majority of written records from ancient Mesopotamia document financial transactions, and set interest rates are a distinctive feature of these records (Goetzmann 2016). Soviet communism was also dependent on complex systems of financial management (Mills and Brown 1966). Today, finance is indispensable to any economic endeavour dedicated toward the public good. Sovereign wealth funds utilise ‘custodial finance’ which seeks to benefit the public and meet an array of social commitments (Myhre 2020, 171). Anyone who works at a public university likely does so in a building whose construction was financed through the issuance of bonds.^[1]Indeed, bonds serve as a critical means through which public infrastructure is financed, including universities, roads, hospitals, ports, rail lines, electrical grids, and water and sewer systems (Anand 2018; Muehlebach 2023). Such projects may facilitate the capitalist pursuit of profit, but they are not capitalist in themselves and may serve public or non-profit aims. For example, financing public higher education was justified under the prerogative of fostering a liberal citizenry capable of self-government. As Wendy Brown has argued, the massive post-WWII investment that North Atlantic states made in post-secondary institutions was instrumental to creating robust democratic polities (2015). Financial instruments such as bonds were critical to financing the establishment and expansion of these institutions. As the financing of higher education illustrates, although the bonds used for financing may circulate as tradable commodities on bond markets, it would be a mistake to reduce public finance strictly to the pursuit of profit.

In addition to distinguishing finance from capitalism, it is useful to differentiate it from the type of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can be conceived of as an extension of market rationality to domains of life not previously conceived of as economic, such as child-rearing, crime rates, or even religious practice (Foucault [1979] 2008; Rudnyckyj 2010). Finance, as the management of money, can be a means or tool through which such an extension can be executed, but is not reducible to it. An emergent literature on financialisation, which examines the influence of capital markets in contemporary economic and political life (Pike and Pollard 2010), addresses how finance increasingly frames the practices of citizens in their everyday lives (Elder 2017; Pitluck, Mattioli and Souleles 2018; Rethel 2018).

Anthropology has made distinct contributions to understanding finance by focusing on the embodied practices of financiers, the reflexivity of financial knowledge, the symbolic nature of financial knowledge and practice, the irrational aspects of financial practice, the formation of subjects through finance, the politics of finance, and the ways in which finance reflects normative values. But before delving into these aspects, it is important to trace the development of anthropological scholarship on finance.

Contextualising anthropological scholarship

Domains of production and reproduction have long been foci of anthropological inquiry (Meillassoux 1981). In this regard, the discipline has focused on how human communities sustain and reproduce themselves, whether through hunting and gathering (DeVore and Lee 1968; Sahlins 1972), agriculture (Mintz 1960; Rappaport 1967; Wolf 1966), or industry (Dunn 2004; Ong 1987; Rudnyckyj 2010). Yet, despite this, finance is often regarded as a novel object of anthropological focus, best left to economists, or as constituting a distinct academic discipline. Business schools typically have several faculty members who focus on finance as a sub-specialisation of degrees in business or commerce (Orta 2019). Such scholars are engaged in the practical dimension of finance, pursuing research on applied topics such as investment strategy, portfolio management, financial engineering, risk management, and the trading of financial instruments, such as equities,^[2] bonds, and derivatives.^[3]This work may entail building mathematical models of investment techniques, the development of formulas through which to understand financial markets, and tools to facilitate risk management.

Finance as an object of anthropological inquiry is an outgrowth of the changing focus of the discipline. Whereas in its initial iteration, anthropology assumed a distinction between tradition and modernity and took as its object a primitive other presumed to be outside history (Fabian 1983), subsequently anthropology has focused on problems of modernisation and social change (Nash 1965; Peacock 1968; Wilson 1971). As a result, modernity itself became the object of anthropological analysis (Barker et al. 2009; Ferguson 1999; Holston 2008; Newell 2012). Given the constitutive role of finance as a tool of rationalisation (Weber 1958), finance, like other constitutive features of modernity such as science (Rabinow 1999), bureaucracy (Bear and Mathur 2015; Gupta 2012), and capitalism (Nash 1981), has become a focus of anthropological inquiry.

Since shortly after World War II, anthropologists became increasingly interested in addressing finance (Bascom 1952). Given the disciplinary engagement with economic development that emerged in this period and the ensuing wave of decolonisation that took place across Asia and Africa, where extensive ethnographic fieldwork was underway, this was a logical turn of events. Economic growth was the central problem in many of these locations (Bohannan and Dalton 1965; Geertz ed. 1963; 1963). Situated within these shifts, early anthropological works on finance approached it by focusing on development, including bottlenecks to it as well as by studying the existing institutions that might provide the capital to fund development. Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz pursued this line of inquiry and, through their ethnographic work, showed how anthropology could understand factors that inhibited economic growth. For example, in Indonesia, two different communities were seen to lack different critical elements to enable their and the nation-state’s development. While Muslim traders in Java had individual initiative but lacked collective institutions, villagers in Bali had strong collective institutions but lacked individual initiative (Geertz 1963). On the one hand, the Javanese traders were capable entrepreneurs but they did not have forms of social solidarity that facilitated institutions beyond individual or family units. On the other hand, people in Bali readily formed collaborative initiatives, but lacked entrepreneurial dynamism. Engaging with questions of economic development, anthropologists also drew attention to microfinance practices and institutions that were already an integral part of different societies. In this vein, RoSCAs were identified as pivotal institutions that facilitated household investment and consumption in both Asia and Africa (Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962). A major theme of these early studies in emergent post-colonial societies was how financial forms cemented social ties and served as a means of facilitating collective cohesion.

Over the past four decades finance has become an increasingly critical facet of global economic activity (Kalb 2023, 94). In the US, the financial sector accounts for over 20% of the value added to the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), compared to 11% for manufacturing (Tran 2023). In the UK, the financial sector provides for over 8% of national economic output (Hutton, et al 2024). Given the increasingly important role of finance in contemporary economic life, this domain has become an ever-more important site for ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, perhaps the most widely read anthropologist in the world, and certainly one of the most influential, is the long-time columnist for the Financial Times, Gillian Tett. Tett has brought an ethnographic sensibility to her explanation of financial crises (Tett 2009) and written explicitly on the value of an anthropological perspective on finance and other domains of contemporary capitalism (Tett 2021).

The difference between finance as an academic specialisation and anthropological work on finance is that anthropological approaches typically entail a ‘second-order observation’ (Holmes and Marcus 2006) and ‘para-ethnography’ (Holmes and Marcus 2006). Second-order observation involves documenting the observations of expert observers. Para-ethnography enjoins anthropologists to recognise the ethnographic practices in which their interlocutors might engage and take them as starting points for their own ethnographic inquiries. In this sense, anthropological work on finance sheds light on the context, assumptions, and background knowledge that constitute knowledge and practice in finance (Rudnyckyj 2024). This disciplinary approach has yielded many generative insights.

As a form of knowledge, practice, and academic discipline, finance is sometimes represented as an objective form of transcendental knowledge. Like other hegemonic forms of positivist knowledge, such as science or medicine, finance presumes that its facts are unassailable, its methods are objective, and the context of its knowledge production are irrelevant. Anthropology interrogates these assumptions by drawing close attention to the embodied, reflexive, and irrational dimensions of financial knowledge instead.

Embodied finance and the reflexivity of financial knowledge

Rather than abstract calculation, anthropologists of finance have shown how finance is embodied in its practitioners. In open outcry financial markets, where traders physically met to buy and sell financial contracts in trading pits, the physical size, gestures, and voices of traders were critical to the operation of the market. Bids and offers were articulated orally in full view of other traders as a means of ensuring the transparent functioning of the market. Traders added ‘lifts’ to the soles of their shoes and wore brightly coloured trading jackets to enhance their visibility and increase their chances of being recognised in trading pits (Zaloom 2003, 6). Even more revealing than the material characteristics of trading is the fact that those participating in the exchange of financial instruments came to embody the market, relying on their bodies rather than mental calculation in deciding when to buy and sell. As Caitlin Zaloom explains, ‘In training their bodies as instruments of both reception and delivery of the underlying information of market numbers, the first step is learning not to calculate’ (Zaloom 2003, 7). Although open outcry equity, bond, and derivative markets are largely an historical relic today and most trading is done through algorithms, this work offers broader insights into the embodied domains of financial action.

The embodied nature of finance and bodily dispositions also impact financial action. Thus, there are ‘ways of knowing that are normally repressed, subordinated, and considered slightly illicit—the ways of knowing relegated in such technocratic organizations to the realm of the anecdotal, hype, of intuition, of experience’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 237). A specific example is the gut pain that former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is reported to experience in response to market gyrations and movements in the rate of inflation; the decision of whether to raise (or lower) interest rates in response to such movements is often felt by Greenspan through a ‘pain in the stomach’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 241). In this sense, anthropologists have documented how managing the money supply in the largest economy in the world is not a purely mental or rational process but is quite literally conducted according to gut feeling.

A related intervention in qualitative studies of finance has been to show that financial knowledge differs from other forms of positivist knowledge in its reflexive power. In some scientific disciplines such as physics or geology, the objects of analysis are not fundamentally transformed by or through the act of scientific investigation. Yet financial knowledge can have profound effects on the objects it studies (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 123). Take, for example, the Black-Scholes options pricing model, created by several professors of finance who were subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize. This mathematical model was developed in 1973 to approximate the value of derivatives based on other investment instruments, taking into account the impact of time and other risk factors, and became used to price options contracts.^[4]Critically, the model became more accurate over time as financial theory reflexively conditioned the financial world that it purported to describe. Traders began to adopt the Black-Scholes model as a ‘guide to trading’ (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 123). Thus, it was no longer just used to describe the options trading market, but it was reflexively used by traders as a basis for their action in the market. ‘Gradually, “reality” (in this case, empirical prices) was performatively reshaped in conformance with the theory’ (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 127).

While scholars of finance often presume efficient markets, such markets do not exist outside of textbooks and theoretical models. This is evident in financial practices such as arbitrage trading, which entails exploiting the price differences of an asset in two different markets (Miyazaki 2013). If markets were truly efficient, such differences should disappear as soon as they are noted, yet financial firms and traders can generate profits by exploiting these differences (Donovan 2021). Arbitrage traders themselves facilitate the disappearance of these price differences. In this sense, the practices of arbitrage traders are indispensable in the production of market truths.

Anthropologists have shown how financial techniques are deployed to extend the ideology of the market to reconfigure different aspects of life, including to alter employment and labour conditions. For example, ‘shareholder value’—the value assigned to different stockholders based on estimated calculations of the company’s profit generating potential over a period of time—was instrumental to rationalise the everyday operations of American business (Ho 2009). Dating to the New Deal,^[5]American corporations exercised paternalistic corporate practices and were largely insulated from the pressures of the stock market (Ho 2009, 136). This resulted in extensive hiring and generous employee compensation. According to investment bankers, until the 1980s, corporations could disregard the pressures and expectations of the stock market, which led them to insufficiently heed market norms. Instead, they sought to cultivate employee loyalty through generous salaries and benefits and the guarantee of lifetime employment. However, in a bid to make US corporations conform more thoroughly to market calculations and the dictates of economic rationality, in the 1980s, Wall Street investment banks began the widespread deployment of the notion of shareholder value. Making shareholder value the central tenet of corporate life precipitated a stunning transformation by forcing firms to conform more rigidly to market imperatives. Thus, shareholder value served as a vehicle to rationalise corporate practice in an effort to make firms more efficient, productive, and competitive, but at the same time leading to massive dislocations as many employees were laid off, or ‘liquidated’ (Ho 2009).

Representational effects and decentring numerical calculation

A key anthropological insight has been to document the effects of financial representation. In this sense, anthropologists have analysed how the presentation and communication of financial information impacts individuals and groups. Anthropologists working in central banks have shown how regulators introduce new guidelines to transform the market and achieve desired outcomes. For example, in an attempt to minimize ‘systemic risk’, that is, the potential for a disruption in one part of the financial system to spread and cause widespread instability or collapse of the system as a whole, regulators in the Bank of Japan transformed interbank payments from a ‘designated time net settlement’ system, in which balances are settled at a fixed point in time each day, to a new ‘real time gross settlement’ system, in which each transaction is settled individually, fully, and in real time (Riles 2004, 397). In so doing, regulators sought to transform the market practices of bankers. The new order that they envisioned would reduce the technocratic intervention of regulators and create an interbank settlement scheme which would reflect the ‘aggregation of the actions of individuals, rather than as an artifact of…planning’ (Riles 2004, 397). Ethnographic studies by Annelise Riles, Douglas Holmes, and others document not simply the actions of financial regulators, but rather how those actors seek to reflexively act on the actions of others.

Research in central banks reveals how financial regulators deploy representations to manipulate their objects. Here financial experimentation takes place in practice, rather than at an artificially created distance from the world, as is characteristic of the natural sciences. Often, language itself is mobilised by economic authorities and financial governors to create conditions conducive to economic growth. This creates an ‘economy of words’ in which the deliberate use of language by central banks influences economic behaviour, market expectations, and public perceptions (Holmes 2014). In this sense, regulators rely as much, if not more, on language than statistics and numbers in managing inflation. There becomes a complex but subtle practice of reflexive interpretation among the key economic players, including bankers, journalists, investors, and corporate managers, when they read the policy pronouncements of central banks. The economy of words operates at the limits of calculation ‘where knowledge is imperfect and experience and intuition can or must inform judgment’ (Holmes 2014, 28). Thus, modern financial power acts, through language, on the action of those who are subject to an economy. For example, central banks realise that doubts about the stability of a bank can become ‘self-fulfilling’, leading to the possibility of a bank run, an occurrence when a large number of customers withdraw their deposits simultaneously due to fears that the bank may become insolvent, potentially causing the bank to collapse. In response, central bankers must issue ‘calming statements’ to reassure the public. In this sense, central bankers self-consciously seek to ensure that they are ‘widely believed by the public to be more knowledgeable about the economy and its current state and path than the public itself’ (Holmes 2014, 117). In sum, the economy of words describes how central bankers, through communicative statements, enlist the practices of those who in turn constitute the economy—that is, the public—to realise the representation of central bankers.

A focus on the language deployed in financial contracts illuminates critical economic events, such as the economic crisis of 2008. This cataclysm can largely be attributed to the reliance of derivative contracts on promises, whereby derivatives can be used to make promises to repay in the event that other promises will be broken (Austin 1962 in Appadurai 2016). Leading up to the crisis, US banks had issued mortgages with adjustable rates to high-risk borrowers who promised to repay the mortgages. These risky loans were bundled into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which were sold to investors. Because they were bundled together, the true risk was obscured. To protect against the potential defaults on these securities, investors and financial institutions had purchased a particular type of derivative called ‘credit default swaps’. These were essentially insurance against the failure of the MBS and thus represented a second set of promises: the promise by an insurer, most notably AIG, to compensate the purchaser in the event of default. When housing prices fell across the board, many of the subprime borrowers defaulted. This led to a collapse in the value of the mortgage-backed securities. AIG then faced massive payouts due to the second set of promises to repay. On a broad scale, what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘failure of language’ can be disastrous, precipitating the waves of defaults that characterise financial collapse after asset bubbles burst (2016).

Attention to financial representation enables reflection on the tendency by financial actors and economists to naturalise economic events such as financial crises (Roitman 2014). Liberal economists represent financial crises as the result of failures in judgement. Such failures cause them to misrecognise value in false value. Marxist economists, in contrast, take financial crises as the inevitable outcome of the boom-and-bust business cycle endemic to capitalism. These accounts naturalise crises, rather than viewing them as the contingent outcome of human action and decision-making. Financial actors and economists thus represented the precipitous drop in house prices after 2008 as a ‘natural development’ (Roitman 2014, 44). This interpretation suggests that home values reset of their own organic accord, rather than as the concrete effects of the practices of financial professionals who made credit readily available to borrowers based on financial models that did not accurately represent the real estate reality that they were reflexively creating through subprime loans, the securitisation of these loans, and the credit default swaps that insured them. The chain reaction of financial losses that came from these decisions undermined the stability of major institutions and contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The limits to the purely scientific and calculative nature of finance is further called into question through the empirical observation that financial actors are not strictly rational actors, but are prone to story-telling and emotional reactions (Chong and Tuckett 2015). This aspect distinguishes the anthropological approach to finance from the social studies of finance approach common in disciplines such as sociology and geography. The latter approaches can reproduce the very epistemology of finance by presuming that ‘markets are more or less analogous to scientific practice’ (Riles 2010, 795). Financial markets do not conform to predictable, rational models, despite the claims of practitioners (Riles 2010, 796). Indeed, anthropological work has shown that rational calculation can be an obstacle to financial action. As described above, many derivatives traders at the Chicago Board of Trade, for example, actively sought to avoid calculating and assessing risks mathematically because they found it a hindrance to profitable action (Zaloom 2003).

Ethnographic work on financial analysis shows how important narrative accounts, stories, and representations are in the transmission of financial knowledge (Leins 2018). Financial analysis entails evaluating financial markets by focusing on the present and future prospects of the share prices of listed companies. Qualitative stories provide a critical frame for the numerical data that constitute the intellectual products created by financial analysts. Rather than starting with statistical and quantitative data, financial analysts start with a qualitative narrative about the economy. This story explains the position of a specific company within the broader economy. Statistics and other quantitative data are then mobilised to augment the narrative. Relatedly, anthropologists have found that ideologically laden concepts, such as the efficient markets hypothesis—the idea that share prices reflect all available information—are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation.^[6]Making a determination of financial value on Wall Street is not an abstract process of calculation, but rather a practice that is shaped by subjective notions, such as investment skill and the presumption that share prices actually reflect available information (Ortiz 2021, 244-5).

Subject formation and the reproduction of norms

Anthropological work has found that financial technologies and practices create subjects insofar as they elicit certain habits, constitute identities, and mould dispositions (Chong 2018, 35-63). Some finance practitioners adopt the practices that constitute their work lives in their lives outside work as well. For example, some arbitrage traders, whose work involves buying and selling assets to profit from price discrepancies in different markets, extend the logic of the market and apply it to their own lives and surroundings (Miyazaki 2003). However, this can become more than just a job pursuit or means of earning a living. Tada, a trader with whom Hiro Miyazaki engages at length, proposes various domains in which to exercise fiscal reason. One idea he floats is purchasing a money-losing religion, restructuring it to operate better, and thus turning it into a financially viable enterprise (Miyazaki 2003, 261). Tada also notes that golf club memberships are overvalued in Japan and that people purchase memberships based on concerns about status and prestige. Tada proposes buying poorly managed golf courses, improving their management, and selling memberships to the public at large instead of just a select group, ‘thereby at once turning a profit and dealing a blow to the irrational Japanese propensity to overvalue status’ (Miyazaki 2003, 261). Tada is fixated on extending economic rationality into domains that were not strictly organised according to its calculus, both on the side of management and consumers. Consumers do not act according to the dictates of market logic as they overpay for something that is not as valuable as they make it out to be. Managers do not act rationally because they are mismanaging their enterprises, at once profiting off the irrationality of consumers but also not garnering maximum profit due to poor administration of their resource. Rather, traders like Tada seek to implement market logic in action to reform institutions and individuals that do not conform to its logic.

Similar to the extension of economic rationality, promoting risk-taking action is another critical tool for shaping a financial actor. Working with risk is a means through which traders form themselves and differentiate themselves from others (Zaloom 2004, 371). The prospect of accruing large profits or suffering devastating losses creates subjects who can not only tolerate the high-stakes scene of the trading floor, but also become vehicles for the accumulation of profits through risk-taking. Financial contracts are also deployed as key means of subject formation as evident in the ways that various branches of the Malaysian state sought to transform the types of contracts used in Islamic finance in the country from debt-based to equity-based (Rudnyckyj 2019). Whereas debt-based contracts encourage risk-averse, rent-seeking behaviour, equity-based ones entail more risk and encourage entrepreneurial dispositions. As part of its efforts to foster more entrepreneurial dispositions among segments of the population, especially among the Malay-Muslim majority, the state sought to re-centre Islamic finance around equity-based contracts (Rudnyckyj 2017).

Work on personal finance has shown how financial relations are not merely economic, but are embedded in moral obligations, social status, and kinship networks. In countries on the global periphery undergoing rapid economic transformation, such as Mongolia and Chile, finance shapes collective ties and everyday experiences. Given the breach between formal market economies and traditional systems of exchange, contemporary Mongolians engage in a mix of formal and informal economic practices, navigating risks and the unpredictability of income, market prices, and employment opportunities through flexible strategies (Empson 2020). This includes both a reliance on informal economic practices, such as bartering, family support networks, and small-scale trade, alongside formal employment in sectors like mining, government, or retail. Mongolian women navigating change live ‘in the gap’ between futures they desire and the difficulty of their everyday existence. Similarly, in Chile, financial precarity shapes everyday life. Families live in a constant state of economic vulnerability, where income is uncertain, and the need to rely on credit or loans is unavoidable. People use a variety of strategies to cope with their financial instability, including borrowing from formal financial institutions, local moneylenders, or friends and relatives (Han 2012).

The role of finance in producing subjects illuminates that it is a profoundly political tool and domain. Whereas disciplines like the scholarly study of business seek to represent commerce and the market as apolitical, anthropological work has documented the power relations inherent in financial relationships. In one of the earliest analyses that took engagement in financial markets as a central object, Ellen Hertz recognised that the ‘interpretative framework through which Shanghainese read their stock market is firstly political, and secondly, if at all, “economic”’ (Hertz 1998, 23). Indeed, although ostensibly communist, political leaders in China experiment with stock markets to tap into the individual savings of millions of petty entrepreneurs in the interest of national development. This initiative has yielded one of the most impressive economic transformations of recent times in which hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have been elevated out of dire poverty (Pieke 2014).

In Malaysia, elites sought to make the country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, into what they called ‘the New York of the Muslim world’ (Rudnyckyj 2014). By this, they meant making it a central node in a transnational alternative to the conventional financial system with its key hubs in the US, the UK, Japan, Hong Kong, and Germany. In so doing, they envisioned a new ‘geoeconomics’ based on hubs not only in Kuala Lumpur but also in places such as Istanbul, Dubai, and Manama. Malaysia is a particularly advantageous site from which to imagine such a project, given its strategic location between the world’s greatest source of surplus capital (the oil states of the Middle East) and its foremost site of industrial production (most notably China, but also the rapidly expanding economies of Southeast Asia). In this emergent economic configuration, Islamic finance experts seek to balance the ethical imperatives of Islam, such as fairness, transparency, and the prohibition of interest, with the practical need to remain competitive and financially profitable in the global market.

Ethical concerns are not only limited to efforts to reconcile religious imperatives with financial action. The emergence of environmental and social governance (ESG) concerns in the management and operations of corporations has drawn critical anthropological attention. Anthropologists have found that investors dedicated toward socially responsible investment use ethics as a tool to manage uncertainty in financial markets. In a field marked by unpredictability, ethics are employed not only as a moral guide but also as a practical resource to help investors make decisions when the future of investments is unclear. By embedding ethical considerations into financial practices, investors can create a sense of certainty and confidence about their investments, as they believe they are aligning their actions with long-term societal good (Leins 2020). Shareholder activism constitutes another domain in which ethical concerns intersect and shape financial action. Activist investors focus on issues like environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and corporate governance. Such shareholder activism offers a way for investors to participate in shaping the moral direction of corporations, challenging the traditional view that financial markets are purely profit-driven (Welker and Wood 2011).

Relatedly, anthropologists have emphasised how finance can also be a site to address inequality. Following the financial crisis of 2008, a group of financial professionals formerly employed on Wall Street came together to deploy their expertise to rethink finance in the interest of creating a more equal and just society (Appel 2014). More recently, financial frontiers, as spaces where financial concepts and products are reimagined in ways that challenge traditional boundaries or structures, have become key sites for rethinking normative financial practices and values (Ballestero, Muehlebach, and Pérez-Rivera 2023). The use of microfinance, informal financial networks, or alternative banking systems that cater to populations that are not well served by traditional banking institutions, are some examples of such reimagining. In contrast, finance can also provide an avenue for deepening inequality, as in Macedonia, where finance served as a means by which an authoritarian regime could strengthen its grip on power (Mattioli 2020). Construction in the country’s capital, Skopje, was enabled by international investment. Although credit relationships expanded, political elites were able to monopolise access to this international credit. As financial flows were centralised and restricted, these elites were able to create a vast network of exploitative domestic debt relations.

Ethnographic work has revealed how normative values shape the perceptions of financial actors, particularly in their own understanding of the effects of their action. A case in point is private equity, a form of investment where firms invest in private companies, often taking a controlling interest, with the goal of increasing their value and selling them for a profit. Private equity investors justify their wealth and privilege based on the notion that they are hard workers and create value, and the Protestant values that attribute moral worth to labour provide a frame for the activities of these well-off private equity investors and serve to justify their actions (Souleles 2019). Similarly, Wall Street financiers enter the career of investment banking as fresh graduates of certain Ivy League universities as ‘the smartest’ and ‘the brightest’, and thereby become socialised into a world of high risk and high reward (Ho 2009). Moreover, the corridors of finance reproduced many of the same race, class, and gender hierarchies that likewise structure other domains of modern life (Fisher 2012).

Conclusion

Finance is a constitutive pillar of contemporary life for most human beings today. Whether considering credit provided though microfinance, the impact of stock market gyrations on retirement accounts, or public bonds that build our places of work, modern life seems almost unimaginable outside the management of money. Hence, finance constitutes a critical domain for analysis and inquiry. Given its centrality to modern life, yet how poorly it is understood, anthropological work dedicated toward understanding how power works must engage with dominant forms of finance as well as alternatives to it. Germinal anthropological accounts have opened the ‘black box’ of finance and illuminated many of its presumptions. These include its claims to scientific status, its apolitical nature, the power of its representations, the reflexive relationship that it has with the broader economy, and its power to mould subjects.

Finance is a complex system comprised of esoteric practices and symbolic representation. Whereas anthropology has long attended to symbolic systems such as language (Basso 1979), religion (Geertz 1973), kinship (Schneider 1968) and the symbolic dimensions of capitalism (Sahlins 1976), the symbolic nature of finance has yet to be thoroughly unpacked. Symbolic representation in finance is premised on stochastic models and high-level mathematical reasoning. With some notable exceptions (Maurer 2002; Myhre and Holmes 2022), anthropologists have avoided extensive inquiry into the symbolic nature of finance. It will be incumbent upon future anthropological research projects to engage on this level if the discipline is to continue to create generative insights into the operations of finance in the future and fulfil its role of unmasking the taken-for-granted truths of modern life.

In this sense, ethnographic research has the potential to raise the veil on the inner mechanisms of finance, demystify its opacity, and relativise its truth claims, perhaps contributing to bringing into being a more equitable future. To achieve this end, research in the domain of finance will be most effective if it entails analysis rather than critique or denunciation. Anthropologists can generate future insights into how finance operates by reporting on its practices and decoding its mode of knowledge, much as they have done with other domains of human life, such as kinship, religion, or language.

This is an unprecedented moment in the history of finance. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 violated long-accepted truisms about the behaviour of real estate markets and challenged the models that financiers use to model markets (Taleb 2007). The response to the crisis brought about widespread experiments with zero and negative interest rates, meaning that borrowing money at an institutional level was free and, in some cases, subsidised. More recently, states around the world have struggled to control inflation. The common strategy of controlling inflation through raising interest rates has proven to be inadequate. A recent paper published by an official of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US, contends that economists have a poor understanding of how economies operate and the effects of the financial models they use (Rudd 2021). Given these developments, the time is nigh for anthropologists to further engage with this critical domain of expertise and bring to light precisely how these opaque domains shape contemporary human life.

Note

Research for this entry was carried out as part of research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the Insight Program, Grant Number 435-2018-0453.

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Note on contributor

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. He is the author of Beyond debt: Islamic experiments in global finance (2019, Chicago University Press) and Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development (2010, Cornell University Press). He is the co-editor of Religion and the morality of the market (2017, Cambridge University Press).

Professor Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, PO Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria BC V8W 2Y2, Canada. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-3940-4881

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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

Jean Price-Mars

Felix Stein — Tue, 09 May 2023 10:09:14 +0000

Photo: Haïti Inter: Quand Price Mars racontait Haïti

Jhon Picard Byron

Initially published 9 May 2023

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

Abstract:

L’anthropologue Jean Price-Mars est une figure importante de l’Atlantique noir. Diplomate, écrivain, homme politique et anthropologue, l’auteur a exercé une influence qui va au-delà d’Haïti et de la Caraïbe. Cette entrée rend compte des contributions clefs de Price-Mars à l’histoire intellectuelle des XIXe et XXe siècles en Haïti, dans les Caraïbes et au-delà. S’illustrant en tant qu’un des principaux fondateurs de « l’école haïtienne d’ethnologie », il a développé les narrations de la nation haïtienne jouant un rôle déterminant dans l’appropriation des héritages africains en Haïti, du vodou en particulier, ainsi que dans la formation du discours de la diversité culturelle dans les Amériques noires. Reconnu comme un précurseur de la Négritude, mouvement culturel et politique anticolonialiste qui se fonde sur l’appropriation et la valorisation de l’héritage Africain, il a repensé les concepts de race, de culture, et d’identité noire en Amérique anticipant, ce faisant, les grands débats des dernières décennies des cultural et des postcolonial studies. Comme pour beaucoup d’autres figures du monde atlantique, en particulier de l’Africain-Américain aux racines haïtiennes W. E. B. Dubois, ses voyages et ses études en Europe ont joué un rôle déterminant dans l’élaboration de la pensée de Price-Mars. Pourtant, en Europe, en dehors de certains cercles littéraires et de spécialistes d’Haïti, il n’est que peu connu. Il faut dire que, pendant longtemps, les anthropologues–à la différence des spécialistes d’études littéraires–ne se sont que très peu intéressés à l’anthropologie haïtienne ; ce n’est, en effet, que depuis 2005, qu’une nouvelle génération de chercheurs procède à l’analyse des œuvres que les figures de l’anthropologie haïtienne ont laissées à la postérité.

