Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Power

Democracy

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

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

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Initially published 15 Dec 2025

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transitions to democracy and local meanings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secularism and liberalism

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

Secularism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citizenship and governmentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Representation and participation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Acknowledgements

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Deep sea

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

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

Marta Gentilucci

University of Bergen

Initially published 11 Aug 2025

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

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction: Under pressure

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

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

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

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

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

Life and knowledge at the edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Material politics of (in)visibility

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

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

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

Porous encounters

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

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

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

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

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

The Blackness of the abyss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: ‘Being (down) there’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Acknowledgements

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

Note on contributor

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

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

[1] Seabed2030. The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. seabed2030.org.

[2] ISA. 2013. Decision of the Council of the International Seabed Authority relating to Amendments to the Regulations on Prospecting and Exploration for Polymetallic Nodules in the Area and Related Matters. Kingston, Jamaica: ISA. https://www.isa.org.jm/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/isba-19c-17_0.pdf

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

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

Energy

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 01:22:10 +0000

Picture of a solar panel engineer in Tinginaput, India. Picture by Abbie Trayler-Smith, 2009.

Katja Müller

Merseburg University for Applied Sciences

Initially published 5 Nov 2024

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

Abstract:

Energy is central to everyday life and industrial production, and is a major concern and focus of public policy. Its production from different sources, its use, and the societal and climatic consequences of energy systems have increased the attention paid to energy in recent years. Energy anthropology provides an in-depth understanding of the social, cultural, and ecological implications of extractivism for energy consumption and of the introduction or transformation of energy systems. Energy anthropology considers resource materialities, infrastructure, institutions, ethics, political power, beliefs, habits, and truth claims involved in energy production, distribution, and consumption. Concepts such as ‘energopower’, energy ethics, and cultures of energy allow us to make sense of the lived realities and cultural understandings involved in energy transition efforts. They recognise that energy is simultaneously personal, collective, and political. They also emphasise that energy transitions are both a climate-political imperative and essentially socio-cultural processes.

Introduction

Energy is what enables life on earth. We all depend on the energy the sun is providing, enabling photosynthesis and therefore plant growth, which animals and human beings feed upon. The intake of energy by animals and humans, measured in joules or in calories, determines the work they can carry out, and hence influences all forms of production, from agricultural to cultural. This omnipotence and importance of energy led, in the middle of the twentieth century, to an argument for a cultural anthropological analysis of energy:

Everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy. Galaxies, stars, molecules and atoms may be regarded as organizations of energy. Living organisms may be looked upon as engines which operate by means of energy derived directly or indirectly from the sun. The civilizations, or cultures of mankind, also, may be regarded as a form or organization of energy […] Cultural anthropology is that branch of natural science which deals with matter-and-motion, i.e., energy, phenomena in cultural form, as biology deals with them in cellular, and physics in atomic, form. (White 1943, 335)

This thinking laid the foundation for anthropology as a discipline to engage with energy. Anthropology has been analysing energy in relation to societies and culture, norms and values, changes and transitions. Anthropologists often think of energy systems as socio-technical intertwinements of resource extractivism, electricity and fuel, infrastructure, institutions, as well as ethics, political power, and beliefs, all of which are situated in the environment and the planetary condition. In physics, energy transformed into applied force equals work; energy can neither be produced nor destroyed, only transformed from one form into another. However, in everyday life (as well as in economics and anthropology), we use the term ‘energy’ with regards to something that can be used and used up: empty batteries are a common phenomenon and so are power cuts, fuel price hikes, empty gas stations, heat poverty, or oil wars. Anthropologists have addressed this experienced reality of energy along all parts of its life cycle, examining, for example, fuel and electricity in regards to their production, transmission, and consumption.

Power and politics

The lived realities of energy systems show that ‘energy is, at once, personal, collective and political, an experienced reality and a total social fact’ (Coleman 2021, 181). Electricity and fuel have become relevant to individual well-being and progress, social arrangements, and industrial and economic development. Electricity’s invisibility allows for its flow to be taken for granted, yet the establishment, maintenance, and transformation of energy systems are highly politicised issues, where the word ‘power’ can be deployed in two senses. One concept used to politically frame energy systems—across production, transmission, and consumption—is that of ‘energopower’ (Boyer 2014). This term refers to both the political and energetic dimensions of a phenomenon and implies rethinking political power through the analysis of electricity and fuel (Boyer 2014, 325; Loloum, Abram and Ortar 2021). Energopower is related to Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘biopower’, in that it is a mode of controlling and subjugating large numbers of bodies and populations in various aspects of their lives (1981). Conversely, anthropologists have also examined how control over energy becomes an essential part of, if not a precondition for, control over people.

The coal miners’ strikes that occurred in Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are an historic example. Mining companies, with the help of state police, tried to subdue coal miners’ fights for better working conditions, but the miners continued the strike and challenged the state’s authoritarian control over energy supply. In effect, the strikes became an essential contributing factor for the formation of worker’s unions in Europe and Northern America and for democratic participation in state formations (Mitchell 2011). This energy workforce co-determined labour conditions, ideas of the welfare state, notions of private and public ownership, economic systems, and political formations, among other things. Oil drilling, as a contrasting example, did not have the same political effects. Its decentralised infrastructure and a minimised workforce with little ability to organise, along with the fluidity and flexibility involved in bypassing and detouring oil tankers, proved less suitable in helping to form democracies. We can hence talk of ‘carbon democracies’ as ones that are influenced or even formed by the way carbon, in its physical structure and materiality, has been drilled, mined, transported, sold, or used. Thus, the concept of energopower allows us to see the various energy-related materialities, transformation processes, discourses, and truth claims as socio-political phenomena, where the power to influence or control events or people serves as a critical factor for the formation of both energy and political systems.

A second, closely related concept to make sense of the political nature of energy is ‘energopolitics’, denoting the various ways in which this power is applied and operates. Thinking of energy systems as energopolitics allows us to re-politicise energy systems, rather than taking for granted their historically evolved material infrastructure and physico-chemical aspects. Turning attention to energopolitics sheds light not only on critical issues of energy systems, but also on its rough edges and sometimes highly violent forms: energy systems can lead to the murder of activists and system opponents or to the creation of ‘sacrifice zones’ that make life unbearable or impossible (Kaur 2021). Politicisation in the form of increased attention and control over energy has occurred whenever energy provision or energy prices were in turmoil. The global oil price crises in the 1970s have led to an increased investigation into energy systems, with a strong stance in anthropology for the voices of Indigenous and other communities affected by energy production to be included (see Rogers 2015, 366). The nuclear armament and reactor dismantling of the 1980s and 1990s, the US war for oil in Iraq, and more recent climate change discourse have contributed to a re-politicisation of energy systems, as did the Russian war on Ukraine and the subsequent rise in European energy prices in 2022.

These energy price crises demonstrate distinctly that there is a nexus between state, energy, and economics. Oil is a prime example: The capital accumulation based on extraction, distribution, and consumption of petroleum, called ‘petrocapitalism’, has been shaping economies as well as political institutions. In the US, for example, big oil companies like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company used money made from oil to monopolise industrial organisation. Here, petrocapitalism comprises corporate economic power, intertwined with political power, as well as their impact on the patterns of ordinary life: gasoline and plastic are common products for mobility, consumption, and comfort, and their ubiquity shape understandings of freedom, security, and national pride (Huber 2013). Like petroleum, other forms of fossil fuels also co-shape capitalist logics. Extractive capitalism, which accumulates fossil capital and uses it for political ends (Malm 2016), relies on ‘nature’s free gifts’, which are commoditised and used as cheap energy. Extractive capitalism focuses on creating surplus value based on exploiting natural resources and human labour. In the process, it pays less attention to (often externalised) costs such as deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, workforce exploitation, or environmental degradation (Moore 2015; Degani et al. 2020). The accumulated fossil capital is one basis for today’s financial markets that have an extraordinary power of their own. The oil market, for example, is increasingly detached from the actual circulation of oil. Rather, it has turned into a financial instrument for investments and profits (Labban 2010), with its own financial narratives to determine future extraction of fossil fuel deposits (Field 2022). Renewable energy has become enveloped into this market. Examples are fossil capital, or ‘petrodollars’, used for building complete ‘green’ cities like Masdar in the desert of Abu Dhabi (Günel 2019; Koch 2022), green bonds (Bracking et al. 2023), or fossil fuel divestment (Langley et al. 2021).

Energy transitions and conflict

Paying attention to the financial aspects of renewable energy production is not least a consequence of climatisation, i.e. the spillover process of climate issues and concerns into international negotiations as well as into wider society (Aykut et al. 2019; Müller et al. 2024). Protecting the climate and trying to keep global warming well below 2°C^[1]requires transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy. These new energy frontiers necessitate new fields of investment, but they also bring energy conflicts. Energy transitions from fossil fuels to renewable resources are but the latest example of how societies scrutinise the socio-technical, cultural, and politico-economical aspects of energy systems. The consequences and impacts of energy transitions have been subject to debate and contestation: What social and cultural impact does an innovation in or exit from an energy industry have? What will be the results of energy transitions for individuals, communities, and societies at large, including their political systems and financial dependencies? Are new energy frontiers and energy transitions predestined for energy conflicts between their beneficiaries and negatively affected parties (see Abram et al. 2023)? Energy conflicts may be driven by fundamental questions over the use or rejection of particular sources of energy. Yet, they can also comprise distributional conflicts, such as the question of who benefits from the financial rewards of energy projects. They may raise procedural questions, involving planning and decision-making processes, access to information, and opportunities for participation and transparency. Or they may raise locational and territorial issues around the use of land for energy projects, as well as questions of identity and belonging (Becker and Naumann 2018).

One widely used typology for the assessment of energy projects is the distinction between different principles of energy justice, which are often lacking in one or multiple forms (see e.g. Abram et al. 2023; Bickerstaff, Walker and Bulkeley 2013; Degani 2022). These principles include: energy availability, or having sufficient energy resources when needed; affordability, encompassing stable and equitable prices for energy use; due process, including stakeholder participation in energy policymaking and fair and informed consent; good governance, including transparency and accountability. Energy justice also comprises the principles of ecological sustainability; inter- and intra-generational equity in accessing energy; and the responsibility of nations towards societies and the natural environment, to minimise their energy systems’ negative impacts (Sovacool and Dworkin 2015). Normative assumptions and European canons of value—Western philosophical ideas of virtue, reason, or equality—form the basis of this justice concept (Sovacool and Dworkin 2015).