Introduction

2019 a marqué à la fois le cinquantenaire de la disparition de Jean Price-Mars (1969), auteur important de l’Atlantique Noir^{^[1]}, et le centenaire de la première publication de son ouvrage La vocation de l’élite (1919). L’auteur, qui a représenté, dans les années 1950 et 1960, le patrimoine spirituel le plus célèbre d’Haïti, jouit encore aujourd’hui d’une grande notoriété dans son pays, non seulement parmi les gens d’un certain âge, mais aussi parmi les jeunes. Au gré des circonstances, son nom est évoqué par nombre d’Haïtiens, universitaires ou politiques, qui le célèbrent comme le « chantre de la culture haïtienne ».

Cette grande reconnaissance locale de Price-Mars contraste avec son oubli voire son effacement de la scène universitaire mondiale. L’auteur y est relégué au second plan alors que ses contemporains Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon et Léopold Sédar Senghor jouissent d’une forte exposition. Pourtant, ce dernier a reconnu les apports substantiels de Price-Mars à la Négritude (Fouchard 1956, 3), ce mouvement intellectuel né dans les années 1930 parmi des étudiants africains et antillais majoritairement francophones dont les visées politiques, foncièrement anti-coloniales, avaient un double caractère anticapitaliste et identitaire, cherchant à découvrir et à promouvoir des valeurs universelles fondées sur des valeurs propres aux populations noires (il était alors fait référence à un nouvel humanisme dit « humanisme nègre »). Les pensées de plusieurs de ces protagonistes sont appropriées par les postcolonial studies et les théories décoloniales depuis les décennies 1980 et 1990.

Price-Mars, qui a pourtant beaucoup inspiré les figures mentionnées plus haut comme un penseur clé de l’émancipation du joug colonial, demeure un grand oublié (Célius 2018). L’aura qui entoura sa participation au 1^er et au 2^e Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs (1956 et 1959) est la preuve^{^[2]}, s’il en fallait une, de son influence à la fin des années 1950. Une des thématiques centrales de ces congrès a été anticipée et développée par l’auteur dans son chef-d'œuvre Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) que la plupart des participants ont dû lire avant de prendre part à ces événements. Nadia Yala Kisukidi relève, à grand renfort de références aux Actes, que les orientations générales du Congrès visaient « à promouvoir une “politique de la culture” contre le préjugé nocif de “peuple sans culture” porté par le processus colonial et la ruine psychique qu'il a entraînée chez les peuples colonisés » (Kisukidi 2014, 61).

Un penseur anticolonial comme Price-Mars ne devrait pas être maintenu dans l’oubli. Parce qu’il peut être considéré comme une figure de proue de la Négritude et au regard de sa contribution au mouvement intellectuel tendant à faire de la culture un enjeu primordial des luttes pour l'émancipation des peuples noirs - ce qui sera préjudiciable à la prééminence du marxisme -, il a lieu d’étudier la genèse de sa pensée, d’en exposer ses grandes lignes et souligner ce qui la distingue de celles de certains intellectuels et politiques qui s’en réclament.

Price-Mars dans la pensée anthropologique haïtienne

On ne saurait évoquer Price-Mars sans parler de l’anthropologie haïtienne. En Haïti, pour paraphraser une formule utilisée pour définir la géographie, « [l’anthropologie], ça sert, d’abord, à faire [la politique] » (cf. Lacoste [1976] 2012 ; Argyriadis et al. 2020). De fait, la politique a joué un rôle de premier plan dans le développement de la discipline anthropologique dans ce pays. Les premiers anthropologues haïtiens tels que Anténor Firmin, Louis-Joseph Janvier ont occupés des fonctions politiques. Leurs préoccupations principales n’étaient, de prime abord, ni d’ordre professionnel ni d’ordre scientifique : le vocabulaire anthropologique leur servait avant tout à traduire et à créer des narrations stratégiques d’identifications culturelles (cf. Bhabha [1994] 2007, 224–225), issues du monde politique et social. Du contexte haïtien, nation mise au ban après la révolution d’esclaves en 1804, découlent des narrations sociales et littéraires qui se sont vues réappropriées et reformulées par les anthropologues haïtiens à la fin du XIXe siècle.

David Nicholls, chanoine anglais, historien et spécialiste d’Haïti, a saisi les contours de ces narrations nationales comme un « racialisme de non-blancs » [« The racialism or racial consciousness of the non-whites »] (Nicholls 1996, 1-2). Selon lui, les intellectuels haïtiens ont participé à forger une conscience raciale contre l’idéologie coloniale et esclavagiste en mettant en évidence trois aspects : « (1) l’idée d’ancêtres communs biologiques associée à celle qui pose que ce fait biologique est secondaire ; (2) l’idée d’égalité des différentes races humaines ; (3) l’idée que les noirs sont capables de civiliser leur communauté, de contribuer au progrès de l’humanité » (Nicholls 1996, 1–2 ; Byron 2018).

Cet ensemble d’idées, source d’une véritable conscience collective comme le pensait Nicholls, constitue pour ainsi dire les éléments de base de l'idéologie nationale haïtienne. Il s’agit donc d’un discours politique et stratégique des élites dirigeantes visant à tenir ensemble une population plutôt hétérogène pour composer avec (ou affronter) les puissances coloniales. Ce discours trouve sa première formulation dans la constitution haïtienne de 1805, édictée par Jean-Jacques Dessalines, qui, en son article 14, dispose que tous les haïtiens sont « noirs » tout en interdisant l’usage de « toute acception de couleur ». Cet énoncé paradoxal remet en cause le racisme colonial qui plaçait le noir au bas de l’échelle sociale et traduit une tendance quasi impériale des Haïtiens du XIXe siècle à se positionner comme leaders de la lutte pour le progrès et l’émancipation des Africains.

En dépit du fait que le principe contenu dans l’énoncé de cet article 14 n’ait pas été respecté, il a constitué pendant des décennies le fondement idéologique de l’unité nationale haïtienne sous l’hégémonie des élites composées de deux groupes concurrents, voire hostiles, à savoir les noirs et les mulâtres. Il reste qu’en dépit de ces contradictions, le discours unitaire de la nation a fonctionné tant bien que mal. Il a permis au XIXe siècle à cette bourgeoisie naissante de revendiquer sa place dans le capitalisme mondial en s’appuyant sur une cohésion sociale interne en mesure de contenir les tumultes et les mouvements revendicatifs des masses paysannes. D’aucun pourrait tirer la conclusion que ces catégories populaires majoritaires - et en majorité noires -, tout comme certaines franges des élites dominantes, se sont retrouvées bon gré mal gré dans cette nation noire.

Au début du XXe siècle, ce discours se désarticule et, concomitamment, la cohésion nationale qu’il sous-tend s’estompe. Avant cela, tout au long du XIXe siècle, ce discours servira de creuset aux travaux des historiens et des anthropologues tels que Anténor Firmin et Louis-Joseph Janvier. Il s’agit, pour les historiens comme pour les anthropologues, d’illustrer un « universalisme noir », fondé sur l’appartenance des noirs à la communauté humaine et sur l’aptitude spécifique du noir haïtien, comme tous les autres, à se civiliser, et ce, dans un geste intellectuel et patriotique visant la défense de la nation.

Jean Price-Mars, qui a pris le relais des anthropologues politiques, n’a pas fait exception à cette règle. Il poursuit dans un premier temps l’exercice de traduction avant de recomposer et élargir ces narrations à partir des années 1920, ce qui coïncide avec l’entrée dans un contexte de crise et de déstructuration du modèle social haïtien hérité de la colonisation. Le système socio-politique haïtien d’avant crise découlait d’une certaine alliance de classes entre la masse d’anciens esclaves et les élites (noires et mulâtres). Si ce nouvel ordre signait la fin de l’esclavage, il se caractérisait aussi par le maintien des cultivateurs (anciens esclaves) dans des rapports sociaux d’exploitation et de domination marqués par la violence nue et des pratiques de prédations qui, organisées par l’État et les classes dominantes, s’accentuent vers la fin du XIXe siècle. L’analyse de ce modèle social par Price-Mars lui permet de déceler l’exploitation et la domination de la masse par l’élite ; ce qui l'entraînera, tout à la fois, vers la réforme de l’ordre social et l’élaboration de nouvelles narrations.

Entre 1915 et 1930, Price-Mars est conscient des limites des narrations nationales conçues dès les premiers moments de l’indépendance nationale. Déjà, au début du XXe siècle, ces narrations ne permettent plus de limiter l’érosion de l’unité nationale. Il considère l’union du pays haïtien comme une fiction, qui ne pourra nullement perdurer dès que la domination sociale d’après l’indépendance deviendra féroce au point de ressembler à la domination coloniale (Byron 2018).

L’œuvre de Price-Mars demeure partie prenante de la mouvance intellectuelle de la « contre-écriture » (Clifford 1980, 205; Byron 2016) dans sa forme proprement haïtienne de la fin du XIXe siècle. Les intellectuels, les historiens en particulier, ont proposé des discours et récits allant à l’encontre de ceux véhiculés en Occident sur Haïti. Price-Mars représente l’une des figures de cette dynamique dans le domaine de l’anthropologie. Leur démarche, empreinte de cosmopolitisme, visait à la reconnaissance d’Haïti comme une nation à part entière du monde occidental. Elle s’accordait aussi avec celle des classes dominantes qui revendiquaient une reconnaissance au sein du capitalisme mondial. Price-Mars, tout en poursuivant cette démarche, convoque des représentations d’Haïti mettant l’accent sur les différences, sur la particularité du pays, sur sa diversité interne et, in fine, sur son identité. Sa vision du pays cherche à prendre en compte les « incomptés » de la nation, contrairement à la plupart de ses collègues du XIXe siècle. En d’autres termes, Price Mars s’est évertué, durant les années 1920, à illustrer l’identité culturelle haïtienne afin qu’elle serve, d’une part, de ferment à l’exigence d’accession des couches populaires à une citoyenneté pleine et entière, d’autre part, de liant entre les diverses composantes de la nation.

C’est dans cette perspective qui articule politique et culture que Price-Mars s’intéressera au folklore. Il en fera l’objet de « la discipline de l’ethnographie traditionnelle » (Price-Mars 1928), de son anthropologie politiquement motivée. Au travers de son analyse et sa valorisation des cultures haïtiennes, il s’attelle à intégrer dans la nation politique toutes les composantes de la société (Byron et al. 2020, 279 ; Célius 2005b).

L’œuvre de Price Mars s’est formée à partir de ses voyages et de ses rencontres avec des figures intellectuelles de la Caraïbe, tel que Fernando Ortiz. Les années 1920 pendant lesquels il voyage, principalement en Europe, sont marquées par « un courant intellectuel » très largement dominé par le « primitivisme » qui célèbre l’homme non-blanc en tant que représentant de notre « état naturel », « l’Art nègre » fondé sur les arts africains, et le mouvement de la « Renaissance de Harlem », mouvement culturel qui s’étend des noirs de New York à travers les Amériques (Byron et al. 2020, 279). C’est au cours de cette même décennie que l’ethnographie africaniste, développée en France dès 1878, commence à transformer le regard porté sur l’Afrique, en Europe comme dans les Amériques (Sibeud 2002). Les théories de l’évolutionnisme social selon lesquelles les sociétés dites « primitives » étaient censées s’orienter vers le modèle Européen étaient alors remises en question par l’émergence des courants « diffusionnistes » qui associent l’homme à sa culture et non à sa race (Laurière 2015, 19) et qui postulaient un changement culturel moins linéaire (Byron et al. 2020, 279–280).

L’œuvre de Price-Mars s’inspire de ces développements et prend une importance capitale dans les transformations épistémologiques de l’anthropologie au XXe siècle. L’auteur participe à la légitimation des « religions afro-américaines » comme propre objet d’études, en rupture avec l’anthropologie évolutionniste. A ce titre, son œuvre s’inscrit dans « l’âge classique des études afro-américaines » des années 1930 aux années 1950 (Aubrée et Dianteill 2002, 8), tendant à une revalorisation des racines africaines de la diaspora africaine en Europe et aux Amériques. Des anthropologues de nationalités française, brésilienne, haïtienne, américaine, suisse et cubaine, tels qu’entre autres, Roger Bastide, Melville J. Herskovits, Alfred Métraux, Rómulo Lachatañeré et Fernando Ortiz se sont investis dans ce travail. En symbiose avec ce réseau, Price-Mars participe à la co-construction de nouveaux concepts comme « l’acculturation, la transculturation, et l’interpénétration des civilisations » qui tendent à expliquer les changements culturels de l’époque, sans pour autant répéter les racismes et l’Eurocentrisme d’auparavant (Aubrée et Dianteill 2002 ; Magloire et Yelvington 2005).

Bien mieux, Price-Mars a eu une grande influence dans les débats sur la question noire du milieu panafricaniste, qui souhaite unir les peuples africains et ses diasporas. Dans son ouvrage Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928), Price-Mars souligne l’intérêt des tenants du système colonial et néocolonial de présenter les nègres comme des êtres dépourvus de culture, sans histoire, sans morale et sans religion (Byron et al. 2020, 305 ; Célius 1998). Selon lui, la culture constituait un enjeu de la construction nationale en Haïti et dans la lutte anticoloniale, menée entre autres par ses contemporains Césaire, Fanon (en particulier [1959] 2012) et Senghor. Les œuvres de ces penseurs, écrivains et politiques autant que celle de Price-Mars visaient à promouvoir une « politique de la culture » à l’encontre du préjugé colonialiste selon lequel les noirs étaient un « peuple sans culture » (Kisukidi 2014). Price-Mars peut donc être vu comme un penseur clef du mouvement anticolonialiste.

Jeunesse et vie d’homme politique

Jean Mars, dit Jean Price-Mars^{^[3]}, né en 1876, à la Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, commune et chef-lieu d’arrondissement du Département du Nord d’Haïti, fait partie d’une de ces familles de l’oligarchie du Nord du pays qui avaient à la fois une forte emprise sur la paysannerie et une grande influence dans les sphères du pouvoir politique régional et national. Jean Eléomont Mars, son père, intégrait la chambre des représentants des communes, comme député de la Grande Rivière du Nord au moment où naissait son fils en 1876 (Antoine 1981, 9). À cette époque, il était agriculteur, exportateur de café, d’acajou et de bois dur et il construisait sa carrière sur sa réputation individuelle et familiale (Antoine 1981, 11).

La famille de Price-Mars comptait de grands propriétaires terriens, des généraux et des commandants d’arrondissements (Etienne 2007, 135). Price-Mars était donc le produit et, en quelque sorte, héritier d’une forme d’« organisation politico-administrative de l’État post-colonial haïtien » (Etienne 2007). En effet, peu de temps avant que Price-Mars entre à Port-au-Prince, vers 1894 ou 1895, pour finir ses études secondaires, Tirésias Simon Sam, l’un de ses grands cousins, est devenu Président d’Haïti (1896–1902). Un autre de ses cousins, Vilbrun Guillaume, dit Sam, qui lui facilitera ses séjours d’études à Port-au-Prince, a quant à lui, occupé les fonctions de député, avant de devenir ministre de l’Intérieur puis finalement Président d’Haïti, de mars 1915 à juillet 1915. Grâce à sa proximité avec ces deux dirigeants politiques traditionnels haïtiens, il fait, très jeune, son entrée dans la diplomatie haïtienne (Trouillot 1993).

Price-Mars est encore étudiant en médecine lorsqu’ il commence sa carrière dans la diplomatie haïtienne qui ne prendra fin qu’en 1960. Si Price-Mars a dû attendre jusqu’en 1923 pour acquérir son diplôme de médecin en Haïti, il a profité de ses différents séjours diplomatiques en France, en Allemagne et à Washington, entre 1900 et 1917, pour se former dans les sciences de l’homme (Damas 1960). Les questionnements qui occuperont par la suite son œuvre se sont formés durant ces années.

L’homme politique que Price-Mars devient au tout début du siècle était naturellement destiné à être au service de l’oligarchie qui l’a vu naître et qui lui a prédéfini la voie qu’il devrait suivre dans l’espace politique. Cependant, les idées progressistes tirées de ses voyages n’ont jamais quitté son esprit. Price-Mars arrive en France au cœur d’une période d’effervescence idéologique coïncidant avec l’affaire Dreyfus, pendant laquelle l’innocent capitaine Alfred Dreyfus fut accusé d’espionnage à cause de ses racines juives. Price-Mars se trouve ainsi exposé aux divers courants du monde politique français de l’époque : du socialisme de Jean Jaurès au « socialisme nationaliste » de Maurice Barrès en passant par le républicanisme de Georges Clémenceau. Dans le milieu scientifique, les idées de l’anthropologie raciale sont battues en brèche par Émile Durkheim et ses disciples. Il découvre également les idées de solidarité sociale des durkheimiens lesquelles seront traduites dans ses premiers écrits (Byron 2012, 181–225). Cependant, c’est le choc de l’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti de 1915 à 1934 qui le conduira à radicalement changer son orientation politique. Se défaisant de sa position de notable, défenseur de sa classe et de sa famille, il deviendra le porteur d’idéaux d’une réforme de l’État (Owens 2015). Auparavant, et ce jusqu’en 1915, il ne se démarquait guère de « l’idéologie des élites traditionnelles » (Byron 2014, 55–58) et il a ainsi accompagné l’autocrate Vilbrun Guillaume au pouvoir (Byron 2014, 53). Cependant, alors même que Price-Mars ait évolué en rupture avec les idéaux de l’oligarchie, il demeurera toute sa vie loyal à ses proches, en témoigne sa publication tardive intitulée Vilbrun Guillaume-Sam ce méconnu (1961) écrite en hommage à ce dernier.

L’intellectuel engagé

L’engagement de Price-Mars se révèle en réaction à l’occupation américaine. Il est en France au moment où le Président Vilbrun Guillaume est assassiné par une foule en colère (Antoine 1981). Price-Mars restera en poste à Paris encore une année et ne reviendra au pays que vers la fin de l’année 1916. Les Américains débarquent dans le pays avec pour mission officielle d’arrêter « l’effondrement de l’État haïtien » (Etienne 2007, 157). Il est vrai que le chaos y règne, ainsi qu’en témoigne la série de présidents éphémères qui se sont succédé au pouvoir depuis 1911. Toutefois les Américains avaient aussi une autre motivation, celle de contrer la mainmise germanique et française sur le pays et d’établir leur propre hégémonie dans la région (Etienne 2007). Leur occupation est aussi le prolongement de la crise du « modèle social » haïtien qui remonte à la fin du XIXe siècle (Célius 1997). En analysant l’occupation américaine comme une conséquence du « délitement de la nation » (Price-Mars 1919), Price-Mars a été bien au fait de cet ébranlement du modèle social haïtien. Il laisse également entendre dans des conférences données dans les premiers moments de l’occupation, entre 1917 et 1919, que le nationalisme traditionnel est manifestement dépassé. Son recueil d’essais intitulé La vocation de l’élite (1919) lui permet d’acter, à la fois, la chute du modèle social et la désuétude de l’idéologie nationaliste élitiste laquelle participe de la domination féroce des élites économiques et politiques sur les classes subalternes, et ne sert qu’à garder la mainmise des élites sur le territoire haïtien face aux puissances étrangères (notamment la France, l’Allemagne et les États-Unis). À partir d’une esquisse-critique du système de prédation des classes dominantes et de celle du régime politique marqué par la violence nue (voir le chapitre II de La vocation de l'élite sur « La domination économique et politique de l'élite »), Price-Mars (1919, 49–84) propose une vision intégrative de la nation qui permet aux classes défavorisées d’avoir accès aux ressources du pays et d’être des citoyens à part entière, et non plus de second rang. Il pose donc l’existence d’une nation unie antérieurement à son délitement (Price-Mars 1919, 15). Finalement, Price-Mars devient le chantre de la reconnaissance de l’héritage africain dans la culture haïtienne. En cela il se distingue d’autres anthropologues du XIXe siècle, y compris Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–1911), ce dernier, plus cosmopolite, laisse peu de place dans sa pensée à l’Afrique (Byron 2021).

Les quasi vingt années d’occupation d’Haïti (1915–1934) ont été assez paradoxalement un moment d’effervescence intellectuelle du pays. Le choc qu’a été cette invasion pour les élites, particulièrement pour les franges de celles-ci qui avaient souhaité la présence des Américains, en est probablement la cause. Le racisme des Américains à l’égard de toutes les couches de la société haïtiennes a également révulsé les élites et est rapidement devenu un « facteur d’unité » dans le pays (Nicholls 1996, 142). Citons parmi les actes racistes des Américains le rétablissement de la corvée pour la construction des routes. Le nationalisme haïtien trouve là un terrain favorable pour se renouveler et s’enrichir. Ainsi, avant l’Occupation Américaine, les spécialistes d’histoire des idées ne trouvent guère de trace en Haïti d’une idéologie qui aurait prétendu que les hommes noirs seraient différents des Européens ou que le peuple haïtien devrait s’orienter vers l’Afrique comme un modèle socioculturel à suivre (Nicholls 1996, 11–12) et ce, jusqu’à ce que l’occupation ouvre la voie à une possible transformation. Le nationalisme intègre alors progressivement un discours plutôt favorable à l’Afrique.

Le lieu par excellence de cette effervescence culturelle et intellectuelle a été les cercles mondains. Lieux de culture, de sociabilité, de débats politiques et de résistance, ces cercles tels que le Cercle Bellevue et le Cercle Port-au-Princien, réunissaient des membres de la bourgeoisie et des classes moyennes (Lucien 2015, 64–73 ; Corvington 1984, 17–20). Des penseurs haïtiens, notamment les auteurs et éducateurs Jean Chrysostome Dorsainvil et Arthur Holly, sont les premiers à diriger leurs regards sur l’Afrique et ses héritages dans la culture haïtienne. Dorsainvil insiste, dès 1912 et 1913, sur l’intérêt d’étudier l’Afrique pour bien saisir la mentalité du peuple haïtien dans ses articles publiés dans le journal Haïti médicale, et plus tard dans son livre Vodou et névrose (Dorsainvil 1931).

Même s’il devance Price-Mars s’agissant de son intérêt pour le vodou, Dorsainvil est loin de considérer le vodou sur le même plan que les autres religions (Byron 2012, 120). Traitant de la possession dans le vodou, Dorsainvil affirme que « dans les cultes déjà évolués, elle n’est qu’une survivance de l’animisme primitif, frappant surtout les types les moins cultivés. Le progrès intellectuel tend à diminuer ou à faire disparaître les cas de possession » (1931, 17). Arthur C. Holly tenait des propos où il revendique sans ambages les idées mystiques des ancêtres des haïtiens. Il prônait dès 1921, un retour à l’Afrique par le vodou qu’il considère comme une religion africaine (voir Nicholls 1996, 151).

Price-Mars a fait évoluer les termes du débat sur la nation. Dans La vocation de l’élite, il évoque un grand débat entre « anglo-saxonnistes » et « latinistes », c’est-à-dire entre « l’esprit américain » et « l’esprit français » (Manigat 1967, 335). Les premiers, selon Price-Mars, pensent l’État « comme une très haute abstraction [quasiment divine] ». Les derniers voient l’État comme simple outil « qui réfrène et limite l’action du pouvoir en des conditions et en des domaines déterminés », afin de permettre à l’individu de s’épanouir. Selon Price-Mars, l’intervention américaine amène à une confrontation des deux doctrines (Price-Mars 1919, II).

L’auteur refuse de s’associer à l’un ou l’autre de ces courants. Il rejette à la fois le nationalisme qui s’appuie sur une idéologie pro-américaine (ou anglo-saxonne) et celui des francophiles qui prêtent allégeance à l’idéologie française (latiniste). La vocation de l’élite implique une troisième voie, fondée sur l’établissement de nouvelles relations entre les deux grandes catégories de la société haïtienne, c’est-à-dire « l’élite » et « la masse ». Selon lui, ces deux classes doivent former une nouvelle alliance, soucieuse des conditions socio-économiques des catégories défavorisées, et au sein de laquelle les membres de cette catégorie défavorisée seraient considérées comme sujets à part entière. Price-Mars appelle l’élite à jouer son rôle dans la reconstitution de la nation, en menant des actions sociales en direction de « la masse » et en reconnaissant leurs droits à la citoyenneté. Il relève le poids historique de « la masse » - qui est plutôt paysanne - dans la constitution de la nation et dans la production agricole qui permet de nourrir le pays et d’augmenter l’assiette fiscale de l’État (1919). Il remonte aussi aux « va-nu-pieds de 1804 », c’est à dire aux anciens esclaves, engagés dans la lutte pour l’indépendance, devenus cultivateurs ou paysans après 1804.

Dans le courant des années 1920, soit quelques temps après le début de l’occupation, Price-Mars lancera ses conférences sur le folklore qui seront insérées dans l’ouvrage Ainsi parla l’oncle publié en 1928^{^[4]}. Il y valorise la culture des paysans haïtiens qui, jusque-là, était connotée négativement et associée à des formes de vulgarité ou de barbarie. Force est de constater que le choc de l’occupation l’a amené à saisir cette culture de façon plus positive. C’est ainsi que Price-Mars va notamment insister sur le vodou comme religion à part entière et non comme de la sorcellerie. Il explique que le vodou est aussi porteur d’héritages africains conservés dans les couches populaires, ce qui rend les paysans, longtemps considérés comme des citoyens de seconde zone par les classes dirigeantes, dignes d’un intérêt culturel qui se double d’un intérêt pour l’Afrique ou de ses survivances en Haïti (Shannon 1989, 129 ; Césaire 2005a). Dans ses conférences, Price-Mars met aussi en valeur d’autres aspects de la culture de la majorité des Haïtiens, tels que les contes, la musique et la danse populaires. Il montre que les paysans haïtiens sont des sujets historiques qui portent et renouvellent la culture du pays. Cela implique la reconnaissance pleine et entière de leur citoyenneté et la reconstitution d’un sujet politique collectif, le peuple-nation. Price-Mars n’est donc pas dans une démarche de « folklorisation » de la culture populaire qui consisterait en la fétichisation des objets et la dissimulation des sujets-porteurs.

Au moment des conférences sur le folklore, Price-Mars enseignait au Lycée National (l’actuel Lycée Alexandre Pétion) et avait repris ses études médicales, qu’il a achevées en 1923, tout en se livrant à l’observation dans les campagnes. Parallèlement à ces activités, Price-Mars, fortement impliqué dans l’Union Patriotique, une association de notables militant contre l’occupation américaine, multiplie les « interventions politiques » lors de conférences publiques (Shannon 1989, 116). Il insiste sur les méfaits de la présence militaire américaine en Haïti et subit, en riposte, la révocation de son poste d’enseignant au Lycée Alexandre Pétion (qu’il réintégrera, un an plus tard, quand son ami Louis Borno accèdera à la Présidence de la République) (Shannon 1989, 116).

Price-Mars développe sa critique des classes dominantes à partir de la notion de « bovarysme » en s’inspirant du philosophe français Jules de Gaultier (1892). Ce concept se définit comme « la faculté que s’attribue une société de se concevoir autre qu’elle n’est » (Price-Mars 2009, 8). Dans le cas d’Haïti cela se traduit dans le comportement des élites, qui, par leur rejet des pratiques culturelles populaires, endossent l’idéologie coloniale qui nie l’existence de cultures propres aux peuples dominés. Dans la perspective de Price-Mars, la critique du « bovarysme » est une phase déterminante de la sortie du joug colonial. L’auteur l’appréhende comme une « démarche singulièrement dangereuse » faite d’« imitations plates et serviles » des colons (Idem). La dangerosité du « bovarysme collectif » tient au fait que les dominés ne sauraient se concevoir comme sujet de leur émancipation sans une identité culturelle propre. Price-Mars reconnait toutefois que cette attitude peut être « étrangement féconde » en permettant à la société de profiter des « ressorts d’une activité créatrice qui la hausse au-dessus d’elle-même » (Price-Mars 2009).

La critique du « bovarysme collectif » invite implicitement les nationalistes sous l’occupation Américaine à revoir leur stratégie. De l’avis de Price-Mars, la résistance aux Américains n’aura pas connu de succès si elle se limitait à opposer aux envahisseurs une partie de leur propre culture ou de la culture occidentale, étant entendu que les Américains sont en majorité d’origine européenne. Revendiquer la « latinité » contre la « culture anglo-saxonne » par exemple, ne fonctionnerait pas car cela ne saurait permettre de fédérer « l’élite » et la « masse » de la société haïtienne face aux occupants. La critique de Price-Mars porte aussi la marque de la radicalisation du nationalisme haïtien, elle consiste en une volonté de se soustraire définitivement à la domination coloniale et néocoloniale. Porter « la défroque de la civilisation occidentale » revient à adhérer à l’idée des colons que les esclavisés noirs (les victimes de la traite atlantique) et leurs descendants sont incultes et, de ce fait, des sous-hommes ; c’est accepter, en fin de compte, la reconduction de la domination coloniale (Price-Mars 1928, II).