Anthropologists have formulated energy ethics as an alternative conceptual framework to assess how just and equitable energy systems, and parts thereof, are (Smith and High 2017). Combining moral questions regarding justice and fairness with an anthropological tradition of taking emic perspectives seriously, energy ethics take into account the heterogeneity of energy as different people experience and conceptualise it. Energy ethics stress the way people judge energy’s place in their lives, working with a bottom-up approach rather than a predefined moral canon. Energy ethics then aim to identify how people themselves evaluate the role energy plays for what they understand as the good life. This can comprise notions of justice, fairness, and equity but it can also go beyond them (Smith and High 2017). Renewable energy technology, for example, can involve different concepts of ‘nature’ that is to be protected, and a highly specific understanding of natural elements such as wind. Take the isthmus of Mexico as an example, where large-scale wind parks are being installed, transforming landscapes and income structures, providing benefits for landowners and often non-local wind park operators. Wind became a valuable energy resource in this stretch of land. The introduction of wind energy to the isthmus is consequently welcomed and highly regarded by some who see wind as an exchange of air due to heat differentials, and wind as a salvational object or a promissory force (Howe 2019, 25ff.). Yet, for others in the isthmus, wind is part of the local Zapotec cosmology and of the Indigenous traditions of communal land use. They see contemporary wind parks as problematic energy projects. Renewable energies have the potential to provide what is frequently ethically required and demanded in a climate-affected life: distributed models of social control of renewables as a public good (Goodman et al. forthcoming). But the practice of energy transitions also can spur displacement, disenfranchisement, and disenchantment, which lead people to contest renewables, thereby delaying energy transitions and further locking in fossil fuels (Goodman et al. forthcoming). Studying people’s energy ethics, therefore, considers energy with the diverging values, paradigms, and expectations that people have in mind, as well as of the consequences of these systems (see e.g. Franquesa 2018; Boyer and Howe 2019).

Energy’s meanings and materialities

Just as anthropology highlights the multiple meanings and evaluations of energy systems through an energy ethics framework, by focusing on cultures of energy, anthropology similarly looks into how energy is variously imagined, understood, used, and contested as a cultural entity (Strauss, Rupp and Love 2013). Acknowledging cultures of energy necessitates being open to different notions of what energy can actually mean, allowing an understanding of energy as a cultural artefact rather than a given universal truth. Energy and its various forms can be framed mythically and cosmologically, and they can be imagined as something political, magical, spiritual, social, or technical (Rupp 2013; Chapman 2013). People use energy in many ways, from animistic worship of sun, wind, and other energy sources, to fetishising commodities or machines (Strauss, Rupp and Love 2013, 12). Nuclear energy and its use as weapons, for example, are seen by peace-groups as anti-humanistic and mad, while engineers with a more technocratic view experience nuclear testing as professional rites of passage (Gusterson 1996). In hydropower and electric infrastructure, by contrast, we find heroism and sacrifice as cultural conceptions. Jahawarlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, considered hydropower dams to be akin to the temples of modern India and inaugurated a vast canal irrigation system in 1954.^[2] They can also be seen as a necessity, and the subsequent relocation they may demand as a sacrifice—as for people in Portugal, who understood large-scale dam projects in the second half of the twentieth century by drawing on Catholic norms of sacrifice (Küpers and Batel 2023). Another example of culturally-specific understandings of energy is embodied by the smokestack of an electric power plant in Vinh City, Vietnam, which turned into a mythical, heroic symbol for perseverance against US aggression (Schwenkel 2018, 103). After 1954, the reconstruction and development of Vietnam’s electrical energy generation had turned into a post-colonial project. It signified emancipation from both colonial enslavement and assumed lack of enlightened thinking among the local population by colonisers. Unlike under colonial rule, electricity was to now be produced and provided for everyone, not only for colonial rulers—aligning with socialist ideas of social justice and freedom. The electric power plant with its smokestack in Vinh City came to symbolise both these ideas and a sense of technological advancement. Consequently, when the US war on Vietnam between 1964 and 1973 targeted the power plant and other critical infrastructure, workers repeatedly defended and repaired it.

The postcolonial power plant that had signalled the nation’s advance toward global socialism, now under the threat of imperialism, came to stand as a symbol of the resilience of the Vietnamese nation. (Schwenkel 2018)

Being but one example of what energy and its materialised infrastructure entails, there is, in consequence, no universal or stable concept for its meanings. Energy’s meaning is, rather, subject to individual and collective understandings, framed by society, politics, and history.

Understanding energy as a more open concept, a vessel to be filled with meaning—see this entry’s opening statement, that everything may be described in terms of energy—also allows for analyses that shift focus onto the concept of ‘resource materialities’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). The resource materialities approach stresses that resources come into being through human thought as well as human action involved in production, drilling, mining, and technical invention. Resource materialities are also held to be of a distributed and relational nature, co-constituted by people’s ontologies and their knowledge about them, as well as by their infrastructure, and the ways people experience them (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). For example, uranium is ‘provided’ by nature and geology, but its chemical and physical structure alone do not make it an energy resource. It needs to be identified as a resource to become part of a technical process for energy production. It needs to be named, mined, scientifically analysed, and desired for exchange and use. Given that electricity and fuel are produced from energy sources, resource materialities as an approach amplifies energy’s various forms and material transformations. It conceives of energy as an assemblage of resources, infrastructure, electrons, petrochemical compounds, human and non-human agency, concepts, and ideas. It thereby shows that human thought and action in interrelation with the physicality of resources co-determine the form that energy takes across space and time.

The consequences of energy’s materialities can be severe, affecting human beings, flora, fauna, and geology. Objectifying and exploiting ecological, geological, and sociocultural worlds often go hand in hand (Bollig and Krause 2023), and environmental approaches to energy speak to the impact that resource extraction and further energy infrastructures have on their immediate surroundings. Industrial extraction projects can cause pollution and environmental degradation, and affect landscapes (Powell 2018). Coal mining causes pulmonary diseases and acidic rain; nuclear power production bears the risk of nuclear accidents and radiation contamination (Parkhill 2010; Powell 2018; Fortun and Morgan 2016). Upstream and downstream aspects of energy production heavily impact the environment too, albeit often in other regions and hence other immediate surroundings. For example, before generating wind energy, the copper, nickel, and rare earth metals mined for wind turbines are often tied in with the long history of vices and violence in mining (Jacka 2018). On the other end, the debris from dismantled power plants and infrastructure can remain on site or very close to it, as when radioactive waste is kept in former nuclear power plants and hence in the vicinity of former workers (Liubimau 2019) and thus continues to impact humans and non-humans alike.

In addition to energy-related accidents, devastation of regions, and pollution of air and rivers, energy’s environmental impact is now also geo-environmental, threatening all species including the future of humanity (Howe 2019). We have come to call the planetary consequences of energy systems and human consumption in the current age ‘the Anthropocene’, or, when referring to the atmospheric impacts, ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’.

Forms and materialisations

The concepts and analytical lenses presented so far have evolved from detailed anthropological research on energy production, transmission, and consumption and on the ruptures and contestations that electricity and fuel have brought about. The sources of electricity and fuel have guided energy research for several decades. One example is oil, because ‘for the better part of a century, petroleum has been the energy source of industrial capitalism’ (Appel, Mason and Watts 2015, 9). Oil is tightly linked to global finance, but oil drilling is also a very localised, concentrated, and highly profitable form of extractivism. It raises hopes for prosperity and a better future (Weszkalnys 2016), but when it is drilled for, it often comes with conflicts over oil rents, i.e. culturally and politically determined struggles over profits and benefits (Reyna and Behrends 2008). Oil is a prime example of the ‘resource curse’, holding that countries rich in resources show less economic growth, get exploited, and tend to suffer from more corruption and political instability than those countries with few resources. Unpacking the resource curse in the context of oil, anthropologists have pointed out that prevailing modes of domination within a nation-state play a determining role in whether oil is experienced as a boon or a bane in countries such as Venezuela, Chad, Sudan, Norway, or the US (Behrends, Reyna and Schlee 2011). These comparisons of different countries and their use of violent and non-violent forms of allocating profit from oil show that there is no ‘resource curse’ or ‘oil curse’ per se.

Anthropology has also attended to the contestations around energy sources. In the 1940s and 1970s, these were predominantly economically and energy-security induced concerns. Contemporary arguments around oil and other fossil fuels have been emanating particularly with increased awareness about their impact on the climate. The potential end of oil drilling and the combustion of petroleum might be publicly demanded or contested, but is hard to execute. Norway, for example, could take a lead in a responsible exit from oil, but it produces arguably the ‘cleanest oil’, i.e. with less environmental impact, which remains a blessing to the state rather than a curse (Lautrup 2022). Oil drilling is the basis of the Norwegian welfare state. Hence, climate activists in Norway, who demand an exit from oil, contest local jobs and living standards as well as national values of prosperity and oil-as-welfare. Goodness for the nation might no longer be enough, given the global effects of burning fossil fuels (Lautrup 2022; see also Schöneich 2022). Historic trajectories continue to impact localised social structures as well as modes of trade and global economies, while at the same time new frontiers, such as fracking, are crossed (Rogers 2014).

Coal mining and combustion have been central to the Industrial Revolution and for regionalised mining communities for over more than one and a half centuries in several countries, laying the foundation for fossil capital (Malm 2016; Mitchell 2011). As part of a coal-development nexus, governments have wanted the resource extracted and combusted to ‘develop’ nations and their industries (Goodman et al. 2020). Coal mining induces incisions into the earth’s surface as well as into social systems: it spurs the devastation of villages, the creation of new mining towns, dust, and the material pollution of the surroundings, and emits greenhouse gases as the single-largest source (Lewin 2017; Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Goodman et al. 2020). Yet, coal mining has also provided for a strong sense of community and coalition among workers, especially when done underground. With the comparatively large, but little-supervised, workforce required to mine it, and a place-based, easy-to-sabotage infrastructure, coal mining has historically contributed to union building and democratisation (Mitchell 2011). At the same time, the economisation of this resource extraction, i.e. the exploitation of nature and workforce at the lowest economic costs, has led to threats or actual abandonment of former mining communities and towns, while coal miners as a workforce continue to be exploited, often with little concern for their dignity, health, and life (Smith 2019; Lewin 2017; Ringel 2018). Coal and coal mines have turned out to variously be colonial death pits, creators of working classes, and symbols of nationalism, fostering militarisation, love for landscape, or a sense of belonging (e.g. Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Kikon 2019; Powell 2018; Morton and Müller 2016).