Ce genre de réflexions va occuper le monde au cours de la période d’après-guerre (1945–1970), et les esprits de penseurs du XXe siècle le plus souvent associés à la négritude. Certains d’entre eux ont reconnu leurs emprunts aux théories de Price-Mars (Senghor 1956), mais il reste à faire un travail d’inventaire pour déterminer, parmi ces penseurs, les lecteurs price-marsiens les plus assidus, comme Fanon ([1952] 2011 et [1959] 2012).

L’usage de l’œuvre price-marsienne

La réception de Ainsi parla l’oncle n’a pas su saisir les enjeux politiques de l’ouvrage. L’œuvre n’a, de prime abord, été lue que sous le prisme de considérations strictement culturelles. L’antériorité du culturel par rapport au politique dans ce livre est apparente. De l’authenticité proclamée de la culture de « la masse », mobilisée dans la définition de la nation, découle la reconnaissance politique de cette catégorie relativement à son poids historique et social. Cette authenticité se répand sur l’ensemble du complexe socio-historique et culturel haïtien. Par « l’acculturation » qui permet à la culture de « la masse » d’incorporer des éléments issus de celle de « l’élite », la nation se mue en une culture partagée, ouverte à tout le peuple-nation.

Afin de construire ces arguments en faveur de la culture populaire (en particulier du vodou) et de ses racines africaines, Price-Mars mobilise l’histoire qu’il présente comme une « ethnographie comparative » en s’inspirant grandement des administrateurs coloniaux français qui ont pratiqué en Afrique un travail ethnographique au service de l’empire. Ces « ethnographes coloniaux », en dépit de leur statut et de la finalité coloniale de leurs travaux, ont contribué à remettre en cause les préjugés selon lesquels l’Afrique serait formée de peuples incultes (Sibeud 2002).

Comme d’autres auteurs du monde noir, Price-Mars a eu conscience que l’affirmation de l’inexistence d’une culture nègre par le colon s’accompagne d’une volonté expresse de bannir les pratiques culturelles des esclavisés. C’est ainsi que le catholicisme leur sera imposé comme religion dès leur arrivée dans la colonie dans un « processus d’acculturation sous l’esclavage et après » (Magloire et Yelvington 2005). Cette méthode de domestication de la culture nègre est analysée par Price-Mars comme une acculturation. Mais, la résistance des noirs est comprise, elle aussi, sous cette même notion d’acculturation. Price-Mars anticipe les travaux sur la thématique de l’acculturation qui seront développés plus tard par d’autres anthropologues tels que Herskovits et Bastide (Magloire et Yelvington 2005). Price-Mars considère le désir des dirigeants haïtiens (et autres) de rejeter leur culture en vue d’adopter celle de la civilisation occidentale comme absurde. Adopter la culture des anciens colons revient, selon l’auteur, à accepter leur domination. L’« acculturation » forcée se transforme alors en une forme d’acculturation voulue.

Quelques penseurs contemporains n’hésitent pas à inscrire l’œuvre de Price-Mars dans la continuité de celle de Firmin (Fluehr-Lobban 2005). Cela reste une question ouverte. Certes, le point de vue anti-raciste (« anti-racist scholarship ») de Firmin a été déterminant pour Price-Mars, mais ce dernier a tracé sa propre voie à partir de préoccupations qui ne recoupent pas nécessairement celles de son prédécesseur, entre autres celle de l'intégration des citoyens-paysans dans la nation (Bonniol 2005). L’érudition anti-raciste du XIXe siècle par Firmin (1884) présente une ambivalence : son point fort est la revendication de l’appartenance de l’homme haïtien à l’universalité humaine, cependant, dans le même temps, elle rend possible le « bovarysme culturel » selon Price-Mars, car elle ne part pas de la spécificité de la culture haïtienne ou de la culture noire mais d’une pensée plus occidentale. En insistant sur les particularités de la culture haïtienne, Price-Mars remet en cause la fascination des penseurs du XIXe siècle haïtien pour la culture occidentale. Il dénonce aussi leur incapacité à mettre en doute les promesses contenues dans l’humanisme et le cosmopolitisme, courants dominants de la pensée européenne de l'époque, ainsi que leur inaptitude à saisir l’héritage africain, et leur mépris à l’égard de la paysannerie et de toutes les catégories de la société haïtienne dépositaires de cet héritage.

La postérité de Price-Mars tient à étudier le complexe processus de formation d’une « culture haïtienne distincte ». Les traditions concurrentes africaines aussi bien qu’européennes auxquelles il fait référence sont destinées à se fondre dans le moule de l’identité culturelle nationale. Les objets appartenant à ces deux traditions ne doivent subsister ou se rattacher à cette identité nationale haïtienne qu’à l’état de « survivance ». Il est vrai que la part africaine a été mise en avant par Price-Mars, et par les Haïtiens d’aujourd’hui. La notion d’« afro-haïtianité » reste peu utilisée dans la pensée haïtienne courante car l’héritage culturel africain est considéré comme part de l’Haïtianité ; toutefois , l’idéal d'authenticité que promeut Price-Mars ne confine pas exclusivement aux héritages africains. L’haïtianité price-marsienne implique une grande diversité d’objets et de pratiques culturels qui sont aussi souvent européens. Ce qui rend authentique ou légitime un objet culturel au regard de Price-Mars c’est sa présence à la fois dans les classes populaires et dans les classes dominantes. Cette vision d’une culture nationale présente une certaine similitude avec le melting pot américain.

L’anti-essentialisme price-marsien

L’usage par Price-Mars de la notion de « bovarysme » a été critiqué. L’auteur a, en effet, pu être appréhendé comme le promoteur « d’un idéal d’authenticité culturelle » (Dash 2012). Plutôt que de l’analyser comme simple renvoi à une essence, la revendication de la particularité de la culture haïtienne chez Price-Mars peut être perçue comme rejet de l’idéologie coloniale appropriée par les classes dominantes haïtiennes après l'indépendance. Price-Mars forge une identité haïtienne marquée par sa puissance fédérative ou d’agglomération en tant que vision partagée du monde. Cette nouvelle identité reste intégrative, toujours empreinte d’une logique d’assimilation ou d’acculturation entre classes sociales et entre origines européennes et africaines. S’il faut admettre qu’il existe une logique d'authenticité chez Price-Mars, elle ne découle pas de la revendication d’une quelconque pureté des objets et des pratiques culturels attribués à la communauté haïtienne. L'authenticité promue par Price-Mars résulte de ce « métissage » qui fait que « nous ne sommes ni les "français colorés" dont se gargarisent les attardés d’un colonialisme suranné, ni les africains dont se réclament des racistes à rebours » (Price-Mars 1971).

Malheureusement, cet aspect intégratif fut souvent oublié ou ignoré par « les disciples » de Price-Mars, notamment pendant la première moitié du siècle passé. Dès la fin des années 1920, pendant les années 1930 et 1940, certains d’entre les membres du groupe de la Revue Indigène (dont Jacques Roumain est le chef de file) et de la Revue des Griots commençaient déjà à interpréter sa pensée comme un essentialisme. Price-Mars a eu même à rectifier au moins une interprétation de ses premiers écrits faite par Lorimer Denis et François Duvalier dans la Revue Les Griots. À partir des années 1960 les duvaliéristes, c'est-à-dire les supporteurs des deux dictatures de la famille Duvalier, avaient récupéré la pensée de Price-Mars se revendiquant comme les seuls héritiers de son œuvre. Les idéologues duvaliéristes ont mis en avant les idées de Price-Mars pour légitimer un régime populiste et dictatorial qui commettait les pires atrocités que des pouvoirs d’État haïtiens n’avaient jamais commises auparavant. Pourtant, une lecture approfondie et soutenue de Price-Mars engage sans nul doute à ne pas l’associer à un tel régime. Les agissements des duvaliéristes n’avaient rien à voir avec sa pensée. Bien mieux, les rares réactions du gouvernement et de ses partisans, enregistrées à la sortie du pamphlet de Price-Mars contre Piquion en 1967 témoignent de la rupture claire et nette, du fait de leurs visions idéologiques différentes, entre l’auteur et son ancien élève, François Duvalier (Nicholls 1996, 230). Le fameux Morille P. Figaro doit son poste de ministre de l'intérieur à ses attaques contre les idées de Price-Mars qu'il traita sans ménagement de « vieillard sur le déclin » (idem). Un discours de campagne électorale de François Duvalier daté de 1957 réimprimé en 1967, l’année de la polémique avec Piquion, sera purgé d'une référence élogieuse à Price-Mars (Idem).

Finalement, il est intéressant de relever que chez Price-Mars l’identité culturelle ne préexiste pas complètement au sujet. Sa vision historique l’oblige à garder la plus grande prudence et à exprimer ses réserves par rapport à l’usage de certaines expressions très courantes telles que : « âme nègre [ou noire] », « race noire » ou « race noire d’Afrique » (Price-Mars 1928). Dans sa perception, le sujet reste fondamentalement créateur de sa propre histoire et de sa propre culture. Price-Mars ne voile pas sa tendance constructiviste, et, avec elle, sa reconnaissance de notre profonde liberté.

Conclusion

Price-Mars est un auteur majeur de l’anthropologie haïtienne dont la force réside en son articulation avec la naissance de la nation et avec son histoire politique. Les anthropologues haïtiens se sont souvent approprié les concepts de l’anthropologie pour développer ou reformuler des discours politiques. Price-Mars en a tiré la possibilité de repenser les fondements de ce qui fait une société moderne. Il a valorisé la culture paysanne haïtienne, établi le vodou comme religion à part entière, et développé une nouvelle vision du nationalisme haïtien qui a marqué les Caraïbes et, à travers les postcolonial studies, le monde entier. Sa pensée reste humaniste et marquée par la foi dans la dignité et la liberté des hommes. Elle reste loin de la pensée des Duvalier ainsi que des essentialismes et racismes qui ont trop souvent marqué l’histoire du XXe et du XXIe siècle.

La recherche contemporaine en Haïti poursuit une démarche de récupération de la pensée anthropologique en puisant dans l’œuvre de Price-Mars. Ce processus est loin d’être terminé. Il existe effectivement chez Price-Mars un essentialisme stratégique que les duvaliéristes en ont pu ériger en une sorte de racisme à rebours, ce qu’il aura l’occasion de dénoncer vers la fin de sa vie. Nul doute que Price-Mars trouve sa place dans le champ des études postcoloniales et décoloniales. La relecture de ses œuvres nous promet de découvrir des nuances et subtilités dont l’époque actuelle semble avoir tant besoin.

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Senghor, Leopold Sédar. 1956. « Hommage à l’Oncle ». Dans Témoignages sur la vie et l’œuvre du Dr. Jean Price-Mars 1876-1956, édité par Emmanuel C. Paul et Jean Fouchard, 3-12. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie de l’État.

———. 1959. « Éléments constructifs d’une civilisation d’inspiration negro-africaine ». Nouvelle série, n. 24/25, Deuxième Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs (Rome : 26 mars-1er avril 1959) : 249–279.

Shannon, Magdaline Wilhemine. 1989. Dr Jean Price-Mars and the Haitian elite, 1876–1935. Ph.D. Thesis. Ann Arbor: University of Iowa.

Sibeud, Emmanuelle. 2002. Une science impériale pour l’Afrique ? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930. Paris : Editions de l’EHESS.

Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1993. « Jeux de Mots, Jeux de Classe : Les Mouvances de L’Indigénisme ». Conjonction : Revue Franco- Haïtienne, 197 : 29–41.

Auteur

Jhon Picard Byron, Professeur à l’Université d’État d’Haïti, est membre permanent et directeur du laboratoire LAngages DIscours REPrésentations (LADIREP), Unité de recherche de Université d'Etat d'Haïti, rattachée à la Faculté d’Ethnologie. Il développe ses recherches sur la construction culturelle et citoyenne en Haïti à partir de l’œuvre de Jean Price-Mars. Il travaille sur des écritures anticoloniales et contre-historiques, sur la construction nationale et l’identité culturelle, la mémoire de l’esclavage, ainsi que sur les instrumentalisations politiques de l’ethnologie. Il a entre autres dirigé avec Kali Argyriadis, Emma Gobin, Maud Laëthier et Niurka Núñez González (2020), la publication Cuba-Haïti : Engager l’anthropologie. Anthologie critique et histoire comparée (1884–1959).

Jhon Picard Byron PhD, Université d’Etat d’Haïti (UEH), 21 Rue Rivière, Canapé-vert, HT–6115 Port-au-Prince, Haïti. jhon_picard.byron@ueh.edu.ht

[1] L’Atlantique noir est une formation culturelle s’étendant sur les rives de l’Atlantique, composée d’éléments divers de l’Afrique et de l’Occident, marquée par les luttes communes pour l’émancipation et le sentiment de faire partie d’une diaspora (Gilroy [1993] 2017).

[2] A la séance d’ouverture du 1er Congrès Mondial des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs en 1956 Price Mars, « le doyen des intellectuels haïtiens », est désigné à l'unanimité « Président» par la voix d’Alioune Diop et est placé bien au centre des participants du congrès au moment de prendre la photo officielle de l'événement.

[3] L’auteur ajoutera Price à son patronyme au moment de rencontrer Booker T. Washington en 1904 (Magloire [2003] 2019 qui cite Antoine). Ti-Price était le sobriquet que son père lui avait donné en guise d’admiration pour son collègue député et compère Hannibal Price (Antoine 1981, 11 et 46 ; voir également Byron 2012, 175)

[4] Ainsi parla l’oncle a été réédité à plusieurs reprises (1928, 1954, 1973, 1996). La dernière réédition date de 2009 aux Éditions Mémoire d’Encrier.

Social reproduction

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

Hadas Weiss

Initially published 25 Sep 2021

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Marxian origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feminist interventions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crisis and financialisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inequality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

References

Adkins, L. 2019. Social reproduction in the neoliberal era: payments, leverage, and the Minskian household. Polygraph 27,19-33.

Althusser, L. 2001 [1970]. Ideology and the ideological state apparatus (notes toward an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays (trans. B. Brewster), 85-125. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Note on contributor

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

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

Sharing

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 17:07:51 +0000

Thomas Widlok

University of Cologne

Initially published 28 Apr 2021

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

Abstract:

Sharing is a particularly versatile and widespread human practice that features in all domains of life, including religion and politics, family life, and economics. It has a long ethnographic record but it is only recently that it has reached centre stage in social theory and in public awareness. However, not everything that is called ‘sharing’ qualifies as such in a comparative and more technical sense. This entry seeks to distinguish sharing from other transfers, such as alms- and gift-giving, resource pooling, and redistribution. Sharing is here defined as ‘allowing others to access what is valued’, an activity that is not necessarily initiated or desired by the person who gives. Sharing can help humans solve problems of resource distribution, but it may also generate problems that require culturally specific answers: What can or should be shared, with whom and under which conditions? What are the social prerequisites and the social implications of sharing? This entry presents some comparative cases of sharing found across the world and looks at how sharing is also a means to level differences and to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power. It equally considers the current inflational use of the label ‘sharing’ and on-going attempts to establish alternative forms of economic transfers in the so-called ‘sharing economy’.

Introduction: the currency of sharing

Not everything that is called ‘sharing’ actually constitutes sharing in practice. When you use a ‘car-sharing’ system, for example, you may in fact be renting a car part-time, as this involves a straightforward rental contract with a company in return for a monthly fee or charges incurred per kilometre driven. This may therefore be a market transaction, akin to buying and selling. The company may want to call it ‘sharing’, as the term has positive connotations in the urban West where it is associated with saving resources and with giving you a sense of being engaged in a morally right activity. However, this may just be part of marketing discourse in what is otherwise a competitive commercial set-up. At the same time, you may have given your colleague or neighbour a lift in that rented car. Was that sharing, even though you may not have thought or talked about it that way? Or was it rather like a gift, if the other person now feels obliged to give you some sort of return at a later stage? And although you have not met the previous person renting this car, driving a car from a ‘car-share company’ may not feel like having a car exclusively to yourself, since you have sat in the same seat, touched the same steering wheel, and breathed more or less the same air as other users. So, was that part of it sharing, or was it something more like ‘pooling’, i.e. using a common property or infrastructure?

Questions such as these illustrate that anthropological analyses of sharing need to go beyond what people may call ‘sharing’ to distinguish different modes of transfers according to the difference they make with regard to the social relationships involved. This is what this entry on sharing focuses on: How can we distinguish sharing from similar but different transfers on the basis of their capacity to change our social relations? And how constitutive are these modes of transfer for our sociality? Many definitions of sharing tend to focus on the objects that are being transferred, so that sharing is seen above all as a means of distribution. This entry, by contrast, focuses on the social implications of sharing by defining sharing technically as practices of ‘extending the circle of people who have access to what is valued’ (see Widlok 2017: xvii). The three elements of this definition will be discussed in turn, firstly the question of ‘what is valued’, secondly the interplay of ‘gaining access’, ‘demanding access’, and ‘granting access’ that constitute sharing as access, and thirdly the question of how exactly and how far the circle can be extended, especially in the growing platform economics.

Given the ubiquity of sharing today, it may be somewhat surprising that it has only recently gained prominence in social theory. This is largely because many other approaches have subsumed sharing under various other labels: Influential has been Marshall Sahlins’ formulation that sharing is a form of ‘reciprocity’ (1988), hence closely related to gift-giving, and fusing sharing with other forms of redistribution (Polanyi 1944) or pooling (Price 1975). Later definitions, by contrast, highlighted that sharing was often ‘uni-directional’ (Hunt 2000) and that it did not have the contest-like quality of gift-giving, which also goes with careful account-keeping that is considered offensive in most sharing contexts (Graeber 2011: 99). While gift-giving can be explained as a strategy for creating dependency, obligation, and status accumulation for the giver, the same explanation does not hold for sharing practices. This intrigued evolutionary scholars who sought to explain sharing with reference to its evolutionary utility even though it seemed to benefit the survival of others rather than of oneself. Evolutionary approaches focus on the function of sharing to create a social resource buffer for lean times, as a risk-reducing strategy (Ichikawa 2005), and on its ‘costly signalling’ function, i.e. signalling to potential partners that we share and therefore care for others.

The growing interest in sharing today is at least partly due to the fact that it is considered a very promising candidate when exploring alternatives to the dominant modes of commercial, extractive, and exploitative economising. This makes sharing an anthropological concern not only for its role in human evolutionary past (see Kelly [2013] for this issue, which is beyond this entry) but also in terms of the transformation of the current and future political and economic order. The currency of sharing, as we shall see, lies not only in its redistributive capacity but also in its social challenges. Anthropologists are adamant in pointing out that much of what today is called ‘sharing’ in the more appropriately named ‘crowd-based’ or ‘platform-based’ economy may not be sharing at all. However, even the misnomers have helped to put sharing, as a practice, back on the research agenda. It took considerable time to understand the change brought about by the rise of capitalism and the extension of markets and commodity logics to all spheres of life in the ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 1944). Today the claim that after the collapse of communism ‘there is no alternative’ to the capitalist market economy has sparked a new interest in exploring the full repertoire of transfer modes that humans have at their disposal.

Sharing and value

The main anthropological problem with sharing is not that it is a rare or somehow ‘exotic’ practice that we are unfamiliar with. Rather, it is ubiquitous and everyone has experienced it. In that, it is different from other human practices that work for some groups but are strange for others. For instance, think of living with several partners, marrying your cousin, moving around nomadically, organising social order without a centralised government, making a living outside capitalist production, and so forth. In these cases, anthropology has had the function of making the seemingly strange familiar, for a long time with a European bias defining what needed ‘de-exoticising’. But not everything cultural is peculiar in this way, and sharing is a case in point. Here, the role of anthropology is to make the mundane intriguing to us so that we can take a fresh comparative look at what seems familiar and unproblematic. With regard to sharing, this means to make sure that we do not mistake the rather peculiar notion of sharing, that we may hold as a result of our own cultural upbringing, with sharing as it emerges across a diversity of human contexts. A common bias that arises from living a particular way of life that we label ‘modern’ is to think of sharing as something that is only done with a few very close relatives, an altruistic exception in an otherwise selfish existence. Moreover, the dominant evaluation of sharing is in many ways disparate: On the one hand, there is a romantic yearning towards sharing as something that should be done, but often is not (or no longer). Alternatively, sharing is despised as something bad or backward that needs to be overcome. In Australia, for example, the government has tried for a long time to organise welfare payments to indigenous Australians in a way that they prevent recipients from sharing ‘too much’. Demand sharing in particular has been targeted as a root problem by state administrators intervening in Aboriginal communities (Altman 2011: 196).

Groups that practice frequent and wide-ranging sharing are subject to this bifurcated preconception, being romanticised and discriminated against. I have encountered this frequently in field research with present-day hunter-gatherers under processes of change (see Widlok 1999, 2020). Nearby farm owners, government officials, and agro-pastoralist neighbours in many of these instances feel that hunter-gatherers have to abandon sharing in order to more effectively accumulate property and adopt a market- and investment-oriented way of economising. Sharing is considered an obstacle in that process. For instance, farm workers in Namibia who used to be hunter-gatherers and who tend to be lumped together under the ethnic label San, have been encouraged by colonial bosses to save up some of their salaries so that they could buy individual property items such as bicycles, cars, or houses (Widlok 1999: 123). The social pressures of sharing their income widely, in this view, prevents the ‘uplifting’ of San to mainstream culture. This has many parallels in the ways in which the landed gentry in Europe looked down on proletarians who lived in permeable domestic units, spending and sharing space and income rather than accumulating and insulating within families. It also has parallels with the concerns of middle-class parents who see the youth as ‘oversharing’ in the social media, by which they mean ‘disclosing too much of oneself in public’ (see Widlok 2017: 165).

In my field research I often encountered doctors and development workers who kept cautioning the San and other hunter-gatherers not to share their tobacco pipes, drinking vessels, and sexual partners since this increases the danger of contracting contagious diseases. In the Covid-19 pandemic, again the dangers of sharing are being invoked, not limited to sharing (bodily) fluids but more generally to sharing the same space, even breathing the same air. The dominant view amongst those who have become unfamiliar with sharing is to delimit it rigidly. By contrast, among skilled and frequent practitioners, sharing tends to operate without rigid adherence to abstract principles of altruism, alms giving, or narrow kin support. It is often more open than that, and can be broadened but also at times narrowed. This raises questions, such as: Under which conditions may it be considered desirable to share? What are the limits and affordances of sharing? And how are these limits and opportunities culturally constructed and socially enforced?

Comparative studies across a variety of societies show that sharing regularly goes beyond individual households, and that repeated food crises lead humans to share more frequently but not automatically more widely (see Ember et al. 2018). When trying to answer the above questions properly, we therefore need to turn to individual cases studies. These are often taken from the ethnography of current and former hunter-gatherers around the world. This is not because the phenomena observed were limited to these societies but rather because theoretically interesting features were observed in these contexts that question recurring cultural preconceptions. For instance, the prevalent romantic but misleading idea that sharing is either a result of pure altruism or pure necessity has been put into question by observations made in Aboriginal Australia. The biased view includes the assumption that if you have at times too much of a certain item, you share it in order not to waste it. However, there is a different lesson that Fred Myers (1988) was taught by a Australian Aboriginal Pintupi man called Jimmy, which is mirrored in many ethnographic contexts: Sharing is not simply the consequence of economic needs and the ecological distribution of resources but rather it is instrumental in producing the underlying social conditions in the first place. It typically does not target what people are happy to give away anyway, but rather what they value and would like to keep. Jimmy asked Fred for cigarettes to be shared even though he did have some himself – which he, in the end, gave to Fred when he found out the anthropologist had given all of his cigarettes away already.

He also taught Fred to make sure to hide some of his resources so that he can dodge the constant demands and requests to share. In Aboriginal Australia, as in many contexts among (former) hunter-gatherers, sharing and demands do not contradict one another. Moreover, demands can take the form of accepted and conventionalised prompts that initiate sharing, but they can also take the problematic form of constant nagging and out-of-proportion asking and pretending to be in need (‘humbugging’ in Aboriginal English). Myers concluded that sharing was often initiated not by those who had something or had too much of something, but rather by those who were asking, an activity that Nicolas Peterson called ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993, see also Altman 2011). In these contexts people are granted the right to ask for things, and they find it morally difficult to reject a demand if one was seen to be able to satisfy it. This suggests that the practices of sharing were not simply a mode of resource allocation but all about dealing with social relationships in a particular way. While this is true for transfers between humans more generally, sharing seems to be characterised by a particular tension between autonomy and dependency (Myers 1988) in contrast to varying evaluations of dependency in societies dominated by market and gift-exchange (see Martin 2021).

Myers’ ethnography also debunked the assumption that sharing was an automatism that followed out of collective ownership or out of a lack of property rights in things. By contrast, the items that Pintupi foragers brought back to camp, such as gathered fruits or small game animals and whatever else their ‘country’ (the land they belong to) was providing, were quite clearly subject to very specific property rights. These rights were partly obtained through labour, when collecting for example, or through kinship and a sense of belonging to a particular country. And there was no automatism that translated these rights into transfers, but rather they were subject to protracted negotiations. Allocations and (re-)distributions of foraged foods, household and ritual items constantly changed. In most societies in which a lot of sharing is being practiced, people do have a choice either to include others in the sharing or to hide items from them. At the same time, they feel that what they part with is not ‘extra’ (like second-hand clothing that well-to-do urbanites in the Global North readily give away) but something that they readily and happily could use themselves. They may therefore only let go of it begrudgingly. The social rules of what constitutes forms of ‘co-ownership’ do vary culturally and so do the actual strategies of asking, taking, and ‘allowing to take’. The occurrence of sharing behaviour cannot be sufficiently explained by the economic and ecological pressures of a resource situation, even though these play a role. The same is true for absence of sharing: Sharing may break down under conditions of extreme shortage and it may thrive when things are abundant, but there is a lot of leeway in between, with culturally specific forms emerging in different contexts. On the one hand, sharing is an adaptive problem-solver for uneven resource distribution, but on the other hand it also involves problems since both nagging requests and inacceptable responses can become divisive. At the same time, the tolerance for open demands but also for attempts to hide and keep have been noted by ethnographers working in societies with a high incidence of sharing.

In other words, if sharing is neither an inevitable product of constant shortage, nor of boundless affluence, it depends critically on dealing successfully with an abundance of requests, on a sense of what constitutes a good response to requests and on what is appropriate access to items of value. It is in this context that being economically in need (or being in the position to provide) becomes relevant for judging which requests are appropriate. Sharing not only redistributes resources but it also recalibrates the social problems of navigating through multiple expectations, entitlements, relationships, and demands. Comparatively speaking sharing depends on what is of value to humans, as humans share more than they need to - and less than they are being asked for.

Sharing and access: gained, granted and demanded

If it is not scarcity or abundance by itself that explains sharing, what are the conditions that enable and encourage, or disable and discourage, sharing? The subject matter of what is being shared is an important factor. Some things are easier and more readily shared than others, and some things lend themselves to be used for other forms of transfer such as gift-exchange or buying and selling. Amongst hunter-gatherers, ‘country food’ items are more readily shared than purchased items, and small items collected while foraging are more readily kept for individual consumption than larger ‘bulky’ items such as big hunted animals, elephants, or whales, for instance (Widlok 2017: 92-8, see also Ready & Power 2018: 76). The latter may invite more specific forms of distributions because they typically involve more of a collaborative effort or investment and more elaborate infrastructure such as boats or traps that need to be maintained.

Many more things can be shared in an economic system than what those who are living in a market economy may think. Researchers working with the Aché people of South America noted that they received more than 80 per cent of all their goods through sharing transfers (Kaplan & Hill 1985). Food collected was more readily shared when out collecting than food bought back to the mission settlement, but it seems that the permeability of domains is again subject to social negotiation as items can move from the domain of buying to that of sharing and vice versa. Even in a capitalist market economy there are many transfers which are not buying and selling. About 60 per cent of the population in post-industrial societies make a living not by buying and selling their labour but rather through ‘other’ transfers (see Ferguson [2015: 20] and Widlok [2017: xiii]). These transfers include state-orchestrated payments of social security, the individual support of dependent family members, and other forms of ‘giving’ like inheritance or neighbourhood assistance, for example.

What is important to keep in mind for those living in a highly materialist society, however, is that sharing is not only and not always primarily about objects that change hands, but at least as much about those involved in the giving and receiving. It is as much about ‘sharing in’ the social relations of givers and receivers as about ‘sharing out’, i.e. the transfer of objects. Among prime objects that can be shared are also immaterial things such as time and visits, knowledge and skills, and experiences more generally. However, what is subject to sharing and what is not cannot always be predicted. Mbendjele central African foragers are happy to share most personal items but they sell songs and rituals (Lewis 2015). San share knowledge about the whereabouts of game animals and not only the meat of hunted animals (Biesele & Barclay 2001). And hobbyists and professionals in industrialised societies may be happy to share their informal insider-knowledge (see Lave & Wenger 1991) without sharing their salaries. In fact, it seems that much sharing takes place under the radar of economic thinking because it often takes immaterial forms and it involves many unmarked and mundane social interactions.