The lived realities of coal mining resemble those of mining minerals or stones, in that they are simultaneously highly exploitative and life-threatening, and engender conceptualisations of community and identity. As several countries are planning for and executing coal-mining phase outs, especially in Europe and Southeast Asia, they foster demands for just transitions as a form of energy justice. Coal exits provoke identity politics because coal has been providing employment and economic potential as well as shaping people’s lives and cultural understandings. In the former German Democratic Republic, for example, brown coal was the prime energy source and in the 1980s the country was the world’s leading brown coal producer. Mining engineers and mineworkers received the highest recognition; their work was essential for the country’s economy. The state’s establishment of a ‘Day of the Miner and Energy’ is but one expression of this appreciation (Müller 2017). However, the mineworkers’ massive layoffs in the 1990s and the more contemporary coal exit invalidates this. These transitions consequently require individual and regional ethical, economic, and political realignments.

Mining minerals such as rare earths, iron, or copper is an important part of the construction of wind turbines and solar panels. Due to the location of mineral deposits and due to cost efficiency considerations (with companies aiming for low wages and low environmental standards), materials used in constructing wind turbines and solar panels are often mined in countries of the Global South. For example, Brazil is a major exporter for iron ore, as is China for rare earths, while Peru, Chile, and Brazil lead copper exports. Central contributions to energy anthropology, however, investigate predominantly the sites of installing and operating wind turbines and solar farms. Wind turbines in general have the advantage of co-existing with human activity. With rotor blades turning several metres above the ground, people can make use of fields, forests, or meadows underneath (Müller and Morton 2021). There are, however, two major sources of conflict over wind energy: concentration of capital and conflicts over land. The former connects renewable energy production to an extractivist capitalism from fossil fuels. The installation and operation of wind parks marks the area as wasteland, which becomes productive of value in an economic logic. Wind parks in Spain’s Southern Catalonia, for example, are being installed as large investments of centralised, international Spanish corporations. The produced electricity is transported to and used elsewhere in Spain and abroad (Franquesa 2018). Such extractivism can become a site for contestation. The local population supported the first wind parks, but the corporations’ attitudes and their questioning of local understandings of a dignified, self-determined way of living in this rural region led to disputes (Franquesa 2018). Anthropologists have noted similar developments in Mexico, Greece, and elsewhere, where investors see wind energy as export opportunities and wind parks as safe returns on their investments. Meanwhile, local populations often underscore the costs of wind energy production, which is borne by local communities and fauna, in the form of noise, exclusion from surrounding lands, and disturbing gregarious animals and avifauna (Boyer and Howe 2019; Siamanta 2019). The concentration of wind parks in particular areas or regions is a result of trying to govern wind energy production: to prevent rank growth, to regulate investments, to foster technical development, or to optimise infrastructure use. But the concentrating of wind turbines significantly contributes to locals’ feelings of being surrounded, impaired, and used: concentrated capital and wind turbines reinforce centralised patterns of exploitation with both the electricity and the profits consumed elsewhere.

Photovoltaics tend to entail similar conflicts, especially when concentrated, i.e. installed as green-field solar parks rather than rooftop solar arrays, and when seen as investments for internationally operating investors. The Pavagada Solar park in India is but one example, where an allegedly arid area has been turned into a mega-project for energy production. As the world’s largest solar park at the time of its construction in 2019, the Pavagada solar park covers 53 km² with an installed capacity of 2000 MW_p. While the government brokered the solar park, drawing on the trust of local landowners in state government officials rather than private companies, resulting changes to the local social system were massive (Ghosh, Bryant and Pillai 2022). With a prevailing system of landowners and dependent landless labourers tilling the land, rents produced through energy production went solely to landowners, while the landless labourers were completely deprived of their means of existence. Adding to the unbearable situation for some was the absence of promised ‘development’, as jobs in the solar (as well as wind) energy production sector are very limited aside from installation (Ghosh, Bryant and Pillai 2022). The mutually exclusive use of land for solar parks, often underscored with fences around the parks, can take neo-colonial form, and renew or reinforce existing domains of governance. They often become ‘green grabs’, i.e. a form of land grabbing that comes with an ecological or climatic benefit and associated moral heft (Stock 2023; Cantoni and Rignall 2019).

Each of the fuels, used resources, and the produced electricity require an infrastructure, which again has the potential for becoming a contested site. Energy infrastructure can be invisible, apparent only at times of dysfunctionality: we may take for granted that electricity comes from the plug socket, that we can turn the heat or the air conditioning on, and that switches will work (Star 1999; Müller 2021). Yet, the set-up of energy transport systems—think of coal on rails and ships, oil and gas in tanks, steam and hot water for heat or hydrogen in pipelines—has seen its own glitches and histories. The same goes for the secondary infrastructure needed for energy systems, such as coal mining towns, supply systems for workers, financial portfolios and investments, policies, rules, and regulations. Electrical grids and fuel transport infrastructure with their technical setups facilitate an inclusion of parts of society and co-constitute people’s feeling as part of it: flying trained coal miners in and out of mining towns in central Australia (Askland and Bunn 2018) will not contribute to democratisation in the same way as did, historically, coal miners’ joint work underground in Europe (Mitchell 2011). The informal sector of collecting coal that falls off lorries, prevailing in India’s coal mining areas, again creates different communities of energy workers (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The electric grid, as another example, epitomises energy’s potential for social inclusion and social construction once again: living off the grid can be a deliberate choice for some, but much more frequently, people perceive brown-outs or black-outs as a form of mismanagement and failure of maintaining the grid (Bakke 2016). Furthermore, when energy infrastructure is entangled with citizenship claims, people often prefer the electrification of remote rural areas through the grid rather than through solar lamps. In these instances the grid can be seen as citizenship materialising in wires (Cross 2019).

Electrifying villages or areas that have not yet been connected to the grid, and the resulting energy consumption, have the potential to change individual lives and interpersonal relationships. People understand electricity as a marker of modernity, signifying citizenship, and rearranging social status. Electrifying a village in Zanzibar in 1990, for example, meant that people got access to mass media and communication, reclaimed outdoor spaces at night, or could meet for watching television in the evenings (Winther 2008; Winther and Wilhite 2015). The fact that electrification can speed up the pace of life, with new cultural practices and a dissolving limitation of activities due to sunlight, makes it a biopolitical project that potentially brings liberation as well as surveillance and control (Gupta 2015). The effects of energy consumption also show in transitions from one energy source to another, i.e. when wood is substituted for low pressure gas cylinders, when solar cookers are introduced, or when biogas plants replace heating systems based on fossil fuels. Such transitions can bring individual advantages when shifting from consuming one fuel to another, such as less smoke pollution and fewer health hazards when used in cooking. They may also serve the interests of constituent energy communities requiring improvements in energy access (Campbell, Cloke and Brown 2016).

Individual choices in energy consumption also figure in the mobility sector, but they are framed by infrastructure. The choice of transport—a car or shared car, electric or diesel train, tram or bus, cycles, scooters, etc—is shaped by people’s socioeconomic conditions and aspirations, by available infrastructure as well as considerations of energy consumption. Each individual decision becomes part of the energy system and hence contributes to an ambivalent relationship between prevailing energy systems’ will to persist and the transformative capacity of (un)conscious changes in energy consumption. Ambivalence also marks many of the conscious and unconscious changes in energy consumption that accompany digitised energy consumption, via smart metre rollouts, for example. Digitisation potentially allows for reduced and optimised energy consumption, e.g. when people have digital metres that monitor and reduce their in-house heating. This works well in idealised industry scenarios, but these ideals do not necessarily prove to be true in reality: prople could use energy and digital appliances in ways rational or economical but, in fact, lifestyles and household preferences tend to be more dominant than energy tariff awareness and response (Kaviani et al. 2023; Strengers et al. 2021). Habits and conventions, daily behaviour, and social practices bear multiple possibilities of rebound effects, leading energy consumption to remain constant or even increase in times of digital energy control (e.g. Morley, Widdicks and Hazas 2018; Røpke 2012). Digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions make for a complicated twin transition (Sareen and Müller 2023).

Conclusion

This entry has only mentioned a handful of sources and material forms that energy can take. Much more can be said about heat pipelines, nuclear fission, batteries, petroleum gas, oil shale, peat, or hydrogen, for example. They feed on similar promises of energy availability and security, of being beneficial for the state, its citizens, the economy, and development. As anthropologists studying energy have pointed out, it is not only systemic availability, political regulations, and price that determine energy use, but also our social and cultural understandings. Furthermore, energy forms and sources often require someone to make a sacrifice, devastating villages, infringing on people’s rights, and violating cultural understandings. People find themselves forced to accept radiation or environmental degradation, living with the risk of accidents and calamity, rearranging social structures, or facing death when fighting against it (see e.g. Perrin 2005; Kelly 2019; Fortun and Morgan 2016; Ortiz 2024).

In the Anthropocene, we tend to group energy sources according to their CO₂ emissions, leading us to distinguish between renewable and non-renewable energy sources, or fossil and non-fossil fuels. This logic, however, has not been the same across space and time (Malm 2016, 38ff.). Energy sources comprise more than chemical and geo-environmental aspects. They can be evaluated according to their ethical, financial, political, environmental, social, and cultural aspects. Transitions from one energy source to another may seem economically and ecologically reasonable as well as technically feasible. We might overcome lock-in effects, be able to balance stranded assets, or convince ourselves of the planetary necessity of energy transitions. Yet, energy also remains subject to individual and communal understandings, experiences, and conceptions.

How we take the human and more-than-human stakeholders and their comprehension of energy into account will determine the future of energy systems. There is a threatening energy future scenario, where growing energy demand is not decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Weakening climate change mitigation efforts and shifting from mitigation to adaptation seems to be in line with forecasts of continuously increasing energy demand and a tardy decarbonisation. More optimistic energy futures expect technology-led transitions, where digitisation and new technology, ideally combined with changing consumer behaviour and social consent, have positive outcomes. They might lead to ‘exnovation’, i.e. terminating the use of an energy source in a just form. Or they may bring about creative destruction, simply making some of our current energy uses obsolete. Optimists thus hold on to the idea that energy systems can bring about greater prosperity and social benefits (see e.g. World Economic Forum 2023). Anthropological studies dampen some of these hopes, as they foreground the neo-colonial tendencies and problematic rebound effects of digitised energy consumption (Sareen and Müller 2023). They also show the great risk of failure of any energy transition that ignores how people handle energy and technology (Pink et al. 2023, 4). Being able to imagine various different energy futures (Watts 2024, 2019) will require collaboration and mutual human recognition. It will also require radically new forms of work. Transitioning from one energy system to another will likely be marked by ruptures, new infrastructural politics, and new extractivist frontiers.

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Note on contributor

Katja Müller is a social anthropologist conducting research into energy systems and digitalisation, as well as material and visual culture. She is Heisenberg-Professor for Technology, Ethics and Society at Merseburg University for Applied Sciences. Her latest books include Digitisation and low carbon energy transitions (2023, Palgrave), Digital archives and collections (2021, Berghahn), and Beyond the coal rush (2020, Cambridge University Press), analysing digital technology's impact on energy systems, online access to heritage material in India and Europe, and the coal rush in Germany, Australia, and India, respectively.