One of the common motivations of sharing is that it prevents accumulation, including the accumulation of power and the creation of dependencies. East African hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania are well-known for their sharing of meat. But even though their situation is one of relative equality, tendencies towards accumulation exist for them as well: Initiated Hadza men are reported to try to reserve some meat for themselves (see Woodburn 1998). Although they do not always succeed in it and although the quantity of meat may actually be limited, this shows a general problem that sharing responds to, namely the potential of turning the allocation of items into a tool for power play and privilege. In some cases, for instance the present-day mixed economy of Canadian Inuit, sharing is tacitly transformed into public and marked acts of generous gift-giving that invokes obligations and supports inequality (see Ready & Power 2018).

James Woodburn, who provided the Hadza ethnography mentioned, insists that sharing has to be distinguished from other forms of transfer, such as gift-giving, because of its social implications: While gift-giving can serve as a tool for gaining status (as a generous and affluent person) and for creating dependencies and obligations, sharing works in the opposite direction. Gift-giving allows people to accumulate status and to create followers through giving and this holds for reciprocal gift-giving with obligatory counter-gifts as well as for gifts that are not returned (Yan 2020). It is well understood as a system for creating mutual obligations, even dependencies, and for marking relationships between giver and receiver as special, also among hunter-gatherers. San foragers of southern Africa are known for cultivating friendships over time and distance through their hxaro exchange systems (Wiessner 1982) and the literature on potlatch in North America and on kula gift giving in Oceania and elsewhere is enormous (see Yan 2020, Widlok 2017). This literature has played such a major role in anthropology’s drive towards pointing at alternatives to the dominant market economy that accounts of sharing were initially often subsumed under forms of ‘reciprocal gift exchange’ (see Mauss 2004). However, sharing as a social practice runs counter to many features of gift-giving, such as public display, strategic dependency, status accumulation, and the creation of obligations, in so that it is now considered a social institution in its own right (Woodburn 1998; Widlok 2017).

It is therefore important to point out that not all reports about giving are instances of sharing – nor are they all about gifts. Gifts are predicated on the obligations of giving, receiving, and returning (Mauss 2004). Sharing, by contrast, can be unidirectional (Hunt 2000). Even if it is mutual, it does not create the same obligations to accept and the same calculated and anticipated returns. Rather, it can effectively decouple giving from receiving; it is not framed as ‘I give so that you will give in return’. This is typically achieved by simply allowing others to take, by not preventing them from taking an object or a share. It is granting a share without necessarily handing over things. This underlines the rightfulness of the share and understates the fact that it was provided by a ‘richer’ party towards a ‘poorer’ party. Leaving things for others to take decouples receiving from returning. It highlights the entitlement of the recipient to what is given rather than the entitlement of the giver on what is to be expected as a return. The mutuality we find in sharing is a far cry from the calculated reciprocity that characterises other transfers, including many forms of gift-giving. Although things often flow both ways in sharing, these flows can be very uneven, they can be delayed and diffused in many ways, and they do not allow for the conversion into accumulated political capital that serves to steer obligations. Hunter-gatherer ethnography does report on various ways of dividing an animal and to allocate specific pieces of meat to specific kinsmen. But this should always be read in the context of two important conditions: firstly, the processual nature of ‘waves of sharing’ and secondly, the levelling power of sharing to undermine lasting obligations.

‘Waves’ and ‘rounds’ of sharing have been observed in many cases (see Ichikawa 2005: 155). Frequently, a hunter is not the person allocating hunted meat and allocation rules may apply in a first wave of sharing that may privilege some (close kin or in-laws of the hunter, for instance). However, this does not prevent meat from being divided further and indiscriminately in subsequent waves. As a result, the resource may ultimately get distributed widely, not only to immediate or specific kin but frequently to anyone who happens to be present. ‘Sharing as levelling’ not only refers to the fact that sharing broadens the circle of people who have access to a good, but also that efforts are typically made to disconnect the act of giving from that of taking. This is most readily achieved by using intermediaries: Children are often sent to carry food from one house to another (Widlok 2017: 7). Others are frequently allowed to take rather than making them wait until they are being given. Thus there are moral rules but also simple practical features that prevent individuals from using sharing as a tool for converting what is given into specific obligations and as a means for ‘investment’ aimed at receiving specific returns. This is very different from prototypical gift-exchange systems (both in pre-colonial Oceania and in bourgeois birthday gift-giving) which is not incompatible with a careful record being kept of what is given, what is received, and what is returned as a gift. Sharing, by contrast, helps to diffuse the attempts to turn, for instance, hunting luck into a tool for dominating others and is therefore an important levelling mechanism to make societies more egalitarian. The combined effect of the waves of sharing and of levelling is that sharing basically continues until there is no more ground for making demands (e.g. when the animal is consumed) while gift-giving continues because it creates the ground of making more gifts in the future.

Drawing a sharp distinction, we could say that the obligation to give, receive, and return gifts is replaced by the opportunity to ask, to respond, and to renounce (Widlok 2017: 79). The opportunity to ask is enabled not only by accepted ways of requests and demands but also by a permeable ordering of space that allows potential recipients to make themselves present to those who have something to share (see Widlok 2021). The opportunity to respond shows in the debates that people have about what is a rightful share or what might be an outrageous demand. And finally, the opportunity to renounce allows people to let go of things that they cannot keep for themselves forever anyway. But this sharp analytic distinction does not preclude that, in practice, people shift and combine different modes of transferring all the time.

Sharing and expansion in online and offline communities

Ethnographers have observed many instances in which people tried to hide and insert into commercial transfers what was expected to be shared with others (see Widlok 2017: 94). ‘Borrowed’ clothes or other personal items often ended up being shared, in that they were never returned even though the givers were for a long time hoping to receive them back. In some contexts reported from Oceania, what missionaries considered ‘stealing’ was called ‘borrowing’ by local boarding school students and could at the same time be categorised as ‘sharing’ by the anthropologist (Strathern 2011). The rules for dividing ‘bulky’ resources such as whales and other big animals that are being distributed among Inuit and other Nordic hunters are another case in point where sharing and other modes of transfer come together. Having contributed to a collective effort such as a whale hunt gives individuals rights in certain parts of the animals. In Alaska, the captain, the harpooner, and the owner of the harpoon all get specific shares, but for the rest of the crew shares are equal independently of whether they participated for a few days or for the whole season - and about a third of the whale are ‘designated as the community share’ at feasts where everyone receives something (Bodenhorn 2005: 84). For smaller animals such as seals, there are elaborate gift-exchange partnerships that people cultivate and which should not be mistaken for sharing (as pointed out above, see Widlok [2017: 53-5]). Inuit examples of sharing from the literature have been important also in other respects. Inuit researchers were the first ones to point out that sharing often does not always ‘even out’. In other words, there may be net receivers and net providers in sharing systems (Pryor & Graburn 1980). Calculated ‘reciprocity’, giving so that one can calculate on a more or less equal return, is not what is motivating these transfers, since they occur without calculation and without things balancing out. Instead, a sense of ‘mutuality’ is indeed involved in that there is a strong expectation that everyone would need to share if they find themselves in the position to do so despite the common experience that some find themselves in that position more regularly than others. In terms of net results and in terms of motivation, strict reciprocity thus seems unnecessary for a sharing system to work, but a degree of mutuality is. This is particularly clear with regard to immaterial sharing, for instance, sharing time or a place to live and work, which requires mutual engagement, attentiveness, and recognition of equal entitlements as social persons despite inequalities. This mutuality that is built into sharing should not be confused with a logic of ‘do-ut-des’ (I give so that I receive). It is not a balancing ‘tit-for-tat’ expectation with balance-keeping (I give as much as I have received). Consequently, Inuit researchers have pointed out the importance of ‘non-material’ forms of sharing, above all sharing time with one another through visiting (Pryor & Graburn 1980). This is echoed by research elsewhere, for instance the importance of sharing a place to sleep in Aboriginal Australia (Musharbash 2008).

It is tempting to continue along these immaterial lines and also include forms of sharing that take place on digital platforms (see below). However, even in digital environments, established and distinctive modes of transfer can be observed. Thus, many transfers among software developers are akin to gift-giving (see Zeitlyn 2003), providing the accumulation of status. The developers of ‘shareware’ software such as Ubuntu also face a situation in which there is a threat of code being appropriated and abused for corporate ‘hoarding’ and accumulation by some while it is defended as freely accessible by others (see Widlok 2017: 159). At the same time, the sharing of content on many internet platforms is accompanied by the accumulation of marketable data by a third party that operates in the background. It seems, therefore, that the interplay of different modes of transfer is as much a bone of contention on large digital platforms as it is in small hunter-gatherer groups. The question that remains is whether sharing as ‘enlarging the circle of those who access what is valued’ is compromised by the size of the group within the circle.

Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS), in which participants offer one another goods or services without the exchange of money (Hart 2000), are sometimes considered examples of sharing. That is because these modes of transfers provide members access to goods without participating in the general market or the money economy. Members can sign up to a platform or a noticeboard where they can trade in their particular skills or assets for what they need (e.g, a particular tool or someone to cut the lawn, take the dog out etc.). An internal currency often helps to store in a ‘time bank’ what can then be used in the form of vouchers to receive support from other members (see Widlok 2017: 145). LETS do not constitute sharing in a narrow sense because they are more like barter systems, as detailed records are being kept, often based on alternative currencies or vouchers. It has also been repeatedly reported that these systems only work up to a specific size that guarantees mutual trust (Widlok 2019a: 32). In any case a set membership tends to be a prerequisite for them, ideally supported by local, personal knowledge of each other that prevents free-riding. The primary goal of LETS is often not to extend the circle of participants but, to the contrary, to make sure that it does not extend beyond control and beyond the circle of trusted members. Correspondingly, these systems only provide small niches within the larger market economy. Recently, neighbourhood platforms have emerged which seek to carry the LETS system into the digital domain (Widlok 2019a). This has happened to sharing, too. What is new here is that online platforms are not only the tool for exchanges or transfers in the non-digital world but constitute an arena of sharing in itself, with individuals sharing knowledge in ‘how-to’ videos, as well as sharing ideas and swapping or copying music, pictures, and other forms of digitised messages. This has created the impression that sharing practices have received a boost beyond previous limits, to the extent that parts of the digital economy are sometimes called ‘the sharing economy’. However, it is important to be precise here, as the English term ‘sharing’ glosses over important differences.

Some acts of digital communication effectively concentrate attention instead of distributing anything or granting access to what is valued. In fact, sharing content via social media may be more like a demand on others to share attention, time, or support. It can also serve to accumulate followers and ‘hoard’ support. Just like spam messages, it is part of the often unsolicited and unwanted giving of what is not a value, but rather a burden. Thus, free software, sometimes known as ‘shareware’, frequently turns out to be malicious in that its recipients find it difficult to detect on or de-install from their computers. Moreover, social media publishing often confers value and status to the giver rather than being realised by the receiver who is literally degraded to being a ‘follower’ and not someone with a rightful share in a resource. Digital publishing and distribution can therefore be very unlike sharing, and more like gift-giving, initiated by the giver as an attempt to oblige the recipient to receive and return (see Zeitlyn 2003). Its precedent in the analogue world may be where surplus goods are put on the street for anyone to pick up – in many cases, things not particularly valued or wanted by others. The social implications of such acts of ‘getting rid of things’ are primarily the status creation for morally self-righteous providers who expect the supposedly needy to owe them gratitude (Widlok 2017: 147-51).

The English term ‘sharing’ has undergone a very peculiar development in recent years which confuses these modes of transfer, at least in part purposefully. English language corpora show that the notion of sharing has been widened to include many more objects in recent decades (John 2017: 26). Google analytics shows an increased pairing of ‘sharing’ with ‘caring’, and the sense of ‘sharing your feelings with’ others, which were not much used before but became widespread through the internet and social media (John 2017: 103). Communication scholars like Nicolas John conclude from this that the usage of ‘sharing’ has changed from a distributive sense to a communicative one. Here ‘being on a digital platform together’ is enough to constitute ‘sharing’, exemplified by the notorious ‘share’ button in several online social networks. By contrast, many anthropologists working in social environments in which distributive sharing is very strong noted that there was not one single term that would correspond to the English notion of ‘sharing’. Instead, people would speak about ‘helping out’, ‘supplying’, or ‘lending’ (see Widlok 2017: 19-20). Clearly, to talk about sharing and to practice it are two different things. But the problem we are facing is that talking about sharing is to some extent implicated in sharing practices. For instance, regular complaints about people no longer sharing can be part of a strategy of eliciting a share. In the Arctic case study mentioned above (Pryor & Graburn 1980), it emerged that those who talked most about the importance of sharing were not necessarily those who did the most of it and vice versa. Studying sharing may thus imply establishing technical terms that distinguish it from buying and selling and from gift-giving, rather than simply adopting the labels used by the agents themselves.

We are therefore well-advised not to be too ‘logocentric’, too hung up on labels, but rather to put the practices of sharing and its social implications at the centre of our attention. This includes paying attention to the language strategies that form a part of these practices. People may disagree on what to call a transfer, but their actions usually speak louder than their words. Moreover, given the moral connotations of various labels, they may be part of strategies to re-classify transfers. In the above mentioned cases from the Pacific, locals spoke of ‘lending’ what missionaries classified as ‘stealing’ (Strathern 2011). Similarly, when ‘car sharing’ first entered the market for short-term rentals, there were initially reservations to actually use the term ‘sharing’ as it was feared to carry negative connotations (John 2017: 7). Since then, many enterprises in the platform-based economy have employed the misnomer ‘sharing economy’ because of the positive sentiments that it has accumulated. The ‘disruptive’ economic strategies of UBER, AirBnB, Mechanical Turk, and so forth are primarily commercial and are not examples of sharing in a more technical sense. They make profit by opening up domains of life to market transactions that were previously not: for instance, giving others a lift as in hitchhiking or helping others out with odd jobs. The qualification ‘primarily’ is necessary here, because the combination and articulation between economic interests, moral aspirations, and change is an on-going dynamic (see Widlok 2019b). It is tempting to label everything ‘sharing’ or ‘gift-giving’ that does not look like a typical market exchange. But especially in complex transfers involving givers, takers, providers, revenue-recipients, and onlookers, several modes of transfer may be involved. What is central from an anthropological perspective is that different modes of transfer are interwoven with one another. Sharing may be a particularly old human practice. As a cultural practice, it has not disappeared when markets were introduced but it also does not automatically re-emerge when markets are shaken, disrupted, or expanded onto digital platforms. For sharing to be successfully (re-)instated or combined with other modes of transfer in the future, a number of preconditions will have to be in place.

Conclusion: the future of sharing

Sharing food or pressing a share button on a digital platform are not the same thing, as the latter too often amplifies ‘leader-follower’ and ‘influencer-influenced’ constellations and ultimately aims at generating profit. Actual sharing practices, by contrast, presuppose and reproduce positions of mutuality. So-called ‘peer-to-peer transactions’ on the internet may provide a degree of mutuality as well, but they often remain compromised, not least because platform providers accumulate information and keep knowledge about algorithms that structure digital interaction to themselves. There is typically no mutuality between platform users and those who hoard status or money as part of online publishing. Permeable public space is another prerequisite for sharing, again often compromised by gated communities and by ‘hoarding’, in the double sense of the word as accumulating and as concealing behind a fence (see Widlok 2021). Taxation may thus be a form of sharing when allowing poorer citizens access to collective wealth, but it also runs the danger of the third, redistributing party abusing access to the pooled resources. With respect to sharing, public control of state power may thus be comparable to public access to algorithms in the platform economy.

Some features of the digital environment may open up new space for sharing. After all, sharing has become cheaper, as creating digital copies and providing wider access to digital resources often comes at relatively little additional cost in comparison to creating and sharing material items. It is therefore not surprising that many digital platforms that are vast and allow ‘peer to peer’ exchange set high hopes in developing sharing both online and offline. However, not every initiative that uses the label ‘sharing’ manages to bring about actual social benefits, and several come with social and individual costs. So, the future will tell whether or not the expansion of the digital world will enable transactions that reduce strategic status aggrandising, foster personal autonomy, limit centralised resource control, and value renunciation rather than an economic ideology of endless growth. Such actual forms of sharing would limit boundless accumulation and could allow us to deal productively with inevitable asymmetries. Since sharing allows potential recipients to initiate transfers through requests and to avoid obligations to be used in power plays, it broadens access to material and immaterial items of value. As such, it has the potential to foster sociality between people - and maybe to improve on it, too.

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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Climate change

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:36:22 +0000

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

University of Oslo

Initially published 26 Apr 2021

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

Abstract:

Climate change, largely a product of human activities, is arguably the most comprehensive and dramatic challenge facing humanity. In the first decades of this century, its implications have become a major concern in anthropology. The first part of this entry shows why the contribution of anthropology is important to the interdisciplinary study of, and engagement with, climate change. Anthropology teaches us that climate change has to be related to global inequality and local diversity, and must be understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon embedded in local life, but with global ramifications. Anthropology can also show why political action to mitigate or halt climate change is sluggish and often inefficient. Tracing the origins and development of the anthropology of climate change in the late twentieth century, this entry then shows how the field has become more diverse, to include studies of resilience and adaptation, renewable energy, climate activism, as well as knowledge and discourses about climate change. While these studies are truly global by relating to a worldwide event, they retain an emphasis on local realities through ethnographic methods indicating variations in impact of and responses to climate change. They foreground that the issues having to do with climate change differ vastly across the world, from Australia to Peru, from Greenland to Mongolia. The entry ends by arguing that the anthropology of climate change represents a new approach to globalisation, one that shifts the focus from economics, culture, and politics to the ecological embeddedness of human life.

Introduction

Even if massive human impact on the climate is a recent phenomenon, the awareness that climate has an impact on human life is not new. One of the founders of medical science, Hippocrates (b. 460 BCE), wrote a treatise called Airs, waters, places which argued for a connection between the climate, the environment, and the human condition (Dove 2004). He held that temperament was related to climate, and that droughts, rains, heat waves, and seasonal changes in general had significant effects on health. Much later, during the Enlightenment, the social theorist Montesquieu (1689-1755) saw a close relationship between climate and social life. Notably, Montesquieu believed that cold air made people vigorous, while heat made them lethargic, with what he deemed to be important implications for cultural development. Dismissed by later social theorists as simplistic environmental determinism, similar ideas have never quite disappeared. What is new in the current age is the almost universal recognition of humanity's impact on climate and its potentially catastrophic consequences for life on the planet in the future. In this field, anthropologists are making important contributions to knowledge and policy. Before considering these contributions, however, it is necessary to provide a short review of the wider context in which contemporary concerns with climate change is placed.

Never before has humanity made its mark on the planet in ways even remotely comparable to the situation now. One-fifth of the way into the twenty-first century, human domination of the earth is such that the term ‘Anthropocene’ has become widespread as a label for the present time, not least because of the impact that humans have on global climate. This is a term which would, if widely adopted, make the Holocene – which began with the end of the last Ice Age about 11,500 years ago, and which had followed the two and a half million year old Pleistocene period – but a brief interlude in the long history of the planet. We live in an era which, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, is marked by human activity and expansion in unprecedented ways. Socio-ecological change, including temperature rise due to the human emission of greenhouse gases, continues to accelerate; one could even speak of an acceleration of acceleration since the early 1990s, or simply of global overheating (Eriksen 2016). This situation represents a major challenge for all of us, whether we identify with kin groups, nations, religions, humanity, or the entire planetary ecosystem.

It is difficult to think of a more urgently relevant research topic in the world today than climate change, as it threatens to undermine the conditions of human societies as we know them. The literature proliferates inside and outside of the academic world and numerous climate change research centres, academic faculty sections and task forces have been established, often with a mixed basic and applied research mission (see, for example, Fiske et al. 2014). Important transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, have produced authoritative examinations, appraisals, and increasingly insistent policy recommendations, notably including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the time of this writing (2021), five IPCC reports have been published, the first in 1990, the most recent in 2014, with a sixth report due in 2022. Climate change has not just driven scholars to coin the term Anthropocene, but also the more recent and more controversial concept of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016). The latter, a term created by the environmental historian Jason Moore, explicitly blames capitalism for the global predicament, suggesting that the overuse of resources, the relentless search for profitability, the translation of nature into quantifiable ‘resources’, and the commitment to endless growth are not characteristics of humanity as such, but of a particular phase in our recent history. The influential multidisciplinary theorist Donna Haraway concurs with Moore in preferring the term Capitalocene to Anthropocene (Haraway 2016), but goes further by coining the concept of the ‘Chthulucene’, which refers to the entanglements of, ultimately, all living species in a web of life. She argues that the new planetary awareness of impending ecological catastrophe may nudge humanity towards a recognition of the fundamental mutual dependency of all life. In a contribution of comparable ambition and scope, the collective volume Arts of living on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017) explores options for human and non-human life in an era tainted and transformed by reckless human activities. Neither Haraway, nor Anna Tsing and her collaborators, call for a return to a pure and uncontaminated world, but explore ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016).

The contemporary world of climate change has not evaded the attention of the social sciences. In general social theory, climate change has been discussed as a consequence of the growth paradigm and uncertainties produced by modernity. While Anthony Giddens (2002) wrote about ‘a runaway world’ where rapid changes were out of control, and Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argued that modernity by default produces uncertainties and instability, Ulrich Beck (2009) increasingly considered climate change the defining global risk of modernity, one that an overly successful industrialisation had inflicted on itself, and that would not be solvable through single-state solutions. Focusing on speed, rather than risk, Hartmut Rosa (2015) has argued that social life increasingly accelerates as human beings produce, communicate, and transport more and more. Thereby, global capitalism creates a situation where resources are being depleted and the environment suffers. Discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene go hand in hand, as both are partially defined and measured by the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, linked to the use of fossil fuels (Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill 2007). Some scholars go so far as to fear societal collapse in which climate change plays a fundamental role. The archaeologist Brian Fagan (1999) has argued that El Niño events, which disrupt precipitation patterns and temperature, have shaped South American societies for centuries (Fagan 1999). In a major work, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) compares our present to the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires, citing climate change as one factor in accounting for the decline of complex societies. However, the decisive cause, as Tainter sees it, is likely to consist of decreased marginal returns on investments in energy (also referred to as EROI), owing to population growth and subsequent intensification of food production with decreasing returns, coupled with growth in bureaucratic, logistic, and transport costs. According to him, resource shortages, a direct result of human dominance of the planet, may be a more acute problem than climate change (for a similar analysis intended for a broad readership, see Diamond 2005).

The issue of climate change thus inevitably raises questions of human energy consumption. Since the late eighteenth century, we have been able to exploit unprecedented amounts of energy; at first in the shape of abundant surface-near coal deposits, and subsequently through the extraction of oil and gas for the sake of economic growth, profits for capitalists, and the general improvement of the human condition (Mitchell 2011). The fossil fuel revolution has enabled humanity to support a fast-growing global population – it has increased eightfold since its beginning. Yet the cost of exploiting fossil fuels grows as this easily accessible resource is being used up. Production relying on fossil fuels also bears within it an inevitable element of destruction (Hornborg 2019) in a dual sense, since we are simultaneously exhausting resources which it has taken the planet millions of years to produce, and undermining the conditions for our own civilisation by altering the climate and ruining the environment on which we rely.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary in order to understand the full implications of climate change. While climate scientists adopt a birds-eye perspective on the planet, and archaeologists move their gaze back in time, anthropologists enter deeply into local realities in order to understand perceptions of and responses to climate change. The last couple of decades have produced a fast-growing body of anthropological knowledge about climate change, much of which performs a double task in that it improves our understanding of society and may also be relevant for policy and action.

The unique contribution of anthropology

The strengths of anthropology in explaining the connections between the local and the global in the human-influenced global climate system have been demonstrated in a number of recent monographs and edited volumes. Taking on anthropogenic climate change explicitly, some emphasise the importance of studying local responses, from the Arctic to Mongolia (Crate & Nuttall 2009). Others describe lessons that can be learnt from indigenous people and their engagement with the environment, such as Amazonian or Melanesian peoples who leave a minimal ecological footprint by not altering their ecosystem through their harvesting and production (Hendry 2014). Since anthropologists focus predominantly on local realities, their gaze and methodology inevitably produces diversity rather than uniformity, displaying locally-tailored solutions to the problems facing actual human beings rather than standardised options of the one-size-fits-all kind. For example, Amelia Moore's research in the Bahamas (2015) shows how the archipelago's dependence on airborne and resource-intensive tourism contributes to the climate change that may ultimately lead these low-lying coral islands to vanish. Herta Nöbauer (2018), carrying out research in Austrian ski resorts, studies how artificial ski slopes are being built in anticipation of snowless winters. She highlights how the Austrian winter tourism industry anticipates mild winters and invests in new infrastructure to mitigate the effects of the melting snow. Harold Wilhite and Cecilia Salinas (2019) have shown how forest peoples, many of them indigenous, are victims both to resource extraction on their territory and global climate change. Climate change threatens their livelihood through changes in precipitation and temperature, and the problem is compounded by logging, further marginalising people on the peripheries of global modernity.

There is broad agreement that interdisciplinarity must be part and parcel of an anthropology of climate change, since climate change is a physical process, handled through political processes at the national and supranational levels, yet responded to at the level of local communities. Werner Krauss (2015), for example, has shown the need for understanding various disciplines in his work on fishermen and conservationists on the German North Sea coast. Krauss collaborates with natural scientists who search for a balance between objectivity and engagement, and has a dialogue with the political authorities by arguing the need to move beyond natural science and involve the human dimension in producing policy on climate change. Noah Walker-Crawford (2021) has followed a Peruvian activist to Germany in a litigation case against an energy company, engaging with political theory, legal scholarship, and NGO activism in his anthropological explorations. David Rojas's and Noor Johnson's (2013) work on climate summit meetings draws on knowledge from various academic disciplines, ranging from international law to climatology. This enables them to show why climate policy needs to move up and down different scales, and not assume that signed international agreements will necessarily lead to the desired changes in the physical world.

A position paper written by a group of American anthropologists lists three kinds of knowledge that anthropology can contribute to the climate change. It provides ethnographic insight, a historical perspective, and a holistic view of the problem at hand, meaning that the entirety of people's lived experience needs to be taken seriously; in other words, that no technical solutions work unless they are integrated with the world in which people live subjectively (Barnes et al. 2013). Anthropologists are well-positioned to make a difference as interpreters, translators, and experts on specific local lifeworlds, and can sometimes help mitigate effects or even propose deeper systemic change to combat climate change.

The growth of climate anthropology

The study of climate change has important precursors in environmental anthropology and the anthropology of energy. This theoretical approach was mainly developed in the United States, going back all the way to the nineteenth century and early studies of material culture, technology, and ecological adaptation. In fact, the pathbreaking anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) already had an interest in the ways Arctic peoples survived under extreme climatic conditions. After the Second World War, Julian Steward (1955) championed the study of ‘human ecology’, focusing on social and political systems from a materialist perspective which encompassed both technology and ecology. Writing about ‘levels of sociocultural integration’, Steward saw a direct connection between the potential of ecological conditions to produce a surplus and social complexity. His contemporary, Leslie White (1949), studied technology and energy use from a social evolutionist perspective, arguing that cultural evolution could be measured as the amount of energy a given society was capable of making use of. The most culturally advanced group of people would thus be the one that uses the most energy per capita. White’s theories soon went out of fashion in academic circles due to the decline of evolutionary thinking. However, his early emphasis on energy and ecology as foundational to socio-cultural life remains relevant for the current anthropology of climate change.

As early as the 1970s, discussions shifted to the study of ecological crises, which at the time was associated with resource exhaustion and pollution rather than global climate change. Gregory Bateson (1972) identified three factors that were driving these crises. Firstly, the destructive side-effects of technological progress, such as the production of pesticides; secondly, population increase leading to resource depletion; and thirdly, a set of entrenched Western cultural values and ideas that place humanity in an unhealthy relation to the environment (what he calls a flawed epistemology based on Cartesian dualism and individualism). Bateson criticised the idea that humans should strive to control the environment rather than seeing themselves as part of a larger ecological system. He also condemned the strong focus on the individual, the belief in endless economic growth (which he considered logically impossible), the assumption that we live within an infinitely expanding frontier, and the conviction that technology will solve any problem facing us. What Bateson calls a ‘healthy ecology’ amounts to ‘a single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, flexible and amenable to ongoing adjustments (Bateson 1972: 502). In this vision lies a quest for an equilibrium where humanity does not undermine the conditions for its own thriving.

Whereas Bateson identified ecological crisis as a central contradiction of contemporary civilisation, he did not address climate change explicitly. Margaret Mead, his ex-wife, may in fact have been the first anthropologist to do so (Kellogg & Mead 1980), as she convened a conference about the atmosphere as early as 1975. Whereas climate change was not yet on the agenda — in fact, many scientists at the time believed that we were heading towards a new Ice Age rather than an overheated world — the conference took on smoke, smog, and other forms of atmospheric pollution as genuinely global challenges that needed to be dealt with politically.

By the 1990s, climate change was still spoken of as ‘global warming’, and entered the political and research agenda. The term ‘global warming’ has since fallen out of fashion, as it does not emphasise the violent and erratic weather events, such as frequent hurricanes, that climate change brings with it. In anthropology, an early important contribution is that of Steve Rayner and Elizabeth Malone (1998). This interdisciplinary work, with contributors from around the world, intended to complement the natural science of the IPCC with knowledge about local livelihoods, political decision-making, and inequality. Another pioneering work was Ben Orlove's ethno-climatological research in the Andes, showing how farmers predicted interannual rainfall and temperature change, based on the visibility of the Pleiades star cluster, which in turn depended on El Niño weather events (Orlove et al. 2000). This work indicated that locally embedded knowledge about climate could be of great scientific and political relevance. In the 1990s, the concern with climate change was nevertheless still marginal and peripheral in anthropology.

A decade later, this was about to change. Coming from the anthropology of health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer published Global warming and the political ecology of health (2009). The book investigates the impact of climate change on water, nutrition, and the spread of disease. It strongly emphasised that climate change affects different communities unequally, owing to an economic system which produces inequality. Thus it affects people in different ways, often corroborating pre-existing global inequalities. Like Hippocrates two and a half thousand years earlier, Baer and Singer showed how the proliferation of diseases, especially in tropical countries, could sometimes be attributed to climatic conditions, in their case anthropogenic climate change.

In the same year, Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall edited the widely-cited and read Anthropology and climate change (2009), which was a groundbreaking volume when it was published, with chapter authors working in different parts of the world. The main perspective is interpretive, and explores local responses to, and perceptions of, climate change, in a wide range of societies, many of them indigenous, from Siberia to Papua New Guinea. Many of the contributors emphasise local interpretations of change and strategies developed to adjust and adapt. It should nevertheless be pointed out that the societies which are the main contributors to climate change – the rich OECD countries, as well as China – are sparsely represented. This shortcoming is addressed in the second edition of the book (Crate & Nuttall 2016), as well as in the edited volume Cultures of energy (Strauss, Rupp & Love 2013), which relates ethnographic research to analyses of the global system, showing how the affluent are the main contributors to climate change, while poorer people tend to be the main victims. A perspective from the Global North is developed in Kari Norgaard's Living in denial (Norgaard 2011). Based on fieldwork in a rural Norwegian community where erratic winters interfere with winter tourism, the author asks how it can be that people who are aware of, and experience the effects of, climate change continue to lead unsustainable lives. Norgaard's analysis, which draws on psychology as well as sociology and anthropology, argues that people tend to rationalise their unsustainable lives (‘My driving and flying makes no difference’) and to compartmentalise their actions (‘After all, I do compost and take my bike to work’).

A few years later, a very substantial body of anthropological literature dealing with different aspects of climate change had appeared, and professional interest in the field had skyrocketed. Whereas there was just a single panel at the Society for Applied Anthropology (SAA) devoted to climate change in 2006, that number had increased to twenty a decade later. Crate and Nuttall sum up the growth and diversification of the field by stating that anthropologists today are engaging research that has a concern with resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, mitigation, anticipation, risk and uncertainty, consumption, gender, migration, and displacement. Anthropologists have developed significant work on the politics of climate change, inequality, health, carbon markets and carbon sequestration, and water and energy (2016: 11).

Global diversity

The body of knowledge that anthropologists have so far accumulated is far-ranging: from critical studies of the discourses and practices of carbon offsets (Dalsgaard 2013) to comparative studies of retreating glaciers^[1] in addition to a fast-growing number of ethnographies describing how communities deal with the local effects of climate change, in projects that look, in Kirsten Hastrup's evocative terms, at the ‘drying lands, the rising seas and the melting ice’ (Hastrup & Hastrup 2015). A political economy approach, informed by anthropological reflexivity, is provided, inter alia, in works by Hal Wilhite (2016) and Alf Hornborg (2019). Local responses to climate change are explored in a work I co-edited with my colleague Astrid Stensrud (2019), and anthropologists have also contributed some significant ethnographic monographs on climate issues, ranging from Jessica Barnes’ research on water in the Nile delta (2014) to Linda Connor’s work on mining in Australia (2016). What these studies have in common is the recognition of global-local linkages, where local lives and communities cannot be understood independently of the large-scale processes producing changed circumstances for future options and constraints. Climate anthropology is inherently multi-scalar, moving from the locality via government and corporations to supranational politics.

Not all environmental anthropology has a focus on climate. Important research on topics such as deforestation, mining, waste, and toxins may be only tangentially related to climate. However, it is fair to say that the broader field of environmental anthropology is being renewed and reformulated owing to the intensified attention to climate; as witnessed, for example, in the edited volume The angry earth: disasters in anthropological perspective (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 2000, 2019) where, in the second, revised and updated edition of the book, nearly all contributors mention the atmospheric changes that have begun to affect the sites of their prior studies. It also deserves mentioning that the most famous living anthropologist without an anthropology degree, Bruno Latour, shifted his attention years ago to the causes and politics of climate change (Latour 2017). Building on his previous work on the production of scientific knowledge, Latour criticises the techno-scientific ideology of control and the sharp boundary, in his view misguidedly, between culture and nature, which can be traced back to Descartes's philosophy. Anthropogenic climate change is everywhere, and it is now. It is comprehensive, it brims with methodological implications, it buzzes with theoretical possibilities, and indeed, it may well be said to redefine not only the specialty of anthropological (or other) research, but raises the question of what it entails to be a human being within a new existential and conceptual framework, which will inevitably cause a reckoning with our ecological identity in a new way. Volatility and flexibility are key concepts in this exploration, which reveal inequality and an ultimately catastrophic separation of culture and nature. Climate change may retrospectively be seen as a major game-changer in intellectual and political life in general, and also in anthropological research. It is no coincidence that the increased interest in multispecies fieldwork, and the rise to prominence of the Deleuzian term ‘assemblage’ (which transcends the human-nonhuman and material-symbolic barriers), have shaped the work of many anthropologists in the present century. An assemblage, in this usage, consists in the connections that make up a particular social, cultural, and ecological configuration; it may include, for example, people, tools, soil, rain and sunshine, power relations, wild and domesticated animals, crops, weeds and discourses. The concept thereby transcends formerly rigid boundaries between things and ideas, as well as nature and culture.

As opposed to attempts to create top-down solutions through international agreements, some of which have a perceptible element of magical thinking (Rayner 2016), the anthropological view from below and within provides a number of useful insights, owing to its reliance on patient fieldwork.

First, an awareness of variation is essential to all anthropological research. The clunky distinction between developing and developed countries, for example, which produces a simple contrast where there is really a great deal of diversity and indeed the very category of the country, does not always fit the territory. The Seychelles is not ‘a place’ in the same sense as China is ‘a place’, although both are states. The former has 90,000 residents, most of them engaged in fishing or tourism, and is uniformly affected by rising sea temperatures and erratic rainfall. The latter has 1.2 billion inhabitants and spans many climatic zones with challenges ranging from desertification to flooding, which means that climate change in China cannot be described in the same way as in the Seychelles. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that actions that have been proved successful in Namibia would work in Nepal. The challenges faced by Greenlanders facing melting ice differ from those in Bangladesh, confronted with intensified flooding, salination of the soil and mudslides, or of Sahelian nomads who witness their pastures turn to dust.

Second, any successful social change has to begin with an appreciation of local lifeworlds and has to be developed not for, but with, the people affected. In the anthropology of development, this point has been made many times (Gardner & Lewis 2015). This insight, a matter of common sense to any working anthropologist, is rarely reflected in the abstract, large-scale worlds of international climate summits or global reports on climate change. In other words, a reasonable conclusion is that climate change policy must be scaled down and informed by the situation at the bottom, and not built exclusively managed from the top. The insistence on the primacy of the local is nevertheless both a strength and a weakness of anthropology, sometimes leading to myopia and a failure to see global connections, another reason that interdisciplinarity is necessary in this domain.

Comparison is a third asset. As one of anthropology's main methods for generating knowledge and opening new theoretical horizons, as well as stimulating the political imagination, comparison generates new ideas about human worlds. For example, anthropologists have often shown that land is not necessarily subject to personal ownership, and that ‘resource management’ and ‘sustainability’ are often integrated in the taken-for-granted knowledge, not least in indigenous groups. The economic historian Karl Polanyi (1944) described land as a ‘fictitious commodity’, showing – as economic anthropologists have later done – that in pre-capitalist societies it could usually not be sold and purchased. It goes without saying, because it comes without saying, that in societies where ‘the economy’ has not been disembedded from everyday life, making people accountable to their surroundings consists of ways that are unknown and perhaps unknowable to those who own and profit from property elsewhere.

The methodological and analytical holism on which anthropologists insist, which means that any social whole needs to be understood as a web of interconnections, has often made anthropological knowledge unwieldy and unmanageable for governments and development agencies, since it goes against the segmentation of worlds into separately manageable sectors and precise measurements that bureaucratic planning requires. Yet at this point in history, more holism may be precisely what is needed. The knowledge, often contested, enabling people to navigate, interpret, and act upon the world, must form an integral part of any project, whether academic or applied, concerning the human implications of climate change.

Forms of engagement

As indicated, the professional interest in climate change has grown massively in anthropology in the present century. Many anthropologists working on the topic are determined to use their knowledge to make a difference – not just in academia, but in the wider world of policy and practice. There are nevertheless significant variations in the ways different anthropologists approach the applied implications of their research.

The cultural ecological perspective, which looks at objective, measurable aspects of humanity's engagement with, and exploitation of, the environment, is less widespread in anthropological research today than in other fields. A main focus of recent anthropological research has rather been on cultural perceptions and responses to climate change. Crate is a spokesperson for this perspective, in that she recommends a cultural interpretive approach to climate change, arguing that anthropologists need to ‘listen, share, and accommodate our research partners’ way of knowing and observing and construct cultural models of how they perceive the local effects of global climate change on their world and worldview’ (2008: 574). In order to avoid being met with resistance and resentment, social change must engage with resources already in place where change is to be implemented, including knowledge and skills possessed locally. This is as true of the Global South as it is of the Global North, as nobody likes outsiders who come in and tell them what to do and how to think. Many policymakers, NGOs, and donor agencies hold that they already do so, which is doubtless the case. However, the quality of ethnographic knowledge collected over a sustained period of time is superior to that obtained through focus groups and interviews, and can be revealing of hidden and unexpected dimensions.

After the Great Acceleration of economic, technological and communicational change that has taken place since the Second World War (McNeill & Engelke 2016), and which has accelerated further since the early 1990s, our collective ecological footprint seems to have gone beyond the point of no return. According to the IPCC 2014, continued emissions of greenhouse gases will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.^[2] Even if anthropogenic emissions should be stopped, climate change will impact life on the planet for centuries, according to the panel. On this background, some anthropologists connect insights into local effects on climate change to a systemic critique of the global economy.

Among the most consistent critics of the global economy from a climate perspective is Alf Hornborg (2019), who argues that in a world of limited resources, standard economic models presupposing growth are not viable. He argues that the capitalist fossil fuel economy is inherently destructive in that it consumes nonrenewable energy. Also invoking natural science, Hornborg refers to the second law of thermodynamics in order to show that the fossil fuel-based energy dissipates into heat, which is useless for further production and contributes to climate change.

The anthropological relevance of this analysis lies in Hornborg's emphasis on inequality and the exploitation of human labour as being inherent to the capitalist economy. He argues that capitalism is parasitical on both human and natural resources owing to the growth imperative, which relentlessly searches for resources and labour to turn them into profitable commodities. Hornborg's critique is thus dual, derived both from a Marxist analysis of surplus value production and from an ecological analysis, showing that we live in a world of limited resources.

Related to Hornborg's perspective is Baer and Singer's Anthropology of climate change (2nd edition, 2018). They provide an overview of extant research, while also developing a vision for climate anthropology which is fundamentally critical of global capitalism, seeing climate change as one of its major contradictions since the search for profits in their view neglects ecological limitations. Their alternative is a downscaled economy where economic activities aim to satisfy human needs rather than generating profits.

Also premised on political economy, but drawing on local ethnographies, the late Harold Wilhite (2016) focuses on consumption. Having previously worked in Kerala, India, he wrote extensively about the relationship between the fossil fuel society and consumption habits. Wilhite argues that deep reductions in energy use and carbon emissions will not be possible within our current political economies, which are driven by the capitalist imperatives of growth, commodification, and individualisation. In order to deal with climate change at the most basic level, he argues that it is necessary to understand the relationship between capitalism and the emergence of high energy habits at the level of family and household that are formed in a material world designed and built for high energy use, e.g. by replacing wooden houses with airtight concrete dwellings dependent on air-conditioning, or by marketing huge refrigerators where a smaller ‘icebox’ would do (Wilhite 2016). This view is shared by Richard Wilk (2016), whose anthropology of consumption is engaged in that it explores the deeper meaning of consumption and questions its feasibility, both ecologically and as a source of well-being.

Other research, which refrains from addressing the entire global economic order, explores the possibilities of changing the energy system in a renewable, sustainable direction. In a creative and productive juxtaposition of two complementary perspectives on climate change, Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have published a duograph (as opposed to a monograph) based on fieldwork in a huge, but ultimately failed, Mexican windpower park. In their twin volumes, they focus, respectively, on the political economy of wind power (Boyer 2019) and on the destabilisation and reshaping of human/non-human relations (Howe 2019). Boyer coins the word ‘energopower’ to capture the complex relationships between energy, economics, politics, and local communities. The term calls attention to a dimension of social life which had fallen out of favour generations earlier following the tendencies to energy determinism in Leslie White's aforementioned work; namely, the ‘power of power’, the fundamental necessity of energy for human life, and indeed the high energy consumption necessary for the global system as we know it. Howe, in her part of the duograph, looks beyond the human world, investigating the impact of wind turbines on nonhuman life in the region.

This dual approach expresses clearly what is a main division in contemporary anthropology, including that of climate change: the contrast between a political economy perspective, where power, inequality, and global economics are at the forefront, and a localised perspective, which insists on the primacy of the local and rejects epistemologies which tend to render everything comparable with everything else. The duograph shows how these perspectives can be complementary and shed light on different dimensions of climate change. Boyer and Howe show that a shift towards renewables is not a straightforward exercise. In their joint preface, they state that ‘renewable energy can be installed in ways that do little to challenge the extractive logics that have undergirded the mining and fossil fuel industries (Boyer & Howe 2020: xii) Yet, they also suggest that renewables may in fact be part of the solution if implemented in the right way.

As these examples indicate, the anthropology of climate change is both multi-scalar (it shifts between a global and a local perspective), interdisciplinary (relying on natural science for some of its facts) and methodologically diverse (ethnographic and comparative). It is also clear that different climate anthropologists, by virtue of their differences in empirical focus and analyses, and also owing to different political views, advocate different solutions, whether implicitly or explicitly.

Climate anthropology as a new departure

What is new about the anthropology of climate change is not its global purview, but the recognition that climate change has enormous consequences for humanity and, in a slightly longer term, for life on the planet. As Moore (2015: 35) says, ‘Anthropogenic climate change has possibly surpassed biodiversity loss as the most widely recognized form of global transformation'.

The global dimension of climate change is indisputable, but it is also necessary to show in what ways climate change is always local in its implications and has to be understood as such: ecologically, socially, politically, culturally. Whereas politicians until recently might write off concerns of urgency by calling for more research, it is by now abundantly clear that the natural science knowledge needed to act has been available for many years. Yet, while the natural sciences have long documented the facts and global perils of climate change, it is by no means evident that the human dimension of climate change is understood sufficiently well. A simple question may be why so little is happening, since nearly all countries are signatories to a series of climate agreements, beginning with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which specifies the steps that need to be taken to mitigate the impact of changes that are already taking place. Later reports from the IPCC have been increasingly insistent about the need to take action immediately. Yet, global emissions continue to rise and are nowhere near to reaching the targets agreed initially in Kyoto and affirmed in later summit meetings.

Coal, and its close relatives oil and gas, the salvation of humanity for two centuries, are now becoming our damnation, and there is no easy way out. The lesson from cultural history may be that lean societies, decentralised and flexible, with less bureaucracy than farming, fewer PR people than fishermen, are the most sustainable in the long term. As Tainter puts it in his book about the collapse of complex societies: ‘Complex societies … are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity’ (1988: 198). This insight, taken from an archaeologist, may serve as a reminder of the potential importance of climate anthropology. Providing a view from within and from below, anthropologists can not only report from and produce analyses of the multi-scalar linkages of climate and society, but they are also in a position to stimulate the kind of intellectual imagination needed not only to understand and explain, but also to deal with the challenges from anthropogenic climate change. This does not mean that anthropologists ought to advocate a return to pre-industrial life, but that they are in a unique position to strengthen the intellectual and political imagination by showing, as the discipline has always been prone to doing, that there are indeed many alternatives.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the three anonymous referees and, in particular, Felix Stein, for very detailed and useful comments on earlier versions.

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Note on contributor

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and carries out research on social and cultural implications of globalisation. Among his books are Small places, large issues (1995/2014, Pluto Press), Engaging anthropology: the case for a public presence (2006, Berg), Overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change (2016, Pluto Press) and Boomtown: runaway globalisation on the Queensland coast (2018, Pluto Press).

[1] See Ben Orlove’s website, https://glacierhub.org

[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014. Climate change 2014: synthesis report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC (available on-line: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/).

Neoliberalism

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

Natalie Morningstar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 26 Oct 2020

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism as world system

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism as mode of governing

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnographies of the state and labour

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

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

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

After neoliberalism?

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

Addiction

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 01:14:10 +0000

Joshua Burraway

University of Virginia

Initially published 21 Oct 2020

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

Abstract:

What is addiction? As an umbrella term, addiction is often used to describe activities where there is an overwhelming drive to engage in destructive, distressing or compulsive behavioural patterns, including not just drug-taking and drinking, but gambling, eating, sex, video gaming, and even shopping. Whilst all these activities have generated rich fields of inquiry across the social science disciplines, this entry focuses primarily on the changing nature of substance addiction. Anthropology has played an important role in unpacking the multiple meanings contained within this phenomenon, tracking its expansion and enmeshment across a diverse range of human domains. The study of addiction encompasses anxieties regarding the changing nature of selfhood, control, and agency, as well as moral and political concerns relating to what counts as ‘proper’ versus ‘deviant’ behaviour. Since the turn of the twentieth century, addiction has increasingly become an object of both biomedical and criminal intervention. This shift has accelerated the birth of a therapeutic-carceral industry, where substance-users occupy the dual role of patient and criminal. This entry traces the development of anthropological thoughts on addiction, demonstrating how cultural approaches to non-Western alcohol use in the 1950s were adopted and expanded as Western social scientists sought more nuanced sociocultural models for understanding substance-use within their own societies. These developments fed into the tradition known as critical medical anthropology, which sought to join experiential accounts of suffering and illness to politico-economic approaches that examined the systemic conditions of inequality. The core contribution of anthropology in the study of addiction has been the generation of rich ethnographic data on the lived experiences and everyday realities of substance-users. This body of work has been instrumental in depathologising the lived world of addiction, demonstrating in vivid colour the complex sociality, cultural values, status dynamics, forms of intimate belonging, embodied experiences, and sociostructural inequities that lie at its heart.

Introduction

As a prism through which to contemplate the contemporary human condition, there are few phenomena that can rival addiction. Indeed, if anthropology is the study (logia) of man (anthrōpos), then addiction is more than a worthy object of investigation. In recent times, the category of addiction itself has expanded to include a far greater range of human endeavours than it has historically encompassed. Activities like sex, technology use, gambling, shopping and eating now sit alongside the more time-honoured activities of drug-taking, drinking and smoking. As Eugene Raikhel (2015) notes, the enlargement of addiction’s rubric to house this greater diversity hinges on the now-pervasive idea that these kinds of activities stimulate our brains in the same way as psychoactive substances do, paving the way for similar forms of self-destructive and compulsive behavioural patterns. Further on, this entry demonstrates some of the ways in which social science approaches to addiction have revealed problems with this brain disease paradigm, in particular the way in which it obfuscates addiction’s psychological, existential, cultural, economic and sociostructural determinants. Whilst this critical discourse applies to the full gambit of supposedly addictive activities outlined above, it is the use of and addiction to psychoactive substances that this entry focuses on, if for no other reason than their sheer ubiquity, contingency, and multiplicity across so many domains of human life.

As both a lived experience and an intellectual concept, substance addiction allows us to investigate diverse concerns such as morality, law, biology, neurochemistry, pharmaceuticalization^[1], agency, free will, and structural violence – to name but a few. And yet, it is also a relatively new object of human interest, grounded in late-nineteenth century Euro-American notions of health, illness, and individuality. As an anthropological concern, it is even newer – not truly capturing the discipline’s attention until the 1960s. Anthropology’s interest in addiction has, in large part, been stoked by major historical transformations in how society has come to understand and regulate the human consumption of psychoactive chemicals.

These transformations include how such chemicals have been culturally and medically conceived. Many contemporary ‘street drugs’, such as cocaine and opiates, for example, were often prescribed during the turn of the twentieth century as over-the-counter treatments for everyday maladies. They also reflect political changes, notably around interconnected themes of race, class, criminality, and power. As rising levels of socioeconomic and racial inequality in the West became tangled up with major public health concerns – such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic – the question of where and why substance-use patterns fitted into these crises became paramount. Addiction thus emerged as a central concept through which to consider the complex intersection between drug-use, therapeutics, epidemiology, and socio-political exclusion.

It quickly became clear that the consumption and circulation of psychoactive substances was no longer reducible to individual failings, be they biological, spiritual, or moral. Instead, social science explorations of addiction have clearly demonstrated the using and sharing of drugs to be intrinsic to local cultural systems, rooted in the social and economic dynamics of a particular place and time. Given that anthropologists have historically defined themselves in relation to the ethnographic study of society and culture, their late-in-the-day study of communities who use and share drugs is somewhat surprising. In point of fact, the now-burgeoning anthropological subfield that began in the 1960s has its roots in the innovative work of several sociologists. Using primarily ethnographic methods, these influential scholars argued not only that substance-use tends to be culturally constructed around local needs and concerns (Dai 1937, Lindesmith 1947), but that the pathologization narratives ascribed to substance-users are as well (Becker 1963). Pathologization refers to the process by which differences in human behaviour, especially those seen as sitting ‘outside’ of conventional moral and cultural norms, are converted into psychological and social aberrations that are seen as inherently destructive, something that increasingly happens through the language of biomedicalization.

Building on these formative ideas, the anthropological study of addiction has grown substantially. It cuts across a number of disciplinary subfields, notably medical, sociocultural, psychological, and political anthropology. Reflecting this boon in interest, a number of different explanatory approaches to addiction have emerged, all couched in their own particular intellectual traditions and scholastic genealogies. In what follows, this entry will first focus on three frameworks surrounding substance-use patterns that have been especially influential: a cultural approach, a subcultural one, and critical medical anthropology.^[2] The latter half of the entry will explore a selection of contemporary approaches to addiction that have emerged from the critical medical tradition. These include the study of differing therapeutic modalities, phenomenological analysis, and the role of temporality in questions of addiction and substance-use.

A cultural approach

Building on the work established by the aforementioned sociologists, the cultural model of substance-use can be traced to Dwight Heath’s (1958) work on alcohol consumption amongst the Camba, a horticultural people living in eastern Bolivia. Heath noted that most of the community’s adults would frequently drink vast quantities of rum during festival periods, sometimes remaining intoxicated for days on end. Rather than being viewed as pathological, though, this collective drunkenness – often to the point of passing out – held an enduring social and spiritual value. It reaffirmed bonds of solidarity as well as sustaining connections to those ancestral spirits who contributed to the health and fertility of the community. Heath’s observations essentially challenged the established orthodoxy that heavy alcohol usage was an intrinsically destructive behaviour. After all, the Camba drank huge quantities of distilled liquor during festive periods – the difference was that their drinking was embedded in a cultural, social, and cosmological context that imbued it with a set of meanings. It emphasised social cohesion over disintegration, collective identity over personal dissolution, and familial connection over breakdown (see also Van Vleet 2011).

In short, their drinking practices did not conform to the pathological model of addiction envisioned through a biomedical lens, in which excessive consumption is seen as intrinsically injurious to both the drinker and their surrounding community. This model, it should be noted, has been subject to a number of dynamic changes as new technologies. In particular neurological imaging techniques and advancements in psychopharmacology have reshaped how Western medicine conceptualises the relationship between behaviour, illness, and biology. The changing shape of biomedicine’s pathologising model, especially its increasing emphasis on the brain as the locus of addiction, continues to hold a profound grip on how substance-use is understood, experienced, and treated. Critically investigating the depth and reach of such pathologising understandings of addiction has become a core concern for anthropologists.

The core contribution of Heath’s cultural model was its capacity to destabilise existing projections of alcohol consumption as pathology. In the process, it shifted analysts’ focus onto emic (‘insider’) constructions of how substances were consumed in a local cultural context. Considering alcoholism to be merely a form of pathology runs the risk of being ethnocentric, that is of projecting one’s own cultural classifications onto the cultural settings of others. According to Arthur Kleinman, this constitutes a ‘category fallacy’. A seminal figure in medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry, Kleinman cautions against the transplanting of Western-based categories to elsewhere places, especially psychiatric diagnoses. Exploring the way depression is expressed and negotiated in China via the moral dynamics of the family rather than the inner life of the individual, Kleinman makes the point that symptom expression is culturally variable, even for illnesses that may have a biological basis (see also Kirmayer & Young 1998). In this regard, Heath’s approach arguably foreshadowed important developments in medical anthropology, in particular the need to question whether Western diagnostic frameworks can be exported across socio-cultural settings, lest the nuances of non-Western lifeworlds thereby be eclipsed.

Heath’s approach, though, was not without its opponents, many of whom argued that anthropology’s tendency to downplay the issues associated with alcohol consumption in non-Western contexts married two of the discipline’s most problematic instincts: romanticization and exoticization (e.g. Room 1984). More broadly, his emic model failed to suitably account for the way in which major changes in the global politico-economic order have transformed and disrupted the shape and rhythm of traditional community life, something that Heath’s field site was certainly not immune from even in the 1950s.

To be fair to Heath, he did in his later work acknowledge how drinking practices amongst the Camba began to shift in relation to the socio-economic and ecological crises they suffered with the growth of the lumber industry in surrounding forests (Heath 1987). Dislocated from its formerly collective ethos, drinking and other forms of substance-use can rapidly become sites of relational breakdown, violence and interpersonal suffering (Quintero 2002). Indeed, anthropologists have observed that problematic forms of substance-use often emerge when social systems suffer major transitions in political organization, kinship, and economy (Frederiksen 2013; Pedersen 2011). The scale of problematic forms of substance-use amongst indigenous groups in the wake of colonial violence is testament to this observation. It reveals the way that historical trauma, dispossession, and social marginalization develop into disruptive drug-taking patterns (Jervis et al. 2003; Musharbash 2007; Spicer 2007; Stevenson 2014). The explosion of drug-related mortalities and other ‘diseases of despair’ throughout the deindustrialised heartlands of the modern West also speaks to the dangers of major socio-structural upheaval and the vacuums that such historical schisms leave behind (Anglin 2002; Billings & Blee 2000; Maggard 1994; Stewart 1996).

A subcultural model

In Heath’s work, heavy alcohol consumption was seen as an integral part of the prevailing moral and cosmological order. It was, in brief, a defining aspect of Camba culture, both as embodied practice and as system of meanings through which to relate to one another. To use the language of Ellen Corin (1995), drinking was central to social life, not peripheral. Over in the Western world, however, heavy forms of intoxication, be it through alcohol or other substances, have not historically been seen as something to be extolled or morally valued. The widespread and heavy-handed criminalization of drugs, the dominance of abstinence-based recovery programmes, and the pathologization of addiction as a psychiatric disorder all gesture to this fact. Accordingly, those who consume these substances are seen as troublesome to the dominant order. They exist on the peripheral edges of cultural norms and values. The drug addict challenges the very logic of Euro-American personhood, in particular the notion that healthy persons are those whose inner lives are stable and autonomous, uncorrupted by the enslavement and chaos of chemical dependency (Summerson Carr 2010). Addicts, then, unfitting of this cultural template, have consistently found themselves relegated to some social space outside of culture, defined primarily through the pathology of their condition.

Historically, these spaces, and the lives of addicts themselves, have been marked by narratives of deviance and exclusion, with little thought given to the complexities and intimacies that pervade them. The ‘subcultural’ thus emerged as an analytical frame through which to attend to them (see Becker 1963). Whilst the ‘sub-’ prefix (literally meaning ‘below’) arguably risks reifying hierarchical divisions of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ forms of human social life, the purpose of this term was to call to attention the myriad ways that people on the periphery carve out ways of living that are at variance with the prevailing cultural centre. The so-called ‘underworld’ of drug addiction, in other words, is just that – a world; one teaming with complex forms of sociality that cannot be so easily explained away through the dehumanising language of deviance and moral decay.

Again, it was the sociologists who were first to the punch. The subcultural approach to substance-use emerged out of street-based research in America’s inner-cities. Seminal sociological accounts, in their rich descriptions of the selling, buying, sharing, and consumption of drugs, demonstrated these practices to be foundational to the daily lives of vulnerable and marginalised people (see Feldman 1968; Fiddle 1967; Partridge 1973; Sutter 1966). Particularly influential here was the work of Edward Preble and John Casey (1969), who described in intimate detail the social life of lower-class heroin users in New York City. For these users, tracking down and injecting heroin is understood as a ‘career’. It is a never-ending hustle that, from making money to buying the drugs, emerges as a full-time job that imbues each day with meaning, purpose, and business. A major contribution of this body of literature was to challenge entrenched myths surrounding drug consumption, especially intravenous usage, which had historically been viewed with high levels of moral panic. In many countries, notably in the US, the puritanical fear of needles remains ingrained in public health policy, with needle exchange programs regularly defanged or shut down out of the unfounded fear that they abet drug-use (Rhodes et al. 2005).