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[2] HT Correspondent. 2023. “From HT Archives: ‘Temple of modern India’ thrown open.” Hindustan Times, July 8. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/jawaharlal-nehru-inaugurates-bhakra-nangal-canal-system-symbolizing-india-s-progress-and-selfreliance-101688755029139.html.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Agency

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:46:42 +0000

Picture by John Fahy

Julia Vorhölter

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 12 Aug 2024

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

Abstract:

In anthropology, agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their lifeworlds and how they act within, or even resist, powerful structures. The concept entered anthropological debates in the 1980s and was initially closely connected to practice theory, an approach which sought to understand how individuals actively create society while at the same time are being shaped by it. Consequently, many of the early debates on agency revolved around questions of self-determination, creativity, and resistance. Anthropologists studied, for instance, how people, especially those in seemingly powerless positions, managed to pursue their own projects and to subvert—if subtly—colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, or other forms of domination. However, anthropologists have always been wary of reducing agency to liberal—or ‘western’—notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Instead, a plethora of ethnographic case studies demonstrate how meanings of agency, including who can exercise it and how it is valued, vary across social, cultural, or historical contexts. In more recent times, anthropologists have also drawn attention to networked, relational, and more-than-human forms of agency such as the agency of spirits, ‘nature’, art, or things. This entry provides an overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency, noting that most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions, our actions, and their effects on the world is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests.

Introduction

At least since the 1990s, agency has been a prominent and much-discussed concept in anthropology (e.g. Ahearn 2001; Duranti 1990; Ortner 1984, 1997, 2001). Emerging out of practice theory, agency was frequently imagined as a positive capacity to act within, and even to resist, potentially oppressive structures. When people had agency, they could explain and instigate personal, social, and environmental change. When non-human actors had agency, they affected and transformed the environment, societies, or other bodies. In more recent times, anthropologists have become less enthusiastic about the concept for various reasons. Human agency is increasingly regarded as overly destructive and potentially problematic rather than something to be celebrated (see Latour 2014). At the same time there is an increasing realisation that human agency is rather limited, and there is a widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of climate change, pandemics, and war. Responding to these shifts in scholarly debates and the world we live in, anthropologists have begun exploring new—distributed, more-than-human, and relational—forms of agency, or even radical alternatives to hegemonic understandings of agency. These include 'patiency' (Mazzarella 2021, see also Schnepel 2009), 'non-mastery' (Taussig 2020), 'waiting' (Hage 2009), or different forms of passivity such as silence (Hofmeyr 2009). Such alternative concepts question the imperative to act or ‘do something’ in order to change the world or ourselves. Instead, they attend to other forms of becoming. In Lutheran theology, for instance, the passive receiving of God’s grace is seen as the foundation for any human agency. More broadly, receiving (e.g. a gift or a declaration of love) may not be wholly passive. It can be conceptualised as a form of passivity by which the giver’s action turns the other into a receiver with all the obligations that come with this role (Robbins 2020).

This entry provides an introductory overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency. Drawing on both classic and more recent ethnographic texts, it discusses the complex relationship between agency, intention, and effect in fields as varied as politics, technology, language, and the body. The main aim is to show how the concept has been used and contested in anthropology and how different understandings of agency are tied to different theoretical positions. More generally, it illustrates the varied ways in which anthropologists have tried to conceptualise the dynamics between agent and world, between creativity and stasis, between responsibility and fate, and between power and resistance.

At the heart of debates on agency is the question of social change. Why and how do societies change despite their fairly stable and powerful structures, which are based on class, gender, belief, etc. and which are constantly reinforced through socialisation, daily routines, and rituals? Is there such a thing as free will, or are the choices we make always determined by the social and cultural contexts we live in? Long before agency became a fashionable concept in anthropology, philosophers and sociologists debated this so-called ‘structure-agency’ problem. Some social theorists, like Max Weber, posited that unlike animals who act out of instinct, humans are capable of conscious, rational decision-making. Others, like Émile Durkheim, cautioned that choices made by individuals are always shaped by social and cultural structures—or, in Durkheim’s terms—by a collective consciousness or conscience collective (Rapport and Overing 2007, 3-5). Later theorists agreed that both the reproduction and the transformation of societies happens through a dynamic interplay between determining structures and individual intentional actions. However, they disagreed as to whether structures or actions were more important (e.g. Berger and Luckmann 1966, Parsons 1951, Bourdieu 1977). One of the most influential theories, based on the idea that agency and structure are part of an inseparable duality, was developed by sociologist Anthony Giddens. His ‘structuration theory’ is based on the premise that

society is the outcome of the consciously applied skills of human agents.[…] While not made by any single person, society is created and recreated afresh, if not ex nihilo, by the participants in every social encounter. The production of society is a skilled performance, sustained and “made to happen” by human beings’ (Giddens 1993, 25).

In anthropology, agency and related research foci emerged comparatively late and only started to gain more traction in the 1980s. In its beginnings, agency was closely associated with ‘practice theory’—an approach that ‘seeks to explain the relationships that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we may call “the system” on the other’ (Ortner 1984, 184; see also Bourdieu 1977, Sahlins, 1981). Practice theory itself emerged out of a dissatisfaction with previous anthropological theories which were either insufficiently interested in questions of history and societal transformation or did not pay much attention to the actions and intentions of individuals.

To put it crudely, up to the 1980s most anthropologists had studied culture(s) or societies as relatively stable, homogenous, and somewhat ‘objective’ entities (for a more nuanced discussion, see Ortner 1984). Their focus was clearly on the collective and not on the individuals of which it was made up. Some influential theories such as structural functionalism, supported by anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, explained social institutions largely as a result of their usefulness for society at large. French structuralism, made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss, focused on a universal grammar underlying all cultures, while symbolic anthropology, famously developed by Clifford Geertz, understood culture as a set of shared public symbols and meanings. These different, dominant approaches to the study of society were largely ahistorical and were not explicitly concerned with questions of social change. Other approaches were, but assumed ‘that human action and historical process are almost entirely structurally or systemically determined’, and not in any central way driven by ‘real people doing real things’ (Ortner 1984, 144). This charge was levelled against evolutionism and later cultural ecology which saw societies as ‘quasi-organisms’ that evolved through technological and environmental adaptation. It was also made against Victor Turner’s ritual theory, which sought to explain how social integration and solidarity were achieved and maintained despite inherent conflict. Marxism, which viewed society as made up of opposing social forces or ‘modes of production’, was also held to be overly deterministic.

The turn to concepts such as agency, then, signalled a move away from a focus on abstract forces and processes to concrete, often individual, actors and their particular motivations, intentions, and experiences of social life. Questions about agency, including who may or may not ‘have’ agency in a given setting, are therefore closely entangled with questions about personhood and self. They foreground human creativity, aspiration, and desire, as well as power and ethics. Discussions, definitions, and theories of agency, as the following sections show, vary according to whether an agent is conceptualised as a rational and independent human individual, a subject (i.e. someone who is to some extent determined by social forces or discourses and studied as a member of a particular subject position, for instance, as a woman or as a peasant), or a non-human actant. According to Sheryl Ortner (2001), one can also differentiate between approaches that analyse ‘the agency of intentions’, i.e. how individuals or collectives design, carry out, and give meaning to their life projects, and those that focus on ‘agency as power’, i.e. how individuals or collectives perform or resist domination and oppression.

In everyday parlance, fuelled by widespread neoliberal doctrines of self-responsibilisation, the notion of agency often evokes the image of a human actor whose intentional actions should produce the intended effects (Gershon 2011). This ‘voluntarist’ notion of agency, i.e. the idea that we are the masters of our own fate and responsible for the outcomes of our actions, has far-reaching implications. It affects, for instance, how contemporary healthcare, welfare, or justice systems are set up in many countries around the world and how people imagine politics more generally. Anthropologists, however, have always emphasised that what people understand by agency, or how they believe they can act in and upon the world, greatly varies across cultural and historical contexts. As the next section shows, they have also cautioned against simply equating agency with human self-determination (e.g. Keane 2003, 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992).

Cultural constructions of agency

Anthropologists have tended to emphasise that the meanings of agency differ substantially between different social, cultural, or historical contexts. Such differences in meaning can have an immediate effect on how and by whom agency can be exercised and how it is valued. For example, if people believe that God, or spirits, or dead ancestors, are powerful agents, this will affect not only how people explain their world, but fundamentally shape many aspects of social life itself. One influential way of defining agency is therefore that it is ‘the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act' (Ahearn 2001, 112).

Anthropological studies have often focused on encounters between people with different conceptions of agency, often in highly unequal positions of power, such as in colonial, missionary, or interethnic contexts (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, Ortner 2001, Keane 2007, or High 2010). In an ethnography of mountaineering in Nepal, Ortner (1997), for example, details how international mountain climbers, known as sahbs, can impose their terms and conditions on the Sherpas they employ as climbing assistants. That is because the international mountain climbers hold a privileged social position and greater economic power. However, Ortner convincingly shows that the Sherpa are not only dominated by the mountaineers, but draw on local constructions of agency to give meaning to their actions and to recurring tragic events, like a death during an expedition. They consider the relations between powerful remote gods, ordinary humans, and harmful demons to make sense of their situation. Ortner claims that over time, Sherpas’ assertions regarding why deaths occur and how they might be prevented, have led to small, but important, changes in mountaineering practices. In her words,

Sherpa religion constructs cultural notions of power and agency and […] their construction of power and agency allows them to manage lamas, gods, sahbs, and deep personal grief in ways that are (for many) effective’ (Ortner 1997, 158).

Although the meanings people attach to agency in different contexts shape the way people can and do act, beliefs about agency are not always in line with how people try to exert influence on the world. Furthermore, even though there are hegemonic understandings of agency, most people rely on a plurality of models to explain human action and behaviour. For instance, while one can certainly find a strong discourse emphasising self-reliance, self-responsibility, and personal autonomy in the US, this discourse is usually deployed strategically. It is foregrounded when politicians argue for cutting down on welfare costs or when the National Rifle Association lobbies against tighter gun controls, but deemphasised in other situations. In the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, for example, US Americans who publicly commented on the shooting almost never assigned unfettered responsibility to the two shooters. Instead they blamed the parents, the school, gun culture, media, or mental health for what happened (Strauss 2007). This shows that while voluntarist understandings of agency are widespread and are often uncontested in the United States, there are some contexts, including situations of great social anxiety, in which people draw on alternative cultural models of agency to explain actions and events (Strauss 2007, 822).

As the examples in this section show, agency is to a certain extent culturally constructed—it is shaped by religious beliefs, political and media discourses, but also by what it means to be a person in a given social context. Conceptions of agency will almost certainly vary depending on whether a person is imagined as an individually crafted self or a highly influential and malleable entity, maybe even an interdependent ‘dividual’ who ‘contain(s) a generalized sociality within’ (Strathern 1988, 13). However, even in very specific cultural, linguistic, or historical contexts, meanings of agency and related ideas such as creativity, freedom, and intention are usually plural and dynamic, and they change over time. The latter point, and the related question of how social/cultural reproduction and transformation occur, is a central concern in debates on agency and language.

Agency and language

Contemporary understandings of agency have been influenced by linguistics, notably by speech act theory. The latter proposes that language does not only describe the world, but that it can in fact change it (see Austin 1962 and Searle 1979). When a priest says, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’, he does not simply describe what he is doing. Instead, he performs an action with very tangible effects. As John Austin, one of speech act theory’s most influential proponents, put it, ‘When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., “I do,” I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1962, 6). Following these lines of thinking, most linguistic anthropologists see language as a form of social action, as something that is continually made and remade by its speakers, and as something that, to a certain extent, constructs and creates social reality (Ahearn 2001, 110–1). The interconnections between language and agency have been debated in relationship to different issues. This section focusses mainly on three: the role of intention, the role of linguistic forms like grammar, and the role of discourse. All three issues are related to the larger question regarding how language is reproduced, how it is transformed and, by implication, how it allows for and how it constrains agency.

How to conceptualise the relationship between agency, intention, and effect is a key concern in any debate on agency. The voluntarist notion of agency, as discussed above, assumes a straightforward relationship between the three: if people want to change aspects of their lives, such as their body, their economic situation, or their health, they can do it. They can intend to do it, engage in the necessary activities, and will likely achieve the desired effects. Other theoretical approaches, however, like actor-network theory (Latour 2005, see below), almost take intention completely out of the equation: they argue that agency is always networked and relational and therefore that things can have agency without having intention. Linguistic anthropologists have engaged with the longstanding debate on intention (Anscombe 2000) perhaps more thoroughly than other sub-disciplines. They have critiqued the proposition of philosopher John Searle (1983) that one can speak of human action only if its effects (i.e. ‘what occurs’, as Searle put it) matches the intention and that therefore unintended happenings, like falling down a flight of stairs, do not strictly speaking count as action (Duranti 2015). Intention, like agency, is socially/culturally embedded: what we want or choose to do, such as the clothes we wear or the food we eat, for example, is strongly influenced by social conventions. More than that, however, linguistic anthropologists have also debated the extent to which different societies assign importance to the intention behind a statement or whether they focus more on the actual consequences of action. In Samoan political and legislative fora, known as fono, for instance, the participants place emphasis on what a specific type of person in a given social role should do, or has promised, rather than speculating about an individual’s intentions or motivations behind their actions or statements. People in specific political or status-based positions, for example, are expected to provide food or gifts irrespective of their current circumstances or desires. And unlike in some cultural contexts, in which reflections about one’s own or others’ thoughts and feelings are common, fono members usually avoid trying to find individual-speciﬁc psychological explanations in cases where people fail to live up to their duties or promises (Duranti 2015, 67).

How people can do things with words depends not only on cultural contexts, but also on what and how different languages allow one to speak. Language is one of the most fundamental structures people operate in, frequently constraining and enabling us unconsciously. Often, we only notice how constraining language can be when we want to describe something for which there are no words, when we translate from a different language, or when the rules of speaking change, like when new pathways for more gender-sensitive language are introduced to societies. In these contexts, we do not speak or write automatically, but we carefully reflect before we incorporate the new rules. Different languages allow for different ways of assigning and marking agents and subjects, with far-reaching implications for how agency is understood and how it can be described and encoded. In English, for instance, one can avoid assigning agency by using the passive form. For instance, rather than saying ‘Peter verbally attacked Wendy’, someone who might not want to cast blame on Peter could simply say ‘Wendy was attacked in the discussion’. Different languages have different ways of encoding agency through their grammatical structure—for instance through rules regarding how a subject or object in a sentence are marked and related to each other. In the English sentence ‘the boy broke the window’, there is no visible difference between the subject/agent (‘the boy’) and the object (‘the window’). In Samoan, by contrast, the agent (i.e. the boy) would be marked by a specific proposition (‘e’) whereas the object (i.e. window) would be unmarked (for a more extensive discussion, see Duranti 2004). Linguistic anthropologists have also paid attention to how class, gender, race, or ethnicity shape how language is uttered and received (Ahearn 2001, 120–4).

Language and how it constructs, or even creates, social ‘reality’ is also a big concern in post-structuralist theories. The latter tend to assume that there is no objective truth and that what we consider ‘reality’ is created through discourses which are shaped by power dynamics and in which meanings are thus inherently unstable (Foucault 1977, 1978). Discourse-oriented approaches frequently lack an explicit theory of agency or concrete agents. Rather, they focus on subjects, and subject-positions that individuals are born into, and which mark their roles and identities in society. Discourses are powerful, but they are not ‘owned’ by anyone and thus also cannot be changed at will. After all, one individual can rarely have a profound influence on how their language is spoken. While individual intentions are recognised, post-structuralist theories, especially those inspired by French social theorist Michel Foucault, focus on the often unintended effects of social practices and the ways individuals cannot escape the subjugating effects of power (Ahearn 2001, 116–7, Ortner 1997, 137–8). For example, our position as political subjects or citizens is created via the descriptive and bureaucratic practices of nation-states. They register us at birth and decide whether we should receive passports and social security numbers. Foucault was attuned to such processes of ‘subjectivation’, showing how they exert power over us in subtle ways. Some post-structuralists, perhaps most prominently Judith Butler (1990, 2010), have tried to extend Foucault’s thinking on subjectivation to include a more refined theory of how social change occurs. Butler starts from the assumption that individuals are born into particular—sexed, gendered, or racialised—subject positions; in other words, the body is always already represented. However, the categories used to represent the body, sex for instance, are not naturally given, but discursively constructed and enacted through language. By giving a child a male name based on their genital markers, people ‘make’ the child’s body male, according to Butler. Because bodily markers like sex or skin colour that are chosen to distinguish bodies are to some extent arbitrary, they need to be upheld through constant repetition—or performance. For example, men and women are trained to sit, walk, eat, speak, and think in ways that re-affirm their gender. This makes bodily subjectivation vulnerable and tenuous, because the stability of norms depends on their constant enactment. There is always the possibility that these enactments can fail, leaving room for norms to change or ‘become undone’ (Butler 2004).

In sum, one can learn a lot about agency by looking at language. Language is one of the most fundamental structures that humans are faced with in almost every social situation. While we have control over the words we decide to speak, we are bound by existing vocabulary, grammatical structures, and often embodied conventions of speaking, which—while dynamic and ever-evolving—do not change at any one speaker’s individual will.

Agency as resistance: The feminist dilemma

The turn to agency in anthropology and other disciplines was in part related to social movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The anti-war, anti-colonial, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements showed that society could change drastically and rapidly. This was also made clear by the late twentieth century social upheavals in Europe which culminated in the end of the Soviet Union. As a result of observing or participating in popular protests which were aimed at, and sometimes succeeded in, radically transforming society, academics became interested in developing a more nuanced understanding of transformative social action (Ahearn 2001, 110).

In some of the earlier subaltern and feminist anthropological work, agency tended to be implicitly or explicitly equated with resistance. This ‘romance of resistance’ (Abu-Lughod 1990) however, created several problems, which became most apparent in feminist anthropology. On the one hand, feminist ethnographies rested on the assumption that women across the world were being dominated by patriarchal structures and forms of power. On the other hand, feminist anthropologists felt compelled not to portray women as (mere) victims, but as agents who pushed back against male domination—even if this resistance was subtle or ineffective (for an ‘anthropological classic’ on subtle, everyday forms of resistance see Scott 1985). Bringing these two goals together proved particularly challenging in situations where women pursued projects which did not challenge, or even supported, patriarchal values and orders (Ahearn 2001, 115-6).

In her work on an Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood (2005, 2006) grapples with this problem at various levels. As a Pakistan-born scholar, post-colonial thinker, and feminist intellectual, she tries to complexify and challenge key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject. The women she studied, while entering into religious spaces and engaging with theological texts which had hitherto been almost exclusively the purview of men, were deeply committed to Islamic principles that enabled, or even prescribed, their subordination as women. In Mahmood’s words, ‘the very idioms that women use to assert their presence in previously male-defined spheres are also those that secure their subordination’ (2006, 182). The women’s piety movement actively tried to push for moral reforms, advocating, for instance, that women should be veiled and that they should ‘cultivate shyness’ as ways of enacting the norm of female modesty. As such, their propositions were not in line with conventional liberal feminist understandings of emancipation and resistance. Yet the Egyptian women studied by Mahmood were acting as moral and political agents and were committed to particular forms of self-realisation. They stood at odds with

a particular notion of human agency in feminist scholarship (that) sharply limits our ability to understand and interrogate the lives of women whose sense of self, projects and aspirations have been shaped by non-liberal traditions’ (Mahmood 2006, 179).

Understanding agency in Egypt’s piety movement meant taking particular historical and cultural contexts into account in which such agency emerges and can be enacted (cf. Lovell 2003). Therefore, ‘agentive capacity’ must be analytically separated from the notion of ‘autonomous will’. Agency may take the form of resisting or challenging norms, but it is also entailed in acts that sustain and reinforce them (Mahmood 2006, 186).

More recent debates have equally moved beyond simplistic conflations of agency with resistance. In fact, the notion of resistance itself has been challenged and complexified. Alternative concepts—such as refusal (Simpson 2014, see also McGranahan 2016, Weiss 2016) or fugitivity (Campt 2014)—come with their very own theories and understandings of agency and what it means in particular contexts and constellations of power. The North American First Nation Kahnawà:ke Mohawk people, for instance, refuse the very terms and paradigms on which the US and Canadian states recognise their existence as people. Rather than actively resisting or trying to change the persisting settler colonial regime, they outright refuse citizenship, voting rights, tax paying, or any other logics (‘games’) dictated by a colonial state. Recognising the insurmountable power asymmetries, and ‘in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people […] to having their land taken, their lives controlled, and their stories told for them’ (Simpson 2016, 327f.), the Mohawk build and assert their very own histories, territory, and political order outside of state-governmental control. Their agency thereby far surpasses mere resistance to the state.