Unyoking drug-use from its historical associations with illness, social decay, and psychopathology shifted the emphasis of analysts from individual usage to the worlds in which such usage occurred. These worlds are marked by complex survival strategies, such as begging, panhandling, sex work, and petty crime. These strategies encompass sharing economies, rituals of socialization that initiate people into drug-using networks, and underground hustling practices that prop up multibillion-dollar narcotics economies. They include creating concealed urban spaces, such as shooting galleries and squats, that shelter ‘hidden’ populations unconnected to state services, as well as new linguistic forms of ‘street’ slang that are uniquely attuned to the conditions of scarcity, insecurity, and racialised surveillance that constitute everyday urban life in the poorest neighbourhoods. Ultimately, it was the long-term intimacy of the ethnographic method through which researchers could develop enduring relations of trust that provided access to these (under)worlds. The researchers’ emphasis on the emic perspectives, cultural order, and social meaning that were built into the fabric of these worlds serve to depathologise substance-use. Where the subcultural approach to addiction eventually succeeded was in its capacity to illuminate the complex arrangement of values, roles, and status dynamics that structure the daily lives of substance-using communities. What looked to the cultural centre like moral decay, pathology, and escapism, from within the periphery is experienced as meaningful activity. The pursuit, scoring, and taking of drugs serves here as the lifeblood of communal existence (see also Friedman et al. 1986).

Critical medical anthropology

Whilst the subcultural approach did much to enrich understandings of drug-using communities and to counter reductive and simplifying forms of stereotyping, a suspicion lingered that an over-emphasis on the ‘insider perspective’ risked a similar form of romanticising of which scholars such as Heath had been accused. The concern was that it might inadvertently deflect attention from the wider social, historical, and politico-economic forces that shaped patterns of drug-use and addiction. The response to such misgivings was the emergence of a critical medical anthropology in the 1980s, whose analytical goal was to fuse experiential accounts of suffering, illness, and wellbeing with politico-economic approaches that attended to the systemic conditions that drive institutionalised forms of inequality, racialised violence, carceral governance, and social control. The foundational figures of this approach, such as Nancy-Scheper Hughes (1990), Margaret Lock (1987), and Merrill Singer (1989), sought not only to reveal the structures underpinning the social determinants of ill health, but also to apply these critical frameworks in practical ways, collaborating with local communities so as to challenge and ultimately change existing healthcare systems.

A pertinent example of this tradition is the work of Philippe Bourgois (1995, 2009), who has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst vulnerable drug-users in New York and San Francisco. Here, addiction is interpreted as a form of social suffering that is inexorably tied to the uneven distribution of wealth and power. In Bourgois’ eyes, America’s neoliberal market economy is rigged in favour of corporate power and special interest groups. Social care services are imbalanced and underfunded, while the principles of individual responsibility and entrepreneurial bootstrapism are still being championed. As a result, an ever-growing number of America’s indigent classes, a disproportionate amount of whom struggle with addiction issues, are turned into a ‘Lumpenproletariat’. This Marxist term historically refers to those people structurally positioned just below the wage worker, who prop up the economic system through irregular employment. In the context of addiction, it describes those vulnerable groups for whom punitive forms of disciplinary governance, such as through surveillance, policing, and incarceration, have become destructive and alienating. This occurs while other segments of the population, notably large corporations, continue to profit from these systems of abuse and punishment. Perhaps the most patent examples of this are the private prison system and the pharmaceutical industry, both of which generate billions of dollars of revenue each year.

The gaping health disparities we see between America’s upper and lower classes not only exacerbate the suffering of vulnerable groups and damage their bodies. They also reshape the bounds of their subjectivity to the point where everyday forms of systemic and intimate violence are experienced as the natural order of things. We see this frequently in cases where substance-users ‘blame themselves’ for the oftentimes brutal and discriminatory situations they find themselves caught up in. Such moments, as Bourgois demonstrates, point us to the way that marginalised people naturalise the structural forces that alienate them by internalising dominant cultural narratives around ideas of personal responsibility. They begin to believe that substance-users must be understood as the sole architects of their own downfall and, by extension, of their recovery as well.

Viewed through this critical lens, substance-use emerges as a form of self-medication through which to attend to chronic conditions of existential distress, powerlessness, and sociostructural alienation. It effectively provides a moment of escapist relief from the painful conditions of the user’s lifeworld. The irony, however, is that using illegal drugs as relief risks attracting exclusionary forms of social control that are likely to compound and amplify that person’s marginalization. Indeed, the ubiquitous forms of policing, punitive surveillance, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement that underpin the US-led ‘war on drugs’ have turned already-precarious social spaces into what Jarrett Zigon (2019) has termed ‘zones of uninhabitability’. They are places where those who inhabit them suffer chronic conditions of isolation, cruelty, entrapment, and expendability. Since former US President Richard Nixon first declared illegal drugs “public enemy number one” in 1971, this now globalised and highly militarised crusade to eradicate this evil has ultimately become a war on already marginalised people (Zigon 2019). This is a war in which users and nonusers alike are trapped in zones of uninhabitability, made into internal enemies against which the ‘good life’ of the contemporary sociopolitical order can be defined, maintained, and protected.

The war on drugs in the age of the brain

The ongoing ‘war on drugs’ is couched in the notion that people are essentially powerless to resist the temptation that drugs offer. Labelled the ‘exposure’ orientation in clinical circles (Alexander 1982), this notion contends that mere one-time contact with certain drugs (especially opiates) is enough to trigger a self-destructive cycle of compulsive, ever-escalating usage. The addict, in other words, becomes a slave to their substance. This model is the foundation on which the idea of a chronic relapsing brain hinges. It holds that certain drugs ‘hijack’ the reward pathways in the brain – especially those responsible for producing dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of pleasure and euphoria, among many other things. The formula ‘dopamine = pleasure’ has been refuted as a gross oversimplification, as the interaction between neurotransmitter production and subjectivity are far more nuanced and complex (Berridge 2007). Nevertheless, the broader paradigm that drugs cause a brain disease has shown itself to be pervasive, underpinning the prevailing idea that drug addiction is rooted in individual biology. In such a view, the addictive substance is seen as mounting a kind of hostile takeover of a person’s brain, in which the neurological mechanisms of reward, desire, and pleasure are systemically compromised.

Much of the empirical groundwork for the exposure orientation stemmed from experiments conducted on rodents in the 1960s. In these experiments, caged rats, who faced the options of drinking either water or an opiate solution, kept returning to the drug-laced bottle, oftentimes fatally. However, in the 1970s, psychologist Bruce Alexander noticed a key structural flaw in the experiments, specifically that the rats were all alone in the cage, with nothing to do but take the drugs on offer. Alexander hypothesised that it was the social isolation, and not the drugs, that sustained their desire to seek chemical relief. To test this hypothesis, he built ‘Rat Park’ – a sort of rodent utopia in which the rats had plenty of space to eat, run, and, most importantly, socialise. Despite facing the same two options, the rats hardly ever touched the drug-laced water, and none of them ever came close to overdosing. From this study and several variations, Alexander developed the ‘adaptive orientation’ view. It holds that addiction ‘is an attempt to adapt to chronic distress of any sort through habitual use’ (1982: 367). In other words, it is not the chemical that causes addiction, but the cages in which beings find themselves.

The extension of this idea is that a human being’s everyday reality can be experienced as cage-like. This chimes with broader anthropological investigations into the ways in which the uneven distribution of wealth, power, and resources has created conditions of extreme social isolation, chronic scarcity, and endemic precarity. These conditions are compounded through the exclusionary policies championed by drug war ideologues. Self-medication through drugs thus emerges as one of the few adaptive coping mechanisms available to deal with these cage-like conditions. This is because psychoactive drugs serve as a readymade shortcut to induce in the user alternative states of being. They may be brief and potentially costly, but they transport the user beyond the existential crises that are otherwise engulfing them.

Chemical interventions

The notion that psychoactive chemicals can act as transformational catalysts within broader healing rites has been noted across history and culture. In particular, hallucinogenic botanicals (such as ayahuasca, peyote, or iboga) have been used in ritual contexts in many small-scale societies to open up pathways between the human and the spirit world (Dobkin de Rios 1972). Taken in a collective setting and guided by ritual specialists such as shamans or other spiritual leaders, these substances open up new therapeutic pathways by reconfiguring the complex relation between self, ego, personhood, culture, and cosmology (Grob & Dobkin de Rios 1994). In the West, however, these institutionalised forms of ritual healing have been largely dismantled and disavowed over the course of modernity along with the stewards who sustain them. They have been replaced by an individualised, highly biologised therapeutic model that hinges on biomedical understandings of illness and disease (Kleinman 1988; Napier 1992, 2004). The modern pharmaceutical industry has emerged in lockstep with these historical changes, locating illness primarily in individual bodies and, in the case of mental health and addiction issues, the brain (see Raikhel 2015).

Whilst Western healthcare systems and certain ritual formats both incorporate chemical interventions into their modes of healing, there are crucial differences in how these substances are implemented, experienced, and conceptualised. For example, the Navajo, an indigenous people of the Southwestern United States, have long employed peyote in their healing ceremonies. Native to Navajo land, peyote is a small cactus plant that contains a hallucinogenic compound known as mescaline, which can profoundly alter a person’s sense of self and reality. According to anthropologist Joseph Calabrese, who took part in these rituals, peyote can be understood as a technology of consciousness modification that allows the sufferer to situate themselves in a broader arc of symbolic and spiritual healing. In other words, the visions, sensations, insights, interpretive activity, and encounters produced within what are known as Peyote Meetings are part of a deeper cultural narrative that reflects and responds to the Navajo cosmos. It is part of a universe that includes not just other humans but also non-human spirits, animals, and ancestors. For Navajo struggling with illness such as alcoholism or depression, taking peyote in ritual contexts opens up lines of communication with omniscient spiritual beings. Direct engagement^[3]with these spiritual entities can aid in the recovery process by providing deep personal insights that would otherwise remain hidden (Aberle 1991; Calabrese 2008).

As a collective cultural experience, the ceremonial distribution and ingestion of peyote differs radically from the clinical prescription of modern pharmaceuticals. In the latter context, the patient’s illness is located primarily in the brain’s faulty or damaged circuitry, while social and existential conditions are rendered peripheral to diagnosis and treatment. As psychiatry has become increasingly biologised (Luhrmann 2001), the result is that more and more mental health conditions are being designated as chronic (i.e. without end). Consequently, these afflictions require constant maintenance through on-going prescriptions and daily pharmaceutical intervention that operates on a molecular level.

Pharmakon dualities

We can learn more about the pharmaceutical approach to addiction by looking at the premise of opioid substitution therapy (OST) for those who are struggling with opioid dependency. OST is practiced in clinical settings across the globe. In it, the patient is prescribed a synthetic opioid such as methadone or buprenorphine that mimics the biochemistry of other opioids whilst suppressing euphoric sensations. By substituting one drug for the other, OST is designed to wean the addict off from the opioid they are perceived to be ‘abusing’, reducing cravings whilst staving off the physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal. This idea of replacing ‘bad drugs’ with so-called ‘good medicines’ has been analysed as a site of profound contradiction by anthropologists. One prism through which a number of them have explored this idea is through the notion of the pharmakon – pharmacology’s etymological root, from the Greek. Pharmakon is a term used to describe things that hold a double valence as both cure and poison, something that has indivisibly positive and negative effects. Pharmaceutical opioids used in OST oscillate between the licit and the illicit (Bourgois 2000; Garriott 2011; Lyons 2014). They are thus an archetypal modern example of pharmakon, pendulating between being miracle cures and deadly poisons (see Biehl 2005; Meyers 2014).

Substances that carry these dual identities can radically blur the partition lines between therapeutic use and abuse. This has been shown by the unprecedented surge in morbidity and mortality associated with opioid pain relievers that has swept the United States in recent years. Aggressively marketed ‘miracle’ painkillers, such as the now-infamous Oxycontin, have flooded the US healthcare system. Their curative capacities soon turned poisonous as they took root within already-precarious communities which had been progressively compromised through the ‘perfect storm’ combination of deindustrialization, socioeconomic neglect, social safety net cuts, and mass unemployment (Dasgupta et al. 2018). Ironically, using OST as the predominant clinical response to the opioid crisis hinges on the same therapeutic logic that led to the proliferation of drugs like Oxycontin in the first place – namely that pain is a biological disorder (see Crowley-Matoka & True 2012). Addiction is here reduced to a set of individual withdrawal symptoms that emerge in relation to the internal dynamics of certain neurochemical pathways. It thus becomes unyoked from its social, political, and existential conditions. In America’s case, the conditions for the proliferation of opioid pain relievers were especially ripe. Pain relievers spread as part of an entrenched culture of pharmaceuticalization (Oldani 2014) that has been amplified by gaping disparities in health and wealth across the population, a rapacious health-care sector with huge barriers to treatment for those who cannot afford it, as well as a lack of unemployment support combined with an emphasis on the importance of maintaining work despite illness or injury.

Addiction, phenomenology and the temporal turn

To move beyond ‘neurocentric’ accounts and understand how wider structural conditions shape addiction, a number of scholars who identify with critical medical anthropology have turned to the philosophical field of phenomenology for inspiration. Simply put, phenomenology can be understood as a philosophical method that seeks to reveal the structure and conditions of lived experience by articulating how the world appears and is felt from an embodied perspective (see, for example, Good 1994; Csordas 1994; Throop 2007). Broadly speaking, then, phenomenological accounts consider a larger range of experiences than simply that of suffering and pathological compulsion. They describe the complex ways that pain intersects with pleasure, despair with hope, and creativity with destruction. At the same time, they hold that such complex forms of subjectivity are always already embedded in particular social, political, historical, and conceptual contexts (Mattingly 2019; Zigon 2018). For a number of scholars working in this subfield, much of the analytical emphasis has been on the way that substances are used as a means to alter temporality – the lived experience of time – under conditions of precarity.

This analytic move reflects broader discussions within the phenomenology of drugs that focus on their capacity to radically alter the subjective experience of time (Cope 2003; Deleuze 2004; Denzin 1987; Flaherty 1999; Hill 1978; Huxley 2004; Lapp et al. 1994; Klingemann 2000; Reith 1999; Shanon 2001; Smart 1968). For example, in her seminal work amongst Hispano heroin-users in New Mexico, Angela Garcia (2010) engages with melancholia, or endless mourning, as a way to articulate the historical dimensions of addiction and drug treatment in the region. For Garcia’s interlocutors, heroin use and the intimate losses it inflicts upon communities through incarceration and overdose deaths is experienced as indivisible from the long history of agricultural land dispossession, grinding rural poverty, and social abandonment. Addiction expresses loss and mourning for a past and a cultural identity that struggles for coherency in the face of widespread socioeconomic change. People here live in a purgatorial world where historical suffering meets clinical therapeutics and where each repeated descent into heroin usage fortifies the prevailing model of addiction as a chronic, ‘no exit’ disease.

My own work amongst London’s inner-city homeless has also engaged themes of temporality. It describes how rough sleepers use anaesthetic intoxicants such as alcohol, opiates, and pharmaceutical sedatives to induce blackout states. These provide a temporary reprieve from the chronic existential crises, painful memories, and deep boredom that undergird street living (Burraway 2018). Many of the homeless describe these blackout states in terms of ‘becoming somebody else’. Thereby, they experience the blackout as a paradoxical form of self-healing. It refashions the normal interface between self, memory, agency, body, and world. The blackout is paradoxical because it transports the homeless into a memoryless state where they are no longer burdened by the crisis of their own presence. Yet it also evaporates the moment the drugs wear off. In this regard, the blackout traps them in a Sisyphean loop in which the very experience of escape is forever held just out of conscious reach.

Approaching drug-use by focusing on how it alters people’s relationship to time has turned out to be a fruitful mode of inquiry, especially in social contexts marked by scarcity, precarity, and vulnerability. For example, in their ethnography of khat consumption among Ethiopian unemployed youth, Mains et al. (2013) note how finding the stimulant khat and then chewing it with others imbued the day with some kind of meaningful rhythm, in the process taking up time, of which there was plenty. So, rather than using psychoactive substances to annihilate the threat of an empty future by inducing anaesthesia – as was the case for my homeless interlocutors – these young Ethiopian men used khat’s stimulant properties to move towards an alternative vision of the future. They sought the psychoactive condition of mirqana, a state which moved them beyond the banal realities of the present and into dreams and hopes for a better time to come. Aligned with these studies is a large body of literature on the concept of waiting, which explores the various ‘time-killing’ strategies that people use to cope with economic stagnation, chronic joblessness, and deep boredom (Masquelier 2013; Harms 2013; Ralph 2008; Honwana 2012).

These studies also foreground that the body becomes central during periods of crisis. When the world feels as though it is spinning out of control, it is the body – people's foremost technical instrument (Mauss 1979) – that often becomes the new locus of control and transformation, a last resort of control in an otherwise-unmanageable world. This has been shown in ethnographic studies on topics as varied as homelessness (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009; Desjarlais 1997), eating disorders (Lester 2009), organ trafficking (Scheper-Hughes 2001), and prostitution (Day 2007; O’Neil 2015). The sad irony, however, as some have argued, is that the ‘resort’ to individual bodily techniques in times of crisis, such as through heavy drug-use, often ends up reproducing the very politico-ideological demands that the person in question seeks escape from. The imperative to take ‘personal responsibility’ for one’s own self-transformation has a decidedly neoliberal edge to it insofar as the locus of transformation is rooted in autonomous decision making rather than any kind of meaningful changes to the individual’s social and existential conditions.

Conclusion

The study of addiction is a messy and highly disjointed research field, described by some in terms of ‘conceptual chaos’ (Shaffer 1997). Much of this chaos can be seen as reflecting broader historical transformations in how Euro-American cultures have come to think about the human condition. Addiction has developed from being considered a spiritual affliction, conceived through Christian theology, to its present incarnation as a brain disease. Its study demonstrates the extent to which contemporary understandings reflect changing ideologies about the core elements of personhood, agency, and subjectivity. This path, though, is neither singular nor linear.

Anthropology has done much to parse out the complexity of addiction, which moulds and is moulded by the contexts in which it emerges (Raikhel & Garriott 2013). The discipline’s cross-cultural perspectives that allow for a more diverse body of thought on the topic challenge the hegemony enjoyed by neuroscientific approaches. While neuroscientific approaches do have merit, their virtues should not be extolled at the expense of alternative perspectives that may also be correct. It is for this reason that some scholars urge us to embrace analytic and interpretive multiplicity. They argue that a ‘vibrant epistemic pluralism’ (Raikhel 2015: 391) will provide a far richer and more nuanced conceptual vocabulary through which to make sense of addiction. Ethnography, which embraces human complexity at both the individual and structural level, has allowed anthropology to come up with many important insights since, its relatively late arrival to the addiction conversation. It has done this primarily by placing emic concerns and lived experience at the forefront of analysis. Ethnographic work emphasises the role of cultural mechanisms in shaping ideologies and experiences surrounding substances-use. It depathologises the social life of addiction amongst marginalised communities and problematises state institutions that effectively fuse therapeutic domains with criminal ones. Further, by moving the analytic lens beyond the individual user, anthropology has illustrated in granular detail that addiction cannot be uncoupled from history, policy, inequality, and political economy.

Addiction has also become a fundamental site for the production of theory, as it sits at the intersection of so many aspects of the human condition, which often stand in contradiction to one another. Thus, addiction is simultaneously an aspect of lived experience and an object of biomedical knowledge, a condition of therapeutic possibility as well as of penal coercion. It is a world of ecstatic pleasure and of debilitating pain, an escape route as well as a prison. Caught up in the swirls and eddies of this ambivalent churn are those who live with addiction each day, their on-going relationships with their chosen substances forcing us to rethink the boundaries of human agency. Above all, they highlight the need to avoid reductive accounts and to hold within our analytic frameworks multiple perspectives at once. To understand addiction, we must consider the structural in tandem with the experiential, the personal with the political, and the epistemic with the existential.

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Note on contributor

Joshua Burraway is a cultural medical anthropologist whose research interests sit at the intersection between social and political theory, critical phenomenology, addiction medicine, and psychiatry. His research interests emerged from a long-term ethnographic study of homeless substance-users in inner-city London. Currently, he is carrying out research in rural Appalachia exploring deindustrialization, social trust, and the proliferation of opioids and other narcotics, such as methamphetamine.

[1] Broadly speaking, pharmaceuticalization refers to the reconfiguring of human realities, processes, and capabilities into opportunities for pharmaceutical intervention, augmentation, or enhancement.

[2] See Singer (2012) for a more exhaustive historical literature review of these approaches and several others.

[3] See also Scherz & Mpanga’s (2019) work in Uganda for how direct spiritual intervention can facilitate recovery from alcoholism.

Hunting and gathering

Felix Stein — Mon, 18 May 2020 20:59:23 +0000

Thomas Widlok

University of Cologne

Initially published 18 May 2020

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

Abstract:

Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from human origins to the present. Correspondingly, there has been a lot of anthropological attention devoted to hunting and gathering with an initial confidence that one could directly observe human nature by studying hunter-gatherers. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown cautious not to draw analogies between present-day hunter-gatherers and those of the distant past too quickly. They also do not focus on hunting and gathering as isolated activities, but rather on the socio-cultural formations that have been found to be associated with them. Despite considerable regional diversity, there are recurrent themes in hunter-gatherer ethnography that show shared patterns beyond the ecology of foraging. Prominent is the notion of hunter-gatherers being ‘originally affluent’ with a relatively low workload. Hunter-gatherers have also been associated with a high incidence of gender and age equality, due to levelling practices such as sharing. Most hunter-gatherers live in very small groups, characterised by multirelational kinship ties. They often have distinct forms of environmental perception, and it has been suggested that they display a high degree of playfulness in ritual affairs. They therefore provide comparative insights in a wide-range of domains far beyond the activities of hunting and gathering.

Introduction: Not everyone who hunts or gathers is a hunter-gatherer

Hunting and gathering as activities have been with humans for all of human evolution up to today. For more than 99% of their time on earth, humans have gained their sustenance through animal and plant food that they hunted and gathered (Lee & DeVore 1968: 3). Even so-called ‘herders’ and ‘farmers’ (or ‘pastoralists’ and ‘agriculturalists’ as they are often called) have historically tended to spend some of their time hunting and gathering. Especially in harsh times, for instance when drought threatens domesticated animals or harvests, herders and farmers include hunted game and undomesticated plant foods in their diet.

At the same time, many herders and farmers all over the world tend to look down on people who live almost exclusively on hunting and gathering, because this way of life often differs not only in how food is gained, but in many other ways, too. The rituals and beliefs of people who specialise in hunting and gathering are often distinct from those of herders and farmers, as are their social rules and norms. They frequently have their own views about leadership, about whom one should marry, how one should bring up children, what a settlement should look like, which rules one should follow with regard to holding and inheriting property, with regard to sharing and pooling resources, and so forth. Therefore, despite the fact that hunting and gathering activities are often combined with other economic pursuits, anthropologists refer collectively to people who rely exclusively (or largely) on hunted game and on gathered plant food as ‘hunter-gatherers’ to acknowledge that there is ‘a distinct hunter-gatherer way of life’ that distinguishes them from their neighbours (see Kelly 2013). Often that way of life is not recognised, and hunter-gatherers are stigmatised because of it. This entry outlines some of the social practices that constitute this way of life and some of the cultural variety to be found across continents. It does not cover all instances of hunting and gathering activities at all times and places around the world, but it will focus on key case studies with only some comparative reference to more outlying examples such as the hunting practiced amongst the European nobility or the collecting of food amongst urban dumpster-divers. In short, this entry is not so much about ‘hunter-gatherers’ as a category of people than about ‘hunter-gatherer situations’ (Widlok 2016) that we find repeatedly across space and time.

The ecology of foraging and the history of hunting and gathering

The term ‘foraging’ is occasionally also used when referring to people who hunt and gather (Lee 1979). It directly, or at least implicitly, emphasises the continuity between human hunter-gatherers and foraging as it is practiced by animals or was practiced by humans other than Homo sapiens (for instance by the Neanderthals). For this reason, the term is rejected by some scholars and explicitly embraced by others. As activities, hunting and gathering pre-date modern humans because all their predecessors have exclusively lived on various types of hunting, gathering, and fishing. How similar or dissimilar these predecessors were from the human hunter-gatherers that live today is a major point of scientific debate. For those studying the remote past, any human living by hunting and gathering today (or in the recent, scientifically-documented past) provides a chance to learn more about what life might have been like in a deep past. Conversely, hunter-gatherer studies can help to construct models that attempt to understand the links between various natural environments and the spectrum of human lifeways. This can, in turn, help us understand current or recent hunter-gatherer situations.

That said, over the last decades there have been growing doubts as to whether what is known about hunter-gatherers through ethnography – that is, through reports by those who have gone to live with them – is a reliable model for reconstructing the ecology of foraging in the remote past, and the other way round. There is growing consensus that the lives of hunter-gatherers are not strictly determined by ecology or by factors detached from human cultural agency while ecological dependencies continue to be underrated with regard to non-hunter-gatherers. In any case, anthropologists have grown much more cautious when claiming analogies with the remote past or with animal behaviour, not least because such analogies have often been used in efforts of colonial domination (Gordon 1992). Moreover, considerable variation and flexibility exist in hunter-gatherer lifeways not only across environments but even within the same type of environment (see Kent 2002, Lee & Daly 1999). Despite striking similarities, life in the Australian deserts is not the same as life in deserts in Africa and elsewhere. The same holds for hunter-gatherers living in savannas, tropical forests, or tundras. An elaborate mythical and ritual attachment to land, for instance, has its very specific history in Australia, not matched in Africa but with regional continuities beyond indigenous Australia (see Swain 1993). At the same time, a high degree of mobility and small but flexible group size is found across the forager spectrum (Kelly 1995). It is important to point out that every ethnographic case documents a collective cultural achievement that has grown historically across many generations. Moreover, every environment inhabited by humans (foraging or not) has been altered by human impact so that hunter-gatherers, too, live in a cultural environment as much as in a natural one. The use of fire by hunter-gatherers, for example, is likely to have been a major transformative power in many natural environments (see Jones 1969).

Reducing hunter-gatherer life to ecology is as problematic as excluding ecology as irrelevant from other modes of life. Take mobility as an example: hunter-gatherers often move regularly within a certain territory. This mobility is a major strategy for dealing effectively with changes in the environment and with seasonal shortages of resources. However, mobility patterns are not only governed by ecological reasons alone. In many instances, they are also social. People resolve or avoid conflicts and social tension by splitting up and moving away from one another. Conversely, they create and maintain social bonds by visiting one another and by staying together. Moreover, hunter-gatherers often move before resources are depleted, in the search for food variety but also because they long to revisit places they have not been to for a while (see Widlok 2015). The movement is different – in its ecological impact and in terms of social relevance – from those of farmers and herders who may constantly be on the lookout for new pastures in unknown territory (see Brody 2000). Among hunter-gatherers, one can typically observe a fission and fusion pattern as people aggregate into larger groups and split up again periodically or seasonally. This pattern is often influenced by fluctuations in the availability of resources (migrating herds, fruit seasons, rainfall variability) but also by social needs, such as visiting known places. It is different from the pattern of outmigration in expanding farming or industrial societies. Mobility practices are therefore not only governed by ecology but they are also a matter of longing for others, of teaming up for rituals, but also for enjoying the personal autonomy of deciding whether one wants to stay or to leave. Much of the contemporary literature in social anthropology therefore concentrates on the social practices of living hunter-gatherers, while in archaeology and evolutionary studies the emphasis is on long-term ecological pressures and adaptations. It is important to note, however, that what is shared among hunter-gatherer groups in comparison with non-foragers and what is locally specific to them has both an ecological and a cultural dimension.

The original affluent society?

Early ideas about hunter-gatherers were hampered by the fact that, by the time that professional ethnographers arrived on the scene in the twentieth century, most hunter-gatherers had been decimated and relegated to remote places. Moreover, many early accounts by European explorers were not based on first-hand observation but on second-hand information provided by dominant farmers and herders that was strongly coloured by their negative attitudes towards foragers, whom they considered to lead a harsh and undesirable life. When ethnographers were able to show that this was not the case (see Altman 1987), this realization – that hunter-gatherers often did not lead the miserable life of desperate poverty that farmers and herders (and early scholars) imagined – became one of the first major insights and intriguing findings of hunter-gatherer studies that continues to inform social thought. The discussion became widely known under the notion of ‘the original affluent society’, coined by Marshall Sahlins (1988). Sahlins relied on time-allocation studies suggesting that hunter-gatherers spend less time on work than people practicing agriculture. This made modern working-hours look less like a unique achievement of Western civilization than a return to what we had before the so-called Neolithic revolution. These findings flagged the drudgery and labour-intensive economic regimes that industrialization had introduced into (most) people’s lives. A rich discussion followed (see Gowdy 1998), highlighting that the affluence of hunter-gatherers is in most cases not to be confused with abundance. Instead of continuously increasing production and maximising output, the main strategy of hunter-gatherers is to accept low production goals and optimise the distribution and use of resources. Instead of seeking to maximise individual material gains, many hunter-gatherers seemed to focus on allowing for plenty of time for leisure, ritual, social relations, and entertainment. Social practices such as sharing (discussed below) and mobility allowed greater access to resources than amongst sedentary people with exclusive property regimes. Not surprisingly, many alternative and post-materialist circles today are attracted to such a way of life.