Distributed agency: Beyond intention, mastery and humans

As noted above, in many contemporary societies, under capitalism, and certainly also in world politics, agency is almost inevitably tied to the idea of an autonomous self. Most persons are held to be capable of making choices and entitled to rights and self-identification. This is particularly evident in current debates on gender, where individuals call for the right to negotiate whether they want to be identified as man, woman, trans, or otherwise, rather than passively accepting social ascriptions based on sex markers (Garrison 2018; Commissioner for Human Rights 2009). People also increasingly want to choose to change their body in the hope of finding ‘a more suitable and fitting gendered space and belonging’ (Sanders et al. 2023, 1064). Ideas of an autonomous self also underly other aspects of identity politics such as the so-called ‘war on fat’ (Greenhalgh 2015). Both sides—those people who ‘fat-shame’ others and blame them for making unhealthy life-choices and those ‘body positive supporters’ who argue for everyone’s right to choose their own body and, importantly, how it should be perceived—use strongly voluntarist arguments (Rose Spratt 2023).^[1]Thereby, both sides largely ignore the socio-economic and political aspects that shape people’s bodies (e.g. the food industry, advertising, or poverty and inequality) as well as the bodily and biosocial factors which contribute to, or result from, obesity (e.g. metabolic processes, food addiction, illness). Voluntarists care little about factors that go beyond an individual’s personal choice. However, research on people who undergo bariatric surgery, for example, complicates the distinction between active and passive subjects and instead shows the complex, networked forms of agency that are involved in signifying and treating obesity. While surgery may partially relieve patients of the difficult task of losing weight by simply changing their eating or exercising behaviour, the changed body calls for, and enables, new forms of self-care which are necessary for maintaining weight loss (Vogel 2018).

Especially in many so-called Western countries, the ideas that everyone is the master of their own fate and identity, and that humans control nature and their own bodies, are widespread and can be traced back to the philosophy of René Descartes. Cartesian thinking, and Enlightenment thought more generally, replaced the idea that God was in charge of life on Earth with beliefs in science, rationality, and human mastery (Latour 2014, Mazzarella 2021, Taussig 2020). However, this is not a straightforward genealogy: Marxist or psychoanalytic perspectives, for instance, offer radically different perspectives on self-control and the ability to make ‘conscious’ or rational choices. Furthermore, current discourses on identity and self-management are closely linked to much more recent neoliberal theories, policies, and ideologies (Gershon 2011). While it appears that people today have extended their control over fundamental matters of life—and even death (Kaufman 2006, Solomon 2022, 147–73) —anthropologists have found more complex ways to conceptualise agency in such contexts. They think of it as relational, distributed, or more-than-human. Ideas of relational and non-human agency have long existed in many parts of the world and have informed past and present systems of knowledge, including African philosophy and psychology (Okeja 2015, Adjei 2019), animism (Chen 2012), and Indigenous epistemologies (TallBear 2011). Now these notions are being ‘rediscovered’ in many current ethnographies (see below).

Early anthropological theories of relational, ‘distributed’, or networked agency draw heavily on the science of control and communication known as cybernetics, which claims that individual, society, and ecosystem are all part of one supreme system—what anthropologist Gregory Bateson (2000) referred to as ‘Mind’. This systemic and distributed Mind is very different from the notion of an individual mind, self, or consciousness, in that it has the capacity to produce information and respond to it in a self-corrective way. The idea of distributed agency was developed in contrast to occidental epistemology and its inherent fallacies of purposive thinking, rationalism, and control, deemed to be a threat to the networked nature of Mind and to the cybernetic system itself. Bateson’s (2000) ideas have recently experienced a great revival and have been taken up by anthropologists and others, particularly in debates on whether we live in a time of man-made planetary change known as the Anthropocene (e.g. Hylland Eriksen 2023). The climate, for instance, can be considered a form of thought or ‘thinking system’ which profoundly shapes ecosystems and social orders (Knox 2020).

Another influential early anthropological theory on relational or ‘mediated’ agency and networked ‘intentionalities’ focused on the agency of art and proposed that art objects have the capacity to exert power over viewers or users (Gell 1992, 1998). Art objects, according to Alfred Gell’s theory, are about ‘doing’ more than they are about meaning, communication, or aesthetics. Embedded in networks of social relations, they have the power to influence and effect change in the world. Art, for instance, can enchant the viewer, affect them emotionally, and thereby implicate them in larger networks of social relations. The agency of art works especially through abduction, i.e. a type of non-deductive inference. Based on their encounter with a particular material object, viewers or users make assumptions about the intention of its producers. Thereby, the object creates and mediates social relations and forms of agency (Gell 1992, 1998 drawing on linguist Charles Peirce).

The most prominent ‘theory’ on networked agency to date, however, is actor-network theory (ANT) which in anthropology is mostly associated with the writings of Bruno Latour (1999a, 1999b, 2005). ANT pays attention to the agency of both human and non-human actors and complicates the distinction between active and passive subjects. Its central premise is that everything exists relationally, and that non-human beings, objects, and ideas are just as important in creating particular social situations as humans. Latour gives the example of a man and a gun who both become changed through their encounter. He writes,

You are different with the gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you (1999b, 179–80).

Latour thus tries to complexify the idea that it is either ‘guns’ or ‘people’ who kill, when in fact actions like killing someone always involve a plurality of agents. Agency, in this sense, is thus not necessarily intentional; it is a source of action and effect whereby the material and the discursive are closely intertwined and the ‘responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants’ (Latour 1999b, 180). This has implications for our understandings of human autonomy. As Latour puts it,

To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects – or rather quasi-subjects – that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized (2014, 5).

Notions of relational, networked, or distributed agency have been taken up in many different fields of anthropological study (for a good overview see Enfield and Kockelman 2017). Some draw explicitly on Bateson, Gell, or Latour, while others build on more recent concepts such as ‘entanglement’ (Barad 2007), ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010) or ‘non-mastery’ (Taussig 2020) which emphasise that humans are inseparably entangled with, rather than being in control of, powerful non-human life and material worlds. Especially in the fields of new materialism, environmental and multispecies anthropology, recent ethnographies explore almost endless forms of non-human agency. These include the agency of waves (Helmreich 2023), algorithms (Siles 2023), robots (Aronsson and Flynn 2021), oil plants (Chao 2022), dogs (Haraway 2007), or spirits (Blanes and Santo 2013) which in various ways haunt, inform, affect, engage, or transform local and global lifeworlds (for a critique of these ‘posthumanist’ theories of agency, see Hornborg 2019).

A good ‘everyday’ example to which one can apply ideas of networked agency and non-mastery is sleep (see e.g. Vorhölter 2023). Sleep poses curious challenges for human agency, as it cannot be easily controlled. Everybody does it all the time, and yet no one can really produce it at will. Once it has ‘chosen to arrive’, sleep is unstoppable. But often, people desperately wait for it—and it doesn’t come. Attaining sleep is a strange mix of acting and non-acting, a form of active surrender—but one that cannot always be willingly achieved. Sleep has a paradoxical relationship to intention: the more one actively tries to sleep, the less possible it becomes. Contemporary sleep science reveals the complex interplay of various bodily, cerebral, and social processes that constitute sleep (see e.g. Stickgold and Walker 2009). While some of these can be consciously controlled (like the decision to lie down or close one’s eyes), others cannot. They simply happen, like changes in brain waves, body temperature, or muscle tone. Intermediary agents, like alcohol or sleeping pills, can assist in the process, but they too depend on other, less controllable, agents such as hormones and neurotransmitters to achieve sleep. In sleep, then, agency seems to be truly distributed. It is the achievement of a complex metabolism with no ‘subject’ in control.

While sleep is a very personal example, the desire people have to control it and the powerlessness they experience when control fails, is emblematic of larger political processes. In particular, the challenges raised by the Anthropocene call for radically new ways of thinking about agency—which recognise the active role of nonhumans, including the Earth, and which complexify the agency-intention-effect triad—as Latour (2014) powerfully argued.

Conclusion: Beyond agency

As this entry shows, agency has been extensively discussed in anthropology over the last four decades. Interest in the concept peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was taken up in theories and fields as varied as post-structuralism, actor-network theory, and linguistic anthropology. Despite anthropologists’ attempts to promote a nuanced understanding of agency and what it implies in different social, historical, and theoretical contexts, agency is still most commonly associated with liberal notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Due to this narrow, but dominant, understanding of the term, many anthropologists have criticised the usefulness of the concept and have proposed alternative terms or concepts which draw attention to specific forms of social action. This is not just a theoretical move, but also a critique of the contemporary moment where ‘agency is imagined as the human capacity without which ethical life, understood as the capacity to do this or to do that, would be impossible’ (Mazzarella 2021, 7). According to this ‘ethics of agency’, the ideal citizen strives for action and self-determination. By contrast, various forms of subtle action and inaction which allow oneself to be acted upon by others, such as waiting, pausing, staying silent, giving in, or yielding, are often perceived as shameful, cowardly, or even as failure.

While William Mazzarella and others have proposed concepts like ‘patiency’ or passivity to imagine possible other, i.e. non-agentic, ways of being in the world, it is highly unlikely that these will replace agency and related questions and debates in anthropology anytime soon. More and more debates in anthropology are moving away from individual and power/resistance-centred notions of agency towards relational and distributed understandings of the term. Rather than being centrally concerned with questions of self, structure, intention, or control, such conceptualisations are much more tied up with concepts like the ‘biosocial’, the ‘post-human’, and the ‘affective’. Whether in the field of politics, body-mind, or ecology, most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions and actions, and their effects on the world, is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests. One major impact of the ongoing theoretical debates, then, has been to change our empirical gaze and encourage us to read agency differently as we analyse social phenomena across an ever-growing range of ethnographic contexts.

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Note on contributor

Julia Vorhölter is senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She has previously conducted fieldwork in Uganda on topics including perceptions of socio-cultural change, humanitarian interventions, gender and generational relations, and psychotherapy. Her current research focuses on experiences, assessments, and treatments of (disordered) sleep in Germany.

[1] Mull, Amanda. 2018. “Body positivity is a scam: How a movement intended to lift up women really just limits their acceptable emotions. Again.” Vox, June 5. https://www.vox.com/2018/6/5/17236212/body-positivity-scam-dove-campaign-ad

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Surveillance

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

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

Vita Peacock Mikkel Kenni Bruun Claire Elisabeth Dungey Matan Shapiro

King's College London

Initially published 5 Dec 2023

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

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Security, policing, and morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health surveillance and care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monitoring labour

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

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

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

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

Participatory surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-surveillance

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

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

Conclusion

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

Acknowledgements

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

Note on contributors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Diabetes

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:04:50 +0000

Person getting tested for high blood pressure and diabetes at Prince Mshiyeni Memorial Hospital in South Africa in 2012. Photo: GovernmentZA

Shir Lerman Ginzburg

Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Initially published 1 May 2023

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

Abstract:

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a global disease that involves the body’s impaired ability to regulate blood sugar (glucose) due to malfunctioning insulin, a hormone produced in the pancreas which is responsible for transporting the glucose into the cells. Anthropologists have provided meaningful insights into the causes (aetiologies) and prevalence of diabetes, particularly focusing on the social, political, and economic factors that underlie the ways in which diabetes continues to afflict millions of people worldwide. As a chronic illness with no cure, diabetes poses unique challenges for people struggling to manage medications, food changes, and multiple medical appointments, particularly for those who are already suffering from other structural barriers to health. Furthermore, anthropologists have highlighted the importance of identifying the overlaps between diabetes and other chronic diseases in order to provide better treatment options and to understand the underlying structural conditions that contribute to diabetes, such as poverty and unemployment. The ‘syndemics’ framework is a useful tool for considering the multileveled approaches to diabetes aetiologies and preventions.

Introduction

Diabetes, a cluster of diseases that impact the body’s ability to process insulin, is well-established as a chronic illness, having been described as such as early as 1500 BCE, when an Egyptian manuscript described a ‘too great emptying of the urine’, although Apollonius of Memphis was the first to call the disease ‘diabetes’ in 250 BCE (Trikkalinou et al. 2017). Several centuries later, an unnamed seventeenth-century English surgeon called diabetes ‘the pissing evile’ due to the frequent urination common to people with the disease (Karamanou et al. 2016; Kelleher 1988). Unfortunately, most diabetes itself is rather less colourful, albeit equally dangerous if left unchecked. Diabetes is a chronic disease characterised by high glucose due to the body’s inability to produce and/or process insulin, a hormone that helps the body use energy (Carruth et al. 2019; Mendenhall et al. 2010; Schoenberg et al. 2005). People are clinically diagnosed with diabetes if their fasting glucose blood test levels are over 126 mg/L or have a three-month average hemoglobin (HbA1c) level of at least 6.0%.^[1] The number of adults (ages 20-79) worldwide living with diabetes reached 537 million people in 2021 and researchers estimate that by 2045, 783 million individuals worldwide will have diabetes.^[2]

Symptoms for diabetes include increased urination and thirst, unintentional weight loss, blurred vision, exhaustion, tingling hands and feet, and dry skin. Diabetes is sometimes called ‘the silent killer’ because these symptoms are so common that they are oftentimes attributed to other things, leading to worsening disease outcomes and decreased quality of life before a diagnosis is even made. Untreated diabetes can lead to coronary artery disease, renal failure, and blindness, and is correlated with high blood pressure (hypertension), high cholesterol (dyslipidaemia), arthritis, and depression (Mendenhall 2019; Trikkalinou et al. 2017).

Healthcare providers generally diagnose individuals as having one of three broad types of diabetes: type 1, type 2, and gestational. All three types share the same general symptoms and basic cause (a cellular inability to absorb glucose for fuel due to a failure to recognise insulin) but differ in the physiological details and cultural paradigms of aetiology and treatment. This entry will begin by outlining the three general types of diabetes and then discuss how anthropologists shed light on interacting cultural models of diabetes diagnosis, treatment, and long-term care.

Types of diabetes

Type 1 diabetes mellitus is an autoimmune reaction wherein the body’s defence system attacks the cells that create insulin, causing a severe insulin shortage in the body and allowing for a dangerous accumulation of glucose in the blood. Unchecked type 1 diabetes can contribute to nerve damage (neuropathy), kidney damage (nephropathy), eye damage (diabetic retinopathy), foot damage, heart disease, and skin infections.^[3] It is linked to both genetic and environmental factors, although the exact causes are not yet known and there is no known cure. Type 1 typically develops in children and young adults and requires individuals to inject insulin daily to remain healthy.^[4] Approximately 10% of people worldwide have type 1 diabetes as of July 2020.^[5]

Gestational diabetes develops in pregnant women who did not already have diabetes prior to pregnancy. This type of diabetes physiologically resembles the other types in that the body struggles to recognise insulin, which leads to higher levels of glucose in the bloodstream. While glucose levels generally return to normal after giving birth, women who have gestational diabetes are at higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes later in life.^[6]The precise origins of gestational diabetes are unknown, yet researchers suggest that the mother’s pre-pregnancy weight, physical inactivity during pregnancy, being of certain races or ethnicities (such as Black, Hispanic, and American Indian), having a family history of diabetes, and having polycystic ovarian syndrome are all contributing factors.^[7] Approximately 14% of women worldwide had gestational diabetes during pregnancy in 2021 (Wang et al. 2022).

Type 2 diabetes has become a pandemic, catching the attention of researchers and healthcare providers alike due to the urgent nature of its scope. Like the other diabetes types, type 2 involves high blood glucose levels, but unlike the other types, in type 2 the pancreas produces sufficient insulin. Instead, cells resist insulin’s efforts to transport glucose into the cells (insulin resistance), resulting in rising blood glucose levels and causing the pancreas to create more insulin. However, the cells continue to resist the insulin’s efforts, resulting in even higher glucose levels which can cause major health problems, such as heart disease, liver and kidney failure, and vision loss.^[8] Type 2 diabetes accounts for 95% of diabetes cases worldwide, with physical inactivity, being overweight or obese, and socioeconomic factors like poverty being major contributing factors.^[9]

This entry focuses on type 2 diabetes due to its overwhelming global prevalence and due to the biomedical focus on solely individual behaviours. Diabetes is commonly known among biomedical healthcare providers as the ‘lifestyle type’ due to its association with overconsumption and sedentary behaviours, which are generally blamed on individual patients (Carruth et al. 2019; Yates-Doerr 2011). However, this framing ignores the social, economic, and political contexts that impact the diabetes experiences of many patients. While anthropologists acknowledge the different clinical diabetes types, they also recognise the limitations of clinical diagnosis in getting to the deeper causes of diabetes.

Structural roots and barriers to care

Diabetes is what medical anthropologists term a ‘disease of modernisation’ due to its association with structural factors, such as poverty, unemployment, and colonisation (Baglar 2013; Ely et al. 2011; Mendenhall et al. 2010; Singer 2020; Wiedman 2012). At the same time, diabetes management has become exponentially more expensive due to the rise in transportation, housing, healthcare, and food costs, which negatively impact many peoples’ ability to consistently afford the many changes that are recommended by healthcare providers, particularly when many individuals are already struggling to pay for rent and other necessary living expenses (Mendenhall 2015; Thorsen et al. 2020; Vest et al. 2013; Weaver 2018). High costs of diagnosis and treatment contribute to diabetes being diagnosed later in its development and enable it to have more destructive effects.

Quality of life for people with diabetes depends on their financial resources, geographic proximity to healthcare services and social support networks, physical pain or discomfort levels, and dietary patterns. The uncertain, long-term benefits of living with minimal complications often conflict with the day-to-day difficulties of diabetes maintenance, which negatively impacts stress levels (Black et al. 2017; Speight et al. 2019). Anthropologists tend to note that not all populations experience the same quality of life in living with diabetes, as some communities face additional social, economic, and racial disparities on top of pre-existing health disparities that make a life of diabetes much harder (e.g. Rock 2003a; Wiedman 2021 and Weaver 2018). For example, Janet Page-Reeves and colleagues (2013) note that individual decisions and human agency is heavily constrained by social environments (structure) when it comes to diagnosing and treating diabetes. The social environment that Page-Reeves and others study is that of Hispanics in the state of New Mexico. They incorporate specific conceptual models of illness such as emotional regulation of symptom experience and biomedical diabetes aetiology, and core cultural values such as religiosity and prioritising the family to understand and deal with the disease. Page-Reeves and colleagues observe that in situations with limited economic resources, deciding where to spend money can be a difficult choice, particularly if family members with diabetes need to buy healthier (and more expensive) foods on top of multiple visits to the doctor.

The structural nature of diabetes reflects community-level inequalities in access to different foods, healthcare, education, and other necessary resources. While diabetes is currently present in all populations worldwide, it disproportionately affects low-income populations due to multiple factors that intersect with poverty, such as unemployment, food insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, and non-existent social support (Ferzacca 2012; Lerman Ginzburg 2020; Mendenhall et al. 2017; Rock 2003a; Solomon 2016; Weaver 2018).

A significant ethnography on the structural experiences of vulnerable populations with diabetes is Carolyn Smith-Morris’ 2006 ethnography of diabetes among the Akimel O’odham (colloquially known by outsiders as the Pima), a Native American tribe based by the Gila River in the state of Arizona and the northern Mexican desert. Smith-Morris found that the sweltering Arizona heat, unemployment, and poverty were all factors in the Akimel O’odham developing diabetes. Here, starkly high levels of unemployment and high reliance on government assistance coupled with limited economic resources, reduced physical exercise due to the heat, limited affordable healthy food options on the Pima reservation, and use of food as a comfort against daily struggles, were all contributing factors to developing diabetes. Although the Akimel O’odham have lived near the Gila River for centuries and are familiar with the high temperatures, their responses to it have changed in the past hundred years. As the Gila River has dried up, the Akimel O’odham lost their traditional farms and increasingly relied on government-subsidised foodstuffs (Smith-Morris 2006). Notably, the drying up of the Gila River was not a natural phenomenon, but resulted from the Arizona government’s extensive irrigation efforts as well as damming by non-Native farmers. However, policies of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which extended into the 1980s, forbade the Akimel O’odham from receiving help from agricultural loans. Combined with the loss of traditional food pathways, these policies forced the Akimel O’odham to obtain sedentary jobs and rely on high-calorie, poor-nutrition governmental food handouts (Booth et al. 2017; Smith-Morris 2006). Indeed, diabetes is so ubiquitous in the Akimel O’odham that participants in Smith-Morris’ research naturalised it more and more, observing, ‘it’s just how Pimas are’ (2006: 33).

Smith-Morris’s work with the Akimel O’odham highlights how political and economic factors contributed to diabetes aetiology in a population already facing racism and other abuses from the very government that was supposed to care for them. Recent work in Nepal supports these findings. Here, governmental inaction in the face of rigid social hierarchies and discrimination against the Dalits–members of the lowest social caste–creates structural situations of high diabetes risk (Thapa 2014). While caste-based discrimination is officially illegal in Nepal, social hierarchies forbid Dalits from participating in many social, religious, educational, and employment opportunities, forcing them into poverty, food insecurity, and occupational and housing uncertainty—all of which elevate diabetes risk. Given that existing social hierarchies are deeply entrenched, the Nepalese government has found it difficult to enforce anti-discrimination laws; in doing so, the Nepalese government failed to take care of its most vulnerable members and reduce Dalit diabetes risk. In this example, it is government negligence, rather than active mismanagement, that increases diabetes risk.