However, it is important to note that the degree of affluence and its socio-cultural repercussions vary considerably. In drier climates, occasional hardships and food shortages occur more often than in rainforests. In lower latitudes, there is a strong seasonal element, resulting in shifts between more concentrated (and arguably more hierarchical) settlements in the summer months and more dispersed (and arguably more precarious) living during the winter (Mauss 2004 [1904-5]). More importantly, in some places like America’s northwest coast, economies based on hunting, gathering, and fishing provided enough sustenance to allow for permanent settlements. As Brian Hayden (1984) argues, in some places enough surplus food could be converted into more hierarchical social structures through exchange and redistribution feasts to eventually lead to ranks, leaders, and clans, which were effectively avoided by most hunter-gatherers elsewhere. While sharing is a main strategy to facilitate resource access and enable equality, large-scale exchange networks and ceremonial, competitive exchange systems (like the potlatch feasts among northwest coast Indians) enabled hierarchy. In other words, major transformations in socio-political life, including the introduction of inequality and strong leadership positions, of inheritance and succession via descent, etc., may not have taken place as a consequence of the introduction of agriculture. They may have been already taking place within the hunter-gatherer spectrum.

This observation has led to a number of attempts to create sub-categories within the hunter-gatherer spectrum and to emphasise the diversity among foraging groups. Amongst the various attempts to distinguish ‘simple’ from ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, the distinction between ‘immediate-return’ and ‘delayed-return’ foragers (Woodburn 1998) has been most productive. While ‘immediate-return’ groups tend to consume the fruits of their labour more or less right away, ‘delayed-return’ groups may invest in land, infrastructure, and people that provide returns at a later stage. The point of departure of this distinction is that hunter-gatherer societies are integrated systems, so that an economic transformation may involve a number of socio-political transformations. Transitioning from immediate-return to delayed-return thus involves creating a strong sense of personal property and of social institutions (corporate groups and leadership positions) that protect property between the moment of investment and the moment of return. More recently, other aspects of this integrated system have been studied in greater detail, above all the ideational (or ontological) confidence that immediate-return hunter-gatherers have in their ‘giving environment’ (Bird-David 1990), and the corresponding notions of distributed creativity and performative sociality (see Lewis 2015). Immediate-return systems, it is argued, do not just allow for confidence in being able to make a living tomorrow, but they also free up time and energy that is then spent on art, music, and on engaging intimately with children and with one another. All of these studies underline that the seemingly ‘simple’ systems are in fact, in many ways, rather complex and intrinsically subject to historical and geographical variation. The following paragraphs will briefly outline key aspects of this complexity by dealing with equality, kinship, and ritual.

Hunter-gatherers and (in)equality

Biased views towards hunter-gatherers typically point out that they ‘lack’ several features that dominate the lives of observers, e.g. strong leaders, religious specialists, large edifices, codified laws, written literature, and formal institutions. The counter-movement has been to emphasise what hunter-gatherers have preserved (and which got lost in other contexts), for instance: equality, personal autonomy, freedom of movement, ecological harmony - with a danger of romanticising forager society as the inverse image of conditions found elsewhere. Much of the task of the anthropology of hunter-gatherers has been to debunk false assumptions leading into either of these directions. With regard to the question of equality, ethnographers have pointed out that it is not a given state of affairs amongst hunter-gatherers (and anyone else). The primate heritage seems to be characterised by widespread hierarchy (see Boehm 1993) from which human foragers managed to break away. Having few material possessions or moving places frequently is not a guarantee for equality. Whatever the material conditions, particular cultural lifeways have to develop for egalitarianism to be transmitted across generations. In other words, equality among humans is not a default that does not require any historically grown socio-cultural practices (see Widlok & Tadesse 2005).

Quite to the contrary, any successful form of equality is typically achieved by a host of practices that are generally known as ‘levelling practices’, techniques that prevent individuals from becoming dominant; from converting, for instance, hunting success into lasting asymmetric dependencies and more generally from creating and accumulating capital in the hands of particular individuals or groups. Sharing, and specifically ‘demand sharing’, is a common strategy that regularly diffuses any inequalities between those who happen to have more than others (Peterson 1993, see also Widlok 2017). ‘Demand sharing’, closely related to ‘tolerated scrounging’, allows those in need to take initiative in the (re-) distribution of goods. Instead of waiting for an alm that may (or may not) be given according to the discretion of the giver, forms of demand sharing are a morally accepted and socially expected behaviour among many hunter-gatherers. It typically requires the owner to justify why something may be kept. It also makes hoarding difficult and often asking can be done implicitly, via a silent demand of a gesture or simple taking. Another example of levelling practices is gambling, such as the gambling of arrows among the Hadza, a group of a few hundred hunter-gatherers in Tanzania (Wooburn 1988). Here, arrows are the stakes in gambling games, which result in any hunter carrying arrows of other men in his quiver, which in turn has implications for meat distribution. Since the maker of an arrow can make claims on game shot with his arrow, this means that the more successful hunters regularly have to give up meat to others. Gambling is also widespread in Aboriginal Australia and those who gain are expected to play until inequalities even out. Another levelling practice is known as ‘insulting the meat’ and has been documented for the !Kung, the largest and best-known group of southern African hunter-gatherers (Lee 2003). Here, the meat provided by a hunter is systematically and rigorously talked about in negative terms (‘insulted’) which prevents hunters from boasting and exploiting their hunting luck for the domination of others, and for creating personal dependencies and obligations to them. A model known as ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’ (Boehm 1993) suggests that these egalitarian systems are actually not free of attempts to dominate, but that equality is maintained through strategies of the many who are dominating those few who otherwise would rise to positions of domination. There are, therefore, a number of informal social institutions that, when taken together, nudge people towards more equal relations and away from more hierarchical ones: mobility patterns allow people to ‘vote with their feet’ by avoiding lasting dependencies, as people cannot be forced to stay. Rituals strengthen communal bonds rather than individual specialists. And systems of universal and performative kinship avoid strong lineages emerging. Not all of these strategies are found in all hunter-gatherer societies. However, hunter-gatherers are characterised by bundles of levelling practices, and the resilience and reappearance of hunter-gatherer societies relies to a large extent on these levelling practices being kept in place across generations. Conversely, we are now in a better position to explain why there are (sub)cultures in which some hunting and gathering are practiced, but which on the whole look very different from the majority of what we call hunter-gatherer societies.

Hunting outside the context of hunter-gatherer societies has both continuities and discontinuities with what we find in the hunter-gatherer contexts. Hunting involves the taking of a life; it invokes the unintelligibility of death, of killing, and of having to kill in order to live. Therefore, the relationship to the animal killed and the hunting practices are universally marked and hedged by ritual acts and special uses of language – including in ‘modern’ hunting. Nevertheless, two instances of hunting, however similar they may be in outward appearance, can involve rather different political institutions and different spiritual connotations. In the more recent history of Europe and its colonial satellites, hunting is closely associated with privilege and hierarchy. The landholding gentry held hunting rights over its large stretches of land which turned hunting into a symbol for (over-)lordship and domination. It also created the poacher as someone who not only illegally hunts but who also defies the sovereignty of kings, clergy, and lordships and who is consequently threatened with extremely harsh penalties (see Thompson 1975). The connection between hunting and ruling has been intimate across a large spectrum of modern political systems including fascist, communist, and colonial rulers, and it continues to be a strong marker of social distinction and power. In many ex-colonies, the nation-state and its representatives consider themselves to be the owners of wild animals (and sometimes of wild plants, too). This often automatically criminalises indigenous hunter-gatherers and has frequently led to the expulsion of local people from wildlife reserves based on an ideology of categorically separating people from wildlife.

Since hunting in European nation-states and in the colonies is associated with power-holders and domination, it is very different from the socio-political embedding found amongst hunter-gatherers. This is not only true in economic and political terms, but also with regard to the relationship between hunters and environment, particularly their prey. In his study Grateful prey, Robert Brightman (1993) gives a detailed account of the religious ideas and hunting strategies of subarctic indigenous hunters, in this case of the Cree Indians of the Hudson Bay. Here, the notion of the game animal as offering itself to the hunter, who in turn has a responsibility for that animal, is widespread. Animals are considered to be, in some respects, like humans, and in other respects seen as unlike humans, as depending on them but also as a potential spiritual threat. The personalization of the prey is deeply ambivalent. Rane Willerslev, in his ethnography of indigenous people of northeastern Siberia (2007) also underlines the point that hunting in these instances is never straightforwardly utilitarian, since there is an important spiritual dimension to it, stemming from the giving and taking of life. As in personal relationships, the exchange between humans and their environment is often conditional. It depends on performative skills and mutual atunement, including a degree of tricking, deception, and retribution, as well as gratefulness and respect (see Breyer & Widlok 2018). These ambivalent tendencies tend to culminate as part of hunting, which elevates this practice for hunter-gatherers to more than just a way of getting meat or of passing their time.

Gatherers, gender and comparisons

A broadly parallel picture emerges with regard to gathering and collecting wild foodstuff. There are two aspects to this: firstly, it has been pointed out that in terms of food quantity, nutrition, and food security, gathering undomesticated plant food is much more important to hunter-gatherers than the hunt, even though ideologically there is commonly an emphasis on game meat. Scholarly preoccupation with the hunting aspect of the hunter-gatherer way of life may therefore be biased, since at least in terms of quantity, gathering is in many settings the main means of survival. Since it is mostly women who concentrate on gathering, the old picture of ‘man the hunter’ (Lee & DeVore 1986) began to be complemented by that of ‘woman the gatherer’ (Dahlberg 1981). This is an oversimplification, since even men who go out hunting often return with gathered fruits (rather than meat) while women’s gathering may include capturing small animals such as lizards and birds. The line between what constitutes ‘hunting’, and who is involved in it, thereby becomes more blurred than anticipated (Kästner 2012). Without the keen observations of women reading animal tracks and movements, many hunts would not be successful. Moreover, collective hunts in forest areas often involve the whole camp, regardless of gender. Despite cases in which some of the meat may be reserved for men (or to particular relatives of the hunter), women in many hunter-gatherer societies enjoy equality that compares favourably with most other societies (see Leacock 1998). This includes their access to resources, but also their social standing and status, their autonomy in making decisions (for instance, in cases of infanticide) and their room for agency. Men, on the other hand, often engage in what may be considered ‘female’ activities, not just gathering but also looking after children (see Hewlett 1991). Despite a frequently observed division of labour, women and men are often equally involved in relevant practices, including economic decisions, politics, healing, and ritual affairs. This point has been particularly intensively debated with regard to the case of Aboriginal Australia where senior initiated men tend to be seen as the guardians of secret-sacred knowledge. Here, more recent studies have shown how women influence rituals from which they are formally excluded, so that kinship relations may override gender in ritual (Dussard 2000). More generally, ritual among hunter-gatherers is considered to be an integral part of making a living off the land (see below).

Although in comparison to hunting, gathering has been somewhat under-theorised in anthropology, the term ‘collector’ is occasionally also used synonymously with hunter-gatherers (and sometimes is restricted to more sedentary foragers). Yet in most instances, the goal of gathering items is not accumulation – in contrast to the case of art collectors, hobby collectors, or ‘hoarders’ in industrial societies. Although there is a sense of ownership in what individuals gather, gathered food items are prime objects of sharing (Widlok 2017). Sometimes, items get stored – for instance, fruit may be left to ripen in underground sand borrows – but as soon as they are brought back into the open, they are subject to intense (demand) sharing. Moreover, the attitude that informs the integration of hunter-gatherers into market and labour economies seems to be informed more by their gathering than by their hunting habitus. In my own field research with ≠Akhoe Hai//om in Namibia, I have observed people who basically forage in their small gardens, checking on small quantities of ripe fruit on a daily basis rather than waiting for a day of harvest. Similarly, their taking on day-labour seems to follow very much the logic of gathering: foraging on day-labour opportunities, as it were. Several authors have therefore pointed at similarities between hunter-gatherer ways of life and those occupying niches in large-scale societies, for instance travelling artisans or so-called peripatetics who live as mobile blacksmiths or other specialists at the margins of sedentary societies (Rao 1987). One may also be inclined to include other ‘labour minorities’, such as deposit bottle collectors, dumpster-divers, day labourers, prostitutes, and others who in one way or another ‘live for the moment’ (see Day et al. 1999). It has been suggested that what connects these disparate cases is not so much the technique of generating an income, but the ‘anarchic solidarity’ (Gibson & Sillander 2011) that comes with it. This refers to a strong sense of mutual support and equality that is paired with the ability to share conventions of appropriate behaviour without a centralised authority figure or the codified rules policed by the state.

That said, there continue to be considerable differences between modern subcultures and hunter-gatherers. The former are typically integral (even though marginalised) parts of larger polities, while the latter usually enjoy a much larger degree of autonomy. While many subcultures of urban foragers are forced into their precarious positions (for an example see Rakowski 2016), most hunter-gatherers consider their way of life not to be ‘second-best’ and a matter of desperation, but rather one of considerable social and personal value that has proven its adaptability and resilience over many generations. While some subcultures may incorporate features that are also found in hunter-gatherer societies, they are in many ways only able to do so as a minority living among a majority that leads a different life. By contrast, within hunter-gatherer societies, their values and practices are practiced by all. They are the mainstream and ‘normal’, even though the size of these groups is very small indeed as they often only count a few hundred individuals. Thus, it is not only true that not everyone who hunts and gathers is living in a hunter-gatherer society, but also that hunter-gatherers share features with non-hunter-gatherers, in particular with some modern subcultures, without necessarily being as integrated into larger encompassing socio-economic systems.

The importance of extreme small-size of hunter-gatherer groups has recently been emphasised by Nurit Bird-David (2017) and it points, again, to the question of how one might compare instances of hunting and gathering across enormous stretches of scale (as well as across time and place). Interestingly, there are two major opposing positions within anthropology that, at their extreme, both discourage comparison, if for very different reasons. Those who consider hunter-gatherers to be closer to ‘human nature’ are disinclined to compare them to any other societies, since the latter are said to follow rules that are a product of a complex cultural history which are assumed to be largely absent in the case of hunter-gatherers. Those who consider today’s hunter-gatherers to be merely the impoverished product of encapsulation by dominant neighbours dispute their capacity to create and maintain foraging as a cultural system from within, and therefore also do not grant them the status of ‘independent’ cases for comparison. However, it is likely that at the heart of the matter is not an intrinsic problem of hunter-gatherer societies, but rather difficulties in the discipline of anthropology of determining what counts as ‘a case’ and of understanding what comparative method(s) entail (see Candea 2019) – and ultimately, what counts as ‘a society’, ‘a community’, or ‘an individual’. None of these terms are neutral as they are filled with assumptions – usually generated from non-hunter-gatherer situations. If the subordination of individuals to a ruling authority or structures of domination defines a society, then we may either conclude that hunter-gatherers do not live in societies or that our notion of society is not universal and broad enough to capture human relationships that bind people together across all cases. The ethnography of hunter-gatherers therefore continues to generate critical reassessments of key notions in social theory. Hunting and gathering, as Tim Ingold (2000: 313) pointed out, is not just a ‘technological regime’ independent of the social relations of those who happen to neither domesticate crops or herds. Consequently, if these groups have more in common than their subsistence techniques, this should also show in domains of life that may at first appear to be less directly connected to hunting and gathering (less, say, than sharing and human-animal interaction), such as the domains of kinship and ritual, for example.

The social relations of hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers across the globe differ in their kinship systems, even though statistically bilateral kinship is encountered most frequently among them (that is, kinship as a broad network that does not strictly follow a ‘pedigree’, a line of descent). Amongst pastoralists and horticulturalists, patrilineal descent (reckoning kinship through the male line) dominates, but it also occurs among hunter-gatherers (Keesing 1975: 134). The ≠Akhoe Hai//om are a case in point insofar as they practice cross-sex naming, which means that daughters receive their father’s family name and sons receive their mother’s family name, which effectively prevents the emergence of strong descent groups, lineages, and clans as corporate agents. Moreover, like many other hunter-gatherers, ≠Akhoe Hai//om may be said to have a universal kinship system; that is to say, they readily incorporate everyone with whom they are co-resident into the kinship network so that their family formation is not fully predicated on blood-ties, unlike the American kinship system (see Schneider 1980). They disregard a strong separation between ‘matrilines’ and ‘patrilines’, and between linear and non-linear kin, for that matter. Given the overall small number of persons in this group, links between people are ‘multirelational’ (Bird-David 2017), insofar as everyone is in many overlapping relations to everyone else. The notion of being a ‘member’ in a single abstract kinship category is not common in hunter-gatherer systems. Rather, kinship may be said to be performance-based, i.e. you achieve a certain kin relation through actions that comply with the expectations for that kin relation. Practices of care can create ‘parental’ kin; practices of friendship and mutual assistance can performatively bring about ‘siblingship’. Thereby, you can become kin to someone who behaves appropriately but who may be distant from you (in terms of genetics or descent). Correspondingly, cases are reported in which those who do not share their lives anymore in a particular way can also lose their status as kin (Bird-David 2017). As mentioned earlier, this does not apply to all hunter-gatherers, but it occurs much more often in hunter-gatherer settings than it does elsewhere. Again, the Australian cases have been critical in many of these debates. This is partly because foundational texts in social thought (e.g. by Emile Durkheim or Marcel Mauss) at the beginning of the twentieth century were informed by early ethnography that came out of Australia, and to some extent North America. Another reason is the extraordinarily complex and varied structure of many Australian kinship systems. Moreover, in a very recent contribution, Doug Bird et al. (2019) have analysed Australian forager ethnography to argue that despite small residential groups, the Martu of the Western Desert of Australia are actually part of large social networks that typically involve social relationships beyond kin relatives. This undermines the widespread assumption that human sociality was conditioned exclusively in tight, small groups of ‘bands’ in human evolution. Rather, even apparently isolated foragers took part in large and complex societies linked through ritual and an expansive social network. These debates illustrate two recurrent challenges in hunter-gatherer studies and in social thought more generally: images of hunter-gatherers (and of humanity more generally) are often wrongly coloured by the assumption that their social relations are simply small-scale versions of present-day modern state societies with clear-cut social roles and individuals occupying these roles (Bird-David 2017). At the same time, images of hunter-gatherers (and of humanity more generally) are also wrongly coloured by the assumption that they are extreme cases of the closely-knit farming communities found in the immediate past of modern state societies with its villages and corporate descent groups, instead of being part of open and expansive networks (Bird et al. 2019).

The fact that some of the arrangements that characterise hunter-gatherer relationships (for instance performativity, or integration of distant people as kin) are also found in the patchwork families of modern urban societies is not, it seems, a coincidence. In both instances kinship ties are not ‘burdened’ with issues of political power, with the control of women by men and of juniors by seniors, with succession to office, or with an indispensable reliance of inherited property for living one’s life. And in both cases we find a high premium given to personal autonomy and open networks paired with an intrinsic interest in other people as particular beings rather than as representatives of social categories. Hunter-gatherer ethnography therefore provides important lessons for understanding social and cultural life, not because it is closer to an assumed natural condition but because it departs in many ways from the dominant ways of farmers and herders – while not being exceptional to the extent that a comparison would not be possible.

Rituals of hunter-gatherers

A similar summary can be made with regard to the domain of hunter-gatherer ritual. Again, some patterns emerge, but without there being a single set of religious ideas and practices associated with hunting and gathering. In fact, it has been repeatedly questioned whether the dominant idea of a religion (defined as a sacred sphere separate from the secular) holds for hunter-gatherer contexts at all. Their rituals seem to be conspicuously disconnected from any direct interaction with a distant creator-god. Rituals are typically not considered to be sacrifices or other forms of ‘striking a deal’ with deities, ancestors, or other spiritual beings. Consequently, many rituals lack the sense of devoutness and dogma. Often rituals are transacted through intergroup exchange, as in Aboriginal Australia, where a whole category of ritual activities is known as ‘travelling business’ in which ritual songs, dances, objects, and emblems have been transferred across the whole continent (Widlok 1992). Among hunter-gatherers of the central African forest, rituals are regularly paid for in such transactions. This is not seen as curtailing their power but rather amplifies their playful and emotional value (Lewis 2015). Ethnographers like Mathias Guenther (1999) have long been pointing at the degree of playfulness and flexibility that characterises hunter-gatherer life, and in particular the domains that are usually called ‘religious’. At least, this is true for many so-called ‘immediate-return systems’. In other contexts, in particular in Aboriginal Australia, transgressing or disclosing what is secret and sacred can have deadly serious consequences. The excitement of new ritual songs, dances, and objects travelling between places is part of this playfulness, but also the fact that ritual activities are often a blend between skilful art performances, entertaining group gatherings, and matters of concern such as healing and caring for the social and natural environment. This is true for ritual actions like the San trance dance, which combines healing with play entertainment and dance performance (Widlok 1999: 249). Dances that may begin as ‘just play’ can involve sincere healing, and most stories and ritual actions have an open, entertaining ‘reading’ as well as a serious, at times secluded, and powerful one. Combining serious issues with elements of ‘serious play’ is also apparent in the ‘mythical’ trickster figures that are prevalent among hunter-gatherers (and beyond). Tricksters are ambivalent not only as superhuman shape-shifters or messengers of superhuman forces, but also as tricking others and as being tricked - and as being laughed about. Where trickster stories and trance dances occur, we find parallel social and political relations of hunter-gatherer groups predicated along similar lines. Peter Gray (2009: 484) speaks of the prolonged social play in these societies as characterised by ‘voluntary participation, autonomy, equality, sharing, and consensual decision making’. At the same time, ritual has been identified as one possible entry-point for emerging inequalities (see Woodburn 2005 and other contributions in Widlok & Tadesse 2005).

Jerome Lewis has recently suggested that attraction, enjoyment, excitement, and entertainment are the main driving forces in the economy of ‘spirit play rituals’ among Mbendjele, central African forest hunter-gatherers (2015: 18). Thus, the playfulness and the role of being attracted to engaging with one another in ritual performance, which was previously considered to be little more than a side-effect, has now entered central analytical stage. Playfulness appears to be a key motivation for engaging in these rituals and for regulating the seemingly ‘anarchic’ social life of hunter-gatherers. The same pattern of play seems to inform not only what one may want to call the religious sphere but also other aspects of human life, such as sharing and ultimately even hunting itself. There seems to be a fairly close match, at least in some of the cases, between hunting practices and ritual ones: hunter-gatherers can be highly tolerant with regard to alternative opinions and interpretations, for instance when interpreting the tracks of game animals, keeping options open long into the hunt (see Liebenberg 1990). A similar acceptance of heterodoxy and flexibility with regard to contextual, situational factors is also found in the religious domain and in the domain of ethical judgements of some hunter-gatherer groups. However, a strong sense of ‘Law’ may prevail in others, above all in Aboriginal Australia and in the case of the northwest coast of America. The argument here is therefore not that there is a causal relation between hunting and religion (or vice versa) but rather that hunter-gatherers in many instances train and cultivate similar ways of going about things across these domains. The playfulness and flexibility of African hunter-gatherers is found across domains, and so are the harshness and rigidity found in both religious and kinship affairs of hunter-gatherers in Australia and the northwest coast.

Conclusions: hunting and gathering in past, present, and future

In the early stages of anthropology, the fact that hunting and gathering predates other human economic practices led to the assumption that they somehow constitute the simplest building blocks of human social life and therefore held the key for understanding humans in general or ‘human nature’. This was the view, for instance, put forward in Emile Durkheim’s book The elementary forms of religious life (Durkheim 2015 [1912]) which relies heavily on what was then known about hunter-gatherers in order to develop a general sociological theory of religion. It also applies to the early work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Many assumptions entertained by Durkheim and other early theorists about hunter-gatherer ethnography turned out to be wrong, even though – arguably – they have been able to draw interesting conclusions from them. Durkheim was wrong, for instance, to think of Australian hunter-gatherers as featuring a particularly simple religion (or society for that matter). Their mythology and their kinship systems are among the most complicated on this planet.

At the same time, studying hunter-gatherers may still lead us towards an improved understanding of religion and other aspects of cultural life. Rather than seeing religion primarily as a system of codified beliefs that lends itself to particular forms of political domination, we may conceive of it more broadly in terms of ‘serious play’. What has been pointed out for hunter-gatherer religion is also true for their economic and social practices: they are not entirely exceptional. Hunter-gatherer ways of practicing religion are reminiscent of sub-strands in other religious traditions (see Turner 1999). Hunter-gatherer ways of organising access to shared resources may inspire changes in urban or digital settings (Widlok 2017). What makes the hunter-gatherer ethnography so relevant for anthropological thought is not that it was entirely different from all other ways of life, nor that it often seems particularly attractive to post-industrial urbanites today. Rather, it is the fact that it enriches the spectrum of possible lifeways that humans have been able to bring about – and it enriches our attempts to better understand how humans create any particular socio-cultural environment in the first place.

Contemporary hunter-gatherers and their descendants face enormous difficulties when trying to maintain their way of life in an economic and political environment that is hostile to them. Their number is decreasing as dominating neighbours have forced them to give up their ways of life. Correspondingly, it becomes ever more difficult to live a hunter-gatherer life and to share that life as an ethnographer. Much anthropological work with hunter-gatherers and their descendants is therefore dealing with issues of land rights, health and education, political mobilization and participation, of maintaining local languages and culture as heritage. Hunter-gatherers themselves are increasingly involved in determining the direction of anthropological research in ways that is relevant and beneficial to them.

At the same time, hunter-gatherer studies continues to be a burgeoning field. Even seemingly abstract and ‘old-fashioned’ anthropological pursuits, such as the collection of genealogies, mapping hunting sites and trails, documenting stories and everyday language, can gain applied relevance in court cases on land rights, in revitalization programmes, and in political conflicts with states and majority populations. Moreover, existing ethnography proves to be a fertile ground from which innovative anthropological explanations continue to emerge. They may teach us about hunter-gatherer culture and what makes it intrinsically valuable, and they may enable us to look differently at other cultural traditions. Once we learn that some people perceive the cosmos as capricious and populated with whimsical powers, we find this perception not just among foragers but also elsewhere. When hunter-gatherers teach us that for some people indulgence is a value, but achieving status through distinction is not, we may not only notice this stance in the documented past before farming or in the utopias of distant futures. Rather, we may be able to better trace practices and cultural repertoires seen and realised among hunter-gatherers in a variety of contemporary contexts elsewhere. After all, the ethnography of hunting and gathering was never only about a group of strange ‘others’, it has always been about them and us as fellow humans.

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Note on contributor

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Anthropocene

Felix Stein — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 07:26:40 +0000

Liana Chua Hannah Fair

Brunel University London

Initially published 8 Jan 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19anthro

Abstract:

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have engaged with the Anthropocene, both as a set of phenomena (e.g. climate change, mass extinction) and as a politically and morally loaded concept. It identifies four main anthropological approaches to the Anthropocene, those that: 1) take the Anthropocene as a context for or backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; 2) interrogate ‘the Anthropocene’ as a socially and politically constructed idea; 3) treat the Anthropocene as an opportunity for creativity and hopeful speculation; and 4) view the Anthropocene as the outcome of long-standing global political and socio-economic inequalities. Such approaches entail distinct methods, analytical frameworks, concepts, and ethico-political programmes. Collectively, they form a large and still-evolving body of work that destabilises divisions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, as well as the scholarly disciplines traditionally built around them. In this capacity, they are also pushing anthropologists to ask what distinctive methodological, analytical, and ethico-political contributions their discipline can make to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Anthropocene studies.

Introduction

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary era: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Initially emerging in the Earth Sciences as the name for a proposed new geological epoch^[1] (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), the Anthropocene has been widely adopted across academia as a catch-all description of the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. Its key markers include climate change and its consequences (e.g. sea level rise), the effects of plastic pollution on marine and terrestrial processes, unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and extinction, and the changing chemical composition of soils, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Academic interest in the Anthropocene has been paralleled by a growing awareness of its existence in the public sphere. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dedicated an entire journal issue to the Anthropocene (UNESCO 2018), while many of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Sustainable Development Goals (2016-present) are built around key Anthropocenic concerns, such as global emissions, ecosystem damage, and overreliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, productions such as Edward Burtynsky’s film Anthropocene: the human epoch (2018) are drawing public attention to both the term and the challenges that it poses in the contemporary world. The Anthropocene has thus become a ‘charismatic mega-concept’ (Turpin & Davis 2015: 6) that bridges the natural and the social sciences, and academia and the public realm, igniting heated debates across all of them.

This entry provides a short and necessarily partial account of anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene—an immense, burgeoning, and still-embryonic field of study (Gibson & Venkateswar 2015; Swanson, Bubandt & Tsing 2015). After briefly considering what the Anthropocene is, we shall examine four key anthropological approaches to it: those that a) put ethnography to work in spaces most directly affected by Anthropocenic phenomena; b) critically interrogate the idea of the Anthropocene: its discourses, truth-claims, politics, and ethical injunctions; c) take the Anthropocene as an opportunity for speculation, creativity, and hopeful regeneration; and d) treat the Anthropocene as a political and socio-economic problem and symptom of global inequalities and injustices.