Additionally, colonisation is a structural factor that boosts diabetes risk, particularly as its effects continue for generations after the dissolution of the original colonising state. Indigenous communities that have experienced colonisation face extremely high diabetes rates due to a loss of traditional lands and food sources, cycles of food insecurity, and mental distress from oppressive regimes. In Canada, the diabetes prevalence rate is four times higher among Indigenous communities than in the general population due to decades of the Canadian government enforcing starvation, stress, food insecurity, and the environmental degradation of traditional food sources such as fishing (Temblay et al. 2021). Similarly, high diabetes rates in the Marshall Islands have been linked to the World War II-era devastation of breadfruit trees, which were a traditional food source for Indigenous communities (Duke 2017). The US began distributing canned meat and white rice when it colonised the Marshall Islands after the war. This abrupt change in food acquisition and preparation negatively impacted the Marshallese’s relationship with their environments and their bodies by increasing their reliance on imported canned foods, which are high in additives, rather than on fresh and local resources.

The geographic diversity of these case studies emphasises an urgent need for studying the complex historical, structural, and traumatic roots of diabetes in greater depth. Prolonged exposure to colonialism is associated with a profound loss of traditional food acquisition, preparation and consumption, and subsequently high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition even when a colonising regime no longer exists. The loss of traditional livelihoods and diminished community self-determination undermine socioeconomic development among oppressed communities. Particularly, it leaves rural communities in debilitating working conditions with only limited access to comprehensive primary care or physical activity options, like walking trails, that are weather-safe for year-round use (Rice et al. 2016; Tremblay et al. 2021).

The colonial roots of diabetes serve as a stark reminder that health is due as much to structural environments as it is to biology. As these and other ethnographies demonstrate, structural environments contribute to diabetes being a social disease as participants shared stories about their etiological foundations of diabetes and the ways in which adjusting to a new life required new perspectives.

Diabetes and biopower

Although, as the ethnographies above elucidate, anthropologists have studied diabetes susceptibility among different populations, anthropological literature has also cautioned against relying on rigid, overly simplistic ethnic categories to understand diabetes because they miss the nuanced biological human variations between and among ethnic groups that contribute to diabetes risk (Montoya 2007). Labelling individuals or entire populations as ‘at risk’ for diabetes based on easy single-gene categories risks ‘naïve genetic determinism’ that glosses over the need for deeper analysis of the social and environmental histories of different populations that shape their susceptibility to diabetes (Montoya 2007). Anthropologists have contributed valuable insight into the social, political, and environmental pressures that individuals and populations face, particularly by incorporating biopower—the regulation of human life at the population and individual body levels—and the politics of health, body image, illness metaphors, and explanatory models into the frameworks of diabetes aetiologies and lived experiences (Ferzacca 2012).

For example, research on the clinical encounters of diabetes highlights the difference between clinicians’ perspectives on diabetes and the perspectives of patients with diabetes (Guell 2011; Hernandez 1995; Hunt et al. 1998). Cheri Hernandez (1995), in an ethnographic study on the clinical parameters of diabetes management, observed that while healthcare providers emphasise maintaining acceptable glucose levels and adhering to medication and weight loss regimens, patients prioritise learning how to live with diabetes. Patients with diabetes often found biomedical explanations for diabetes to be insufficient and attributed their diabetes to personally-relevant triggering events and behaviours. Those who believed that their own behaviours were causes of diabetes tended to be more involved in their treatment; the act of being involved in treatment was associated with long-term behaviour change (Hunt et al. 1998).

While Hernandez and Linda Hunt et al. focused on the individual’s biomedical encounters for diabetes treatment, others have expanded this approach to the collective diabetes experience. Cornelia Guell (2011) draws attention to the conflicting hierarchies of diabetes knowledge in Germany that arose among Turkish migrants in Berlin. Tensions arose between Turkish healthcare providers and layperson self-help groups over conflicting values and knowledge hierarchies about diabetes. Along with fierce competition for limited funding for community diabetes clinics and health education classes, these differences in diabetes knowledge not only pitted the community and healthcare providers against one another but also created rifts in a community already facing severe marginalisation. Similarly, healthcare providers frequently place the responsibility for diabetes management squarely on the patient, making them ‘morally liable for their own ill health’, as Rebecca Seligman and colleagues have highlighted in their work on Mexican immigrants with diabetes in the city of Chicago (2015: 64). Many physicians believed that structural and social interventions were not part of their jobs, preferring to focus solely on clinical treatments without being concerned for the underlying social and structural roots of diabetes (Mendenhall et al. 2017). This arbitrary dividing of responsibility is harmful and perpetuates the deeper structures contributing to diabetes. It also conflicts with how people living with diabetes view their own diabetes aetiologies. Many people who spoke with Seligman et al. (2015) attributed their diabetes to structural factors, such as interpersonal violence, poverty, and unemployment, indicating that the biomedical emphasis on individual patient responsibility overlooks patients’ lived experiences with diabetes.

Diabetes management is complex and fraught with overlapping layers of meaning. A major theme in the anthropological literature on diabetes is that of responsibility and control over diabetic bodies. Biomedicine, in its fervent pursuit of individualised health, places the locus of control directly onto the patient to manage self-care; when diabetic bodies do not behave according to biomedically prescribed plans, the onus of responsibility falls squarely on the patient. Biopower, or the regulation of human life at the population and individual body levels, is used to discipline misbehaving bodies into docile conformity through state-controlled sites, such as schools, hospitals, and prisons (Foucault 1976). Bodies become political and economic battlegrounds between policymakers and healthcare providers as debates rage over the best ways to prevent and treat diabetes, while at the same time these forces exert control over the individuals who are inhabiting the very bodies at the centre of these debates (Gibson and Dempsey 2015).

One example of biopower in a colonisation framework is among Indigenous communities in Canada. Indigenous children at residential schools in Canada developed negative relationships with food due to malnourishment, abuse, punishment, and humiliation perpetuated in the residential school environment (Howard 2014). These collective traumas and negative lived experiences of residential school food were passed on to subsequent generations, where, aided by a loss of traditional food pathways due to aggressive colonisation by the Canadian government, they are embodied as diabetes among Canada’s Indigenous communities. Indigenous interactions with contemporary healthcare systems in Canada have reinforced colonisation through racism, stereotyping, and discrimination (Jacklin et al. 2017). Patients reported being repeatedly ignored or patronised at medical appointments despite having travelled long distances for check-ups. Physician shortages and geographic isolation from clinics contributed to diabetes mismanagement, as patients sometimes waited for several months without seeing a physician or having their medications refilled. In both cases, colonialism reinforced the stereotype of misbehaving diabetic bodies and placed the blame firmly on Indigenous communities for their own diabetes while diffusing blame from the state-sanctioned violence of colonisation that is responsible for diabetes perpetuation.

One of the most fundamental contributing factors to biopower and diabetes is the question of control over the very parameters of health. US doctors who led medical missions to Belize taught the locals that diabetes was the individual’s responsibility, rather than the doctor’s liability (Moran-Thomas 2019). This biomedical focus on patient responsibility for diabetes maintenance absolved doctors of the obligation to consider the roles of broader social, economic, and political milieus in which their patients lived. Doctors did not spend much time helping patients identify the early warning signs of diabetes but simply told them to lose weight and get more physical activity, despite limited access to healthy, affordable foods, safe infrastructure for outdoor activity, or disposable income for gym memberships. Amy Moran-Thomas notes that this lack of comprehensive medical care is notable because, as diabetes is not transmitted between people, there is less biomedical focus on the ways in which people’s interactions propagate the disease and more on the individual’s genetics and decisions that make someone more at risk for diabetes, despite the blatant social risk factors. As such, patients are blamed for noncompliance, frequently without evidence, despite the structural factors that exacerbate diabetes risk.

The physical body is also shaped by cultural metaphors of health and diabetes and naturalises certain cultural norms while stigmatising others (Martin 1987; Solomon 2016; Hardin 2018). This is evident in the ways in which diabetes is stigmatised due to its socially perceived associations with uncontrollable food consumption (Aghamohammadi-Kalkhoran and Valizadeh 2016; Broom and Whittaker 2004; Ferzacca 2012; Lee et al. 2015). For example, Amanda Willig and colleagues (2014) found that African American women with diabetes reported experiencing diabetes stigma when they were the only ones in their extended families with the disease, as they were perceived as having no self-control over their health and were treated as children without the ability to make decisions for themselves. Denise Bockwoldt and colleagues (2016) found that African Americans are less likely to adhere to insulin-based medication regimes due to a plethora of negative emotions associated with insulin, such as self-blame, frustration, fear of complications, and of being a burden on loved ones. Some study participants admitted to hiding their insulin from their loved ones so as to not be outed as insulin dependent. These results were replicated by Kryseana Harper et al. (2018), who found that family-based diabetes stigma was common in their mixed-gender African American cohort. This stigma both perpetuated a reduction in diabetes self-management and created resentment towards diabetes for the disruption it caused to peoples’ personal lives.

Additionally, healthcare providers sometimes stigmatise people with diabetes if they do not lose weight or adhere to their prescribed medication regimens, which further discourages people from visiting a healthcare provider (McNaughton 2013; Shahab et al. 2019). People with diabetes who need to inject insulin may also be mistaken for and stigmatised as drug users should they need to inject insulin in public (Balfe and Jackson 2007; Bock 2012). In the United States, a country in which productivity is highly valued, any loss of individual productivity is devalued and stigmatised, particularly if the cause of that loss is concealed or is a manageable disease, as diabetes is commonly thought to be (Ferzacca 2012; Hopper 1981; Shahab et al. 2019). External stigma over perceived loss of productivity and lack of individual discipline that are thought to contribute to diabetes become internalised among those living with diabetes or are involved in its treatment, and perpetuate individual and biomedical diabetes mismanagement (Aghamohammadi-Kalkhoran and Valizadeh 2016; Ferzacca 2012; Seligman et al. 2015).

Anthropologists reject the overly simplistic categorisations of diabetes as a disease of racial and genetic determinism, preferring instead to trace the overlapping intersections between biological pathways and structural factors. In her work with the Native community in Chicago, Margaret Pollak (2018) notes that anthropologists reject the thrifty genotype hypotheses, which speculates that people are biologically predisposed to diabetes, which is then triggered by social environments. Instead, the alarmingly high diabetes rates among certain communities are explored in relation to external influences, such as colonisation and land loss among American Indians in Chicago