These approaches are characterised by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, conceptual vocabularies, and ethico-political agendas. However, they also share certain key traits. First, they point to how the Anthropocene destabilises dichotomies between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, as well as the academic disciplines built around them. At a time when microplastics have infiltrated marine food chains and ‘natural disasters’ like floods and coastal erosion are precipitated by human-induced climate change, such dichotomies have become increasingly hard to maintain. Many anthropologists have responded to this problem by transcending their own disciplinary boundaries, and engaging with methods and frameworks from other disciplines, such as biology and art.

Secondly, none of these approaches can be said to be agnostic about their subject matter. Rather, they exemplify what has become an increasingly pervasive tendency in this field: the imbrication of the analytical with the political and the ethical. More than analyzing the Anthropocene, anthropologists are increasingly asking what can and should be done in response to the threats and opportunities that it poses. Their agendas and interventions, however, vary significantly—as do the demands that they make on themselves. The upshot of all this, thirdly, is that anthropologists are increasingly pushed to ask what exactly their discipline can bring to the evolving ‘Anthropo-scene’, i.e. the intellectual field that has emerged around the concept (Lorimer 2017), and vice-versa. This entry suggests that classic anthropological methods, such as small-scale participant-observation and the critical juxtaposition of ‘strange’ and ‘familiar’ insights, are well suited to adding empirical depth and nuance to this multidisciplinary field. Yet the same time, it is also becoming clear that engagements with the Anthropocene are reshaping anthropological practices and imaginaries, with profound ethical and political implications.

What is the Anthropocene?

Since the early-2000s, the Anthropocene has received increasing scientific attention as a proposed new geological epoch: one dominated by the impact of human activity on planetary systems. These impacts include anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss leading to mass extinction, and the ubiquity of microplastics in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Proposed bio-geophysical evidence for these and other features of the Anthropocene includes increasing global average temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations, rising sea levels and ocean acidification (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Lewis & Maslin 2015). On the basis of such evidence, in 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (founded in 2009) provisionally recommended that the Anthropocene be formally recognised as a distinct unit of geological time (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). However, debates continue regarding its starting point.

Events as early as the extinction of mammoths through human predation 13,800 years ago (Doughty et al. 2010) and forest clearances and rice cultivation 5,000-8,000 years ago (Ruddiman 2003) have been proposed as boundary points that mark the start of the Anthropocene. While Paul Crutzen and other members of the working group previously endorsed the Industrial Revolution and the development of the steam engine as the Anthropocene’s origin (Crutzen 2002; Zalasiewicz et al. 2008), the working group’s members now largely favour the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015)—the period of extensive technological, demographic, economic, and resource use expansion from 1945 onward—as the origin point. Members of the working group contend that the Great Acceleration represents a global synchronous phenomenon (a key criterion for selecting a stratigraphic marker), compared to earlier suggestions, which they argue were merely regional or did not occur simultaneously across the world.

Alternatively, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) have proposed 1610 as a starting date, due to the profound alterations to ecosystems produced by the Colombian Exchange^[2]as well as the dip in CO2 concentrations most likely caused by reforestation in the Americas, due to the enormous loss of Indigenous life. As well as identifying an event they deem stratigraphically significant, Lewis and Maslin therefore foreground colonial violence as a foundation of the Anthropocene. This position is endorsed by feminist scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017), who contend that selecting this starting date would create space for Indigenous thought within the Anthropocene debate.

Decisions regarding the formal boundaries of the Anthropocene have political and socio-economic repercussions. Depending on the starting date that is chosen, particular processes will come to be held responsible for our current planetary predicament. This will suggest certain avenues for action, and foreclose others. For instance, selecting the Industrial Revolution as a start-date suggests that capitalism as a socio-economic system is primarily culpable for the Anthropocene, whereas 1610 foregrounds colonialism and the historic and ongoing exploitation of the majority world,[3] suggesting that former imperial nations have a particular responsibility to mitigate Anthropocenic problems. These debates reflect how the Anthropocene is not simply a natural scientific phenomenon, but a methodological, conceptual, and ethico-political challenge for scholars across a range of disciplines. The following sections examine how anthropologists have both approached and intervened in these debates.

The Anthropocene as context

While the Anthropocene encompasses many different processes, anthropogenic climate change is often treated as its main ‘yardstick’ due to the scale and ubiquity of its impacts (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 48). Ethnographic research into the effects of, responses to, and understandings of climate change constitute some of the earliest anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene. These approaches draw upon anthropology’s traditional strengths of rich qualitative research in small scale societies, focusing particularly on regions mostly critically threatened by climate change impacts, such as low-lying small island states. Such ethnographic research provides insights into how Anthropocenic phenomena are apprehended, experienced, and conceptualised in specific settings. In this way, they point to the heterogeneous nature of the Anthropocene, and the need to examine its social and cultural dimensions, rather than approaching it as a purely natural scientific concern.

Anthropologists have commonly tried to understand how climate change is experienced in particular local settings (Crate & Nuttall 2009). In these studies, the Anthropocene is treated as a backdrop to social life or a key factor shaping social relations, rather than as a purely geophysical phenomenon. For example, Heather Lazrus (2009) documents how, in Nanumea, Tuvalu, the tips of islands, which are associated with particular family lineages and corresponding levels of community prestige, are shifting due to coastal erosion, potentially causing changes in familial status and social hierarchies. Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall argue that climate change is ‘ultimately about culture’ (2009: 12) as it has emerged from a culture of mass consumerism, requires cultural change to mitigate it, and threatens Indigenous cultural practices by disrupting cosmologically significant human-environment relations. This emphasis on culture chimes with the work of geographer Mike Hulme (2008), who contends that climate change discourse is dominated by natural scientific frameworks, and consequently has been stripped of cultural context (see also Malm & Hornborg 2014). Instead, he argues both that the climate must be understood culturally, and that climate change must be locally situated and rendered culturally and ethically meaningful for those that it impacts. Thus, culture can be understood as both a cause of climate change, integral to understanding it, and a means of influencing responses to it. This latter process has been explored in relation to Christian responses to climate change, with ethnographies analyzing the use of Biblical stories in challenging the hegemony of predictions of sea level rise in Kiribati (Kempf 2017) and advocating for greater preparedness in the face of intensifying cyclones in Vanuatu (Fair 2018).

Many researchers advocate bringing Indigenous knowledge of climate change into dialogue with scientific knowledge, for example by drawing on Athapaskan and Tlingit oral histories of glacial travel in the Gulf of Alaska (Cruikshank 2001), or organising community knowledge exchanges that bring together ethnographic accounts and scientific data regarding changes to the permafrost in northeastern Siberia (Crate & Fedorov 2013). This approach, however, raises more fundamental questions about the distinction between local and scientific knowledge. There have been calls to recognise how scientific knowledge of climate change is shaped by specific local and cultural conditions, rather than accepting it as a ‘view from nowhere’ (Hulme 2008), as well as recognising that local knowledge itself is not isolated, static, or sealed off from scientific discourse. In this vein, anthropologists have explored how scientific knowledge is received, interpreted,and incorporated within specific local cultural settings. For example, Jerry Jacka (2009) shows how the impacts of El Niño in the Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea have been accommodated within Christian narratives of punishment and apocalypse and understood as revenge for the destruction of significant ritual sites through road building. These local understandings can render problematic the anthropogenic dimension of climate change. While they concur regarding the human responsibility for global warming, they do not agree which specific human actions have caused it.

Peter Rudiak-Gould’s (2012) work in the Marshall Islands also highlights how scientific understandings are combined with local understandings and used to bolster existing moral frameworks, a process he describes as ‘promiscuous corroboration’. He identifies a prevalent Marshallese understanding of climate change as symptomatic of wider, pre-existing cultural decline, due to increasing American influences and the loss of traditional knowledges, lifestyles,and practices. Similar understandings have been identified in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu (Fair 2018) where climate change impacts, including the intensification of cyclones, have been attributed to deviations from both Christian morality and kastom (traditional knowledge, beliefs, and practices). Climate change as rendered intelligible through these existing ethical frameworks therefore also lead Islanders to hold themselves morally culpable for Anthropocenic impacts, in distinction to their nation’s minimal contributions to carbon dioxide emissions.

Rudiak-Gould’s work reveals some of the tensions that can emerge between research and political advocacy. He argues that while most anthropologists subscribe to a narrative of climate change blame focused upon the responsibilities of industrialised nations, researchers should be open and alert to alternative narratives, even those that challenge their own politico-ethical standpoints. While the Marshallese narrative of Islander responsibility is at odds with conventional framings of small island states as victims of climate injustice, it is also empowering on a local level, as ‘innocence implies impotence’ (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 58).

This raises a broader question: what political and ethical demands does the Anthropocene make of social scientists? Crate and Nuttall (2009) argue that anthropologists have a privileged point of engagement: many are already working with communities who are experiencing the severest impacts of climate change while being some of the least responsible for those impacts. Consequently, some researchers have focused their energies not just on analysis but advocacy, engaging with legislation and policy (Fiske 2009), setting up university sustainability initiatives (Bartlett & Stewart 2009), and participating in climate justice movements (Chatterton et al. 2012). Their efforts exemplify a form of engaged research that seeks to alleviate, or at least highlight, the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene.

Studying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a concept

Much of the work cited above is situated in the Anthropocene, which serves as an encompassing, real-life backdrop to ethnographic inquiry. However, there is also a growing body of scholarship that advocates a critical understanding of the Anthropocene as an idea (Moore 2015: 28). Drawing partly on critical traditions such as science studies and post-structuralism, these writings examine how Anthropocenic knowledge practices and truth-claims are constructed, circulated, contested, and strategically deployed—as well as how these can bring new realities and relations into being.

This approach is marked by a commitment to rendering the familiar strange by showing how apparently clear-cut Anthropocenic ‘facts’, such as ‘climate change’, ‘carbon emissions’, and ‘biodiversity loss’, are inherently partial and dynamic constructs. Rather than assuming their veracity, anthropologists ask: how are such concepts defined, made visible or knowable, and formalised, and to what effect? In recent years, for example, scholars have examined how the Anthropocene is made ‘imaginable and comprehensible’ (Marzec 2014: 249) through specific technologies, including narratives, photography (Kember 2017), infographics (Houser 2014), and environmental visualizations (Carruth & Marzec 2014). Another fecund area of inquiry is that of climate science, with anthropologists examining the scalar, spatial, temporal, and speculative dimensions of climate modelling (Hastrup & Skrydstrup 2013), the universalization of carbon as a metric through which to quantify (and thus compare) a vast array of human activity (Günel 2016), and the impact of ideals of accountability (Hall & Sanders 2015) and expertise (Vaughn 2017) on climate science research. Their insights into the all-too-human production of scientific knowledge are exemplified by Jessica O’Reilly’s discussion of Antarctic research (2016), which reveals how scientific data about the shifting Antarctic landscape is indelibly shaped by scientists’ intimate, sensory engagements with the ice, national research logistics and nationalism, guesswork, and, often, pure chance.

By treating scientific practices and categories as objects of ethnographic scrutiny, such scholars highlight the vital point that

[k]nowledges do not ﬂoat free from their contexts of production, and cannot arrive any old way. They travel well-worn paths, and are preconditioned by other academic knowledges, knowledge-producing apparatuses, and institutional arrangements (Hall & Sanders 2015: 454).

These approaches thus reveal how seemingly ‘factual’ Anthropocenic discourses, categories, and epistemologies are in fact malleable, fragile, and socio-historically specific (see, e.g., Last 2015). Moreover, the truth-claims that they generate are often tied up with profoundly moral ideas that evoke specific ways of thinking and feeling. Some of these, such as paintings of scenes from the Industrial Revolution, romanticise and naturalise the very conditions of human dominance over nature that fuelled the Anthropocene (Mirzoeff 2016). Others, notably public discourses about climate change, are apocalyptic (Swyngedouw 2010), depicting the Anthropocene as a threat to humankind’s very survival.

More than making the Anthropocene knowable, such ideas and imaginaries can have powerful social, political, and material effects in multiple settings. Narratives of low-lying island states being imminently engulfed by rising sea levels, for example, can disempower affected communities and inhibit effective mitigative action by representing Islanders as helpless victims and their homelands as inevitably lost (Farbotko 2010). Rather than reflecting an inherent vulnerability to climate change, these discourses can actually encourage people in affected areas to produce and perform their vulnerability in order to receive development funding (Webber 2013), and in doing so divert resources from other areas. Other studies show how discourses of climate change vulnerability have been mobilised in order to reinforce existing stereotypes of certain places and groups of people as vulnerable, hazardous, and disadvantaged (Yamane 2009).

It is here that anthropologists are well-placed to intervene in ongoing conversations by producing detailed ethnographic accounts of the

events animated by the Anthropocene idea, from emergent political alliances and spatializations to modes of subjectivity and citizenship, from forms of scientific objectification and naturalization to shifting research methods and narratives, from green markets, products, and flows of capital to the materialization and embodiment of these ideas in spaces, places, bodies, and earthly relations (Moore 2015: 40).

Through such accounts, Amelia Moore suggests, anthropologists can begin to treat ‘the Anthropocene idea as a problem space’ (2015: 41; italics in original) that needs to be explored rather than taken for granted.

Moore’s work on the growth of sustainability, conservation, and eco-tourist initiatives in the Bahamas (e.g. Moore 2015) exemplifies the value of such an approach. Taking the Bahamas as one particular ‘Anthropocene space’ (2015: 31), she traces how rising sea levels, notions of sustainability, and concerns about biodiversity loss have collectively reframed and literally reworked the islands’ ecological, spatial, and socio-economic makeup—for example, through the promotion of sustainable fisheries, the establishment of new marine protected areas, and the growth of ecotourism initiatives. In her work, the Anthropocene is not simply a backdrop to ethnographic inquiry, but a material and imaginative space that constantly generates new relations and effects.

Similar approaches can be found in Jason Cons’ (2018) ethnography of the pre-emptive restructuring of Bangladeshi borderlands in the name of climate security; Cymene Howe’s discussion of multiple claims to ‘anthropocentric ecoauthority’ in the context of wind power development in Mexico (2014); and Nayanika Mathur’s description of the political work performed by Anthropocenic categories like ‘climate change’ in the context of human-wildlife conflicts in the Indian Himalayas (2015). Rather than asking how anthropology can illuminate small-scale responses to the Anthropocene, these writings push us to interrogate the very idea of the Anthropocene, the truth-claims and the ethical demands that it makes, and the effects of such claims and demands in multiple settings. By adopting this critical perspective, they imply, anthropologists can not only challenge the deleterious effects of oversimplified concepts such as ‘anthropogenic’ or ‘climate change’, but can also begin to explore ‘alternative visions’ (Cons 2018: 286) and possibilities for life in the Anthropocene. On this point, their work converges with that of another form of scholarship, to which speculation and creativity are central.

Remaking the Anthropocene: speculation, creativity, and experimentation

Rather than critically unpack the ‘Anthropocene’ idea, other scholars have opted to play with the speculative and regenerative possibilities that it presents. While not uncritical of its horrors and injustices, their writings approach the Anthropocene as an opportunity: as a still-emergent entity to be appropriated, recast, and even redone (Buck 2015: 372).

This diverse body of work is often animated by a shared concern with unsettling, reworking, and transcending dominant scholarly categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘human’, and ‘nonhuman’. Although social scientists have long questioned these categories’ universality, the Anthropocene has thrown their contingency into starker relief: if ‘human agency has become the main geological force shaping the face of the earth’ (Latour 2014), how, then, can we tell what is ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’? By thrusting this vital question into the public spotlight, the Anthropocene has, as Bruno Latour puts it, been a gift to contemporary scholarship—an invitation to ‘renegotiate the shape, boundary, limit and extent’ of anthropology’s core concern, ‘humanity’ (2014), and much more besides.

A common response to this invitation is to embrace rather than abhor the Anthropocene’s human-nonhuman hybrid ‘monsters’ (Latour 2011; Swanson et al. 2017: M4), from bacteria that have evolved to resist human-synthesised drugs to ‘blasted landscapes’, such as sites of oil spills, that are simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘social’ (Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014). Many scholars point out that the Anthropocene has simply made visible the complex webs of relations in which humans and nonhumans have always been enmeshed, while also generating new, inescapable hybrids and relations in the present. Apprehending these old and new hybrids and relations means finding ways to transcend anthropology’s traditional focus on humans, and asking: on what other terms can the Anthropocene be approached? To this end, many anthropologists draw on methods and analytics developed in ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), a field of scholarship that foregrounds how all humans and nonhumans on the planet are ‘entangled’—tied together and interdependent in various ways (e.g. Haraway 2008; Mitchell 2016; Reinert 2016; Rose 2011; Tsing 2015; van Dooren 2014). Rather than shunning such entanglements, they posit, why not use them to engender new possibilities for thinking about and living in the Anthropocene?

Such calls are often underpinned by a distinct ethical injunction: to elevate nonhuman entities into subjects worthy of scholarly attention, and also care and solidarity. Musing on the presence of penguins and flying foxes in urban spaces, for example, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose refute the assumption that such animals are ‘out of place’ (2012: 2), advocating instead an ‘ethic of conviviality for a genuinely inclusive multispecies city…that provides a space for the flourishing of as many different forms of life as possible’ (2012: 17). Similarly, Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) propounds a form of ‘multispecies love’—‘passionate immersion in the lives of…nonhumans’ (2011: 19)—as an antidote to the destructive excesses of global capitalism. For her, multispecies entanglements offer a glimpse of how life, like mushrooms in abandoned anthropogenic landscapes, can emerge from ruined places (2015: 6). Indeed, ‘in a global state of precarity’, she argues, ‘we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin’ (2015: 6).

For many of the scholars mentioned in this section, then, the interdependence of humans and nonhumans is not simply an ontological fact, but it may be a potent conceptual and ethical way of moving forward on a ‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). As Swanson et al. put it:

Our continued survival demands that we learn something about how best to live and die within the entanglements we have. We need both senses of monstrosity: entanglement as life and as danger (2017: M4).

In such work, the Anthropocene is thus an opportunity to: 1) right old wrongs, particularly the anthropocentric hubris that caused such planetary ruination; and 2) create and experiment with new modes of understanding, living with/in, and transforming the Anthropocene, so as to make it plural, livable, even charming (Buck 2015). Here, hope and possibility (Kirskey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014) are key motifs; correctives to what Donna Haraway calls the ‘game over’ attitude (2016: 2) that characterises more cynical, hopeless responses to the Anthropocene.

Such hopeful interventions are often accompanied by an impulse to play and experiment with existing scholarly methods and frameworks. Rather than writing straightforward ethnographies, anthropologists are increasingly turning to cross- and trans-disciplinary engagements—with art and artists (Davis & Turpin 2015; Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014), natural sciences and scientists (Tsing 2015), and stories and storytelling (Haraway 2016; van Dooren & Rose 2012)—to overcome the limits of disciplinary knowledges, practices, and barriers. These experimental, collaborative projects are generally characterised by two attributes.

First, many are ‘transgressive’ (Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014: 17) and ‘speculative’ (Davis & Turpin 2015: 17; Haraway 2016). Defying, rather than conforming to, academic conventions and expectations, they experiment with different methods, forms of knowledge, and aesthetics to ‘imagine alternative [Anthropocenic] futures’ (Lorimer 2017: 131). For example, Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson (2015), creators of the art installation The Museum of the History of Cattle (2013), use the narrative of an imaginary cow in a way that urges the reader to reimagine the world’s history, animal sociality, and the Anthropocene in bovine terms. In the process, they invite us to consider how we relate to nonhuman others in the Anthropocene, and what a non-anthropocentric Anthropocenic future might look like.

Second, as we saw above, these interventions are commonly framed as ethico-political manifestos that implicate their audiences in the urgent project of finding new ways to live and survive in the Anthropocene (see esp. Gibson, Rose & Fincher 2015; Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014; Tsing et al. 2017). Treating the ethical, the political, and the scholarly as of a piece, such speculative discussions impel anthropologists to embrace their connections with other entities and to formulate ‘alternative political visions, modes of relation and opportunities for ethical responsiveness’ (Mitchell 2016: 39). In contrast to the critical, deconstructionist agendas of the works cited in the previous section, these interventions are self-consciously experimental and collaborative—and always ethically and politically loaded. Yet, as the next section shows, they have their own limitations.

Re-politicising the Anthropocene

While enthusiastically adopted in some quarters, creative approaches to the Anthropocene have also been criticised for failing to rigorously interrogate the relationships between capitalism, power, inequality, and the Anthropocene. Such critiques typify a fourth main response to the Anthropocene in our discipline: one that emphasises historical contingency, political contestation, and socio-economic inequality. Contributors to this field have reproached both speculative and dominant scientific approaches for depoliticising their subject matter at a time when political engagement is most needed.

Three major concerns have been expressed regarding the dominant narrative generated by the Anthropocene Working Group. The first concerns its portrayal of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture. In The shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) contend that the dominant narrative perpetuates a historically inaccurate myth: that humans have suddenly awoken to the negative consequences of their actions upon the environment (see, e.g., Steffen et al. 2011). This awakening narrative, they argue, presumes that environmental inaction emerges from ignorance, as opposed to an ideological battle over how humans engage with the non-human world. It conceals longstanding environmental consciousness and previous grassroots political struggles against ecological degradation in the Global North and Global South, thereby depoliticising the contested history of the Anthropocene (Swyngedouw & Ernstson 2018). Bonneuil and Fressoz further argue that such narratives glorify the position of scientists, placing them above society and suggesting that science can provide straightforward solutions to the Anthropocene while concealing a need for political choices. This narrative frames the Anthropocene in terms of human accomplishments, rather than taking it as an opportunity for humility and recognising the distinction between human influence and human control (Nixon 2017). The notion that the Anthropocene represents a sudden new era of ecological dystopia has also been critiqued by Indigenous scholars. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018), for example, argues that this fails to recognise that, from one Indigenous perspective, the Anthropocene is a perpetuation of environmental destruction, displacement, and extinction due to the violence of colonialism: for some Indigenous communities, he argues, the apocalypse already arrived long ago.

Secondly, scholars have argued that the dominant Anthropocene narrative treats humanity —the Anthropos —as a ‘unitary species actor’ (Nixon 2017: 24), or a singular universal subject. In this capacity, the imaginary of ‘the anthropogenic’ covers over the global and historical inequalities between humans that caused the Anthropocene, and that continue to structure global politics today (Sayre 2012). It thus fails to recognise the inequity of responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, as well as the unequal distribution of exposure to its impacts, thereby depoliticising analysis. Moreover, far from being universal, this vision of the Anthropos has been criticised for making wealthy European perspectives stand in for the experiences of all of humanity, thereby replicating the homogenising violence of colonialism (Davis & Todd 2017). Métis scholar Zoe Todd argues that the Eurocentrism of the dominant Anthropocene narrative is a consequence of its emergence from white Eurocentric institutions, and instead advocates a decolonization of the Anthropocene through bringing in Indigenous knowledges that emphasise the ‘reciprocal, ongoing, and dynamic relationships’ (2015: 251) between humans and nonhumans.

Thirdly, dominant Anthropocene narratives may also naturalise the development of the Anthropocene, depicting it as inevitable rather than identifying it as a consequence of contingent historical developments and particular political choices. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) note how, in some accounts, a linear trajectory is drawn from the discovery of fire to the development of the steam engine. This presentation of the Anthropocene as a natural, inevitable, teleological development depoliticises its origins, and limits political responses to it. Instead, they argue that the Anthropocene should be understood as a ‘sociogenic’ phenomenon, emerging from particular social relations and an uneven distribution of power between different nations, social groups, and species. Naturalising the Anthropocene can lead to an understanding of human domination of the planet and of nonhuman life as inevitable, with the epoch’s very name maintaining an anthropocentric perspective to the exclusion of all others (Crist 2016). This failure to recognise the Anthropocene’s historically contingent conditions can be attributed to a ‘consequentialist bias’ (Moore 2016) of dominant scientific approaches, reflecting their greater emphasis upon evidence of biophysical changes as opposed to systemic causes.

Responses to this singular Anthropocene grand narrative vary. Bonneuil and Fressoz advocate producing multiple histories of the Anthropocene, which recognise the different political choices that have been and can be made (2016). Bringing analyses of power into the Anthropocene and rejecting the homogenised figure of the Anthropos, Malm and Jason Moore present contrasting accounts of a ‘Capitalocene’, an epoch defined by the impacts of Capitalism upon planetary systems, as opposed to those of all of humanity. While Malm (2016) focuses on the Industrial Revolution and the role of fossil fuels in capital accumulation, Jason Moore (2016; but c.f. Hornborg 2017) identifies 1450 and the mercantile capitalist era as the starting point of the Capitalocene. He argues that this period witnessed the production of ‘Nature’ as an abstracted object of power, and that it was the violent exclusion of ‘Nature’ from ‘Society’ that enabled the development of capitalism. Meanwhile, Hann (2017) urges an even more long-term perspective on the development of capitalism, one that overcomes what he perceives as the Eurocentrism of existing analyses. He focuses on Jack Goody’s work and urban revolutions of the Bronze Age, arguing that the emergence of commodity as opposed to gift economies can be seen as part of the social, political, and cosmological preconditions of the Anthropocene.

Like the speculative scholarship discussed earlier, such writings undermine the Euro-American modernist division between ‘nature’ and ‘society’. However, their interventions take a markedly different form. Rather than treating the Anthropocene as an opportunity for hopeful, creative speculation, they view it as a spur to unmasking and contesting long-standing political and socio-economic inequalities in the present. But does this entail entirely dissolving the differences between ‘nature’ and ‘society’? Hornborg (2017), for one, rejects Moore’s view of nature and society as entirely entangled. He contends that without a clear analytical separation of nature and society, capitalism cannot be critiqued, thereby diminishing the possibility for political action. Similarly, Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson (2018) challenge what they label as a post-humanist rejection of nature/society distinctions. For them, an understanding of nature as entirely part of society and capitalism creates a view of nature that can be too easily managed and co-opted by neoliberalism. This depoliticises the Anthropocene, as it perpetuates the fantasy that life and capitalism can continue as they are, ignoring the need for decisive, radical socio-economic transformation.

Such neo-Marxist concerns about depoliticising the Anthropocene extend to their critiques of the speculative and creative approaches discussed above. Hornborg (2017), for example, accuses scholars like Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016) of ‘dithering’ in the face of ecological crisis: producing poetic yet inaccessible, theoretically imprecise interventions that preoccupy the attention of critical scholars rather than critiquing inequality or encouraging political action. While blunter than most, Hornborg’s critique typifies a specific kind of ethico-political position on the Anthropocene. Underpinned by the insights of political economy and political ecology, such scholarship treats anthropological critique as an intervention in the world: as a means of highlighting ongoing inequalities and historical contingencies and continuities, as well as the basis of a direct, engaged form of political action.

Conclusion

Jason Moore describes the Anthropocene as having ‘two lives’: one as a scientific concept and object of geological debate; and another as an idea that has moved beyond its natural science origins, permeating the social sciences and public discourse, and raising questions about the relationship between humans and the non-human world (2016: 80). This entry has offered a glimpse of the Anthropocene’s second life as it is playing out in various anthropological quarters.

As we have seen, the Anthropocene is apprehended in multiple ways within anthropology: as an encompassing, threatening backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; as an idea and ‘problem space’ to be interrogated; as an opportunity for creativity, speculation, and experimentation; and as the outcome of historical inequalities and injustices. These varied figurations of the Anthropocene give rise to equally varied ethico-political positions and interventions. As the approaches above reveal, there are different, and differently scaled, ways of responding to the Anthropocene: to take it apart and focus on its small-scale, localised challenges; to critique its truth-claims and politics on various levels; or to capitalise on the Anthropocene as an opportunity to formulate new, hopeful, experimental possibilities for the future.

Embedded in, but also evolving through, these propositions are thus different visions of what anthropology is, could be, and can do. But such competing visions—and they are likely to be joined by many more—are not simply about the future of anthropology. As lenses onto the world, they raise much bigger questions about how the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are being reproduced, transformed, or even dissolved in the present moment. And as Anthropocenic phenomena impact ever more of the planet, and Anthropocenic discourses gain greater social, political, and moral traction, these are questions that will animate academic debates and affect the lives of millions of people for years to come.

Notes

Research for this entry was carried out as part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement No.758494.

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Note on contributors

Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has studied conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, indigeneity, resettlement and development in Malaysian Borneo since 2003. She is currently leading a large multi-sited project that explores the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene. http://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/liana-chua

Hannah Fair’s doctoral research concerned Pan-Pacific climate justice movements and religious understandings of climate change in Vanuatu. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from University College London, and is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Brunel University London, investigating interspecies compassion, extinction, and orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene.

Anthropology, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.

[1] At the time of writing (late 2018), ‘the Anthropocene’ has yet to be formally recognised by the International Union of Geological Sciences or the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a distinct geological epoch.

[2] A term that refers broadly to the movement of plants and animals such as potatoes, tomatoes, cattle, and sugarcane between the Americas and Europe, Africa, and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies.

[3] The term ‘majority world’ collectively refers to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania – who make up the majority of the world’s population – without defining them negatively in comparison with Europe and North America (unlike the categories ‘third world’ or ‘developing world’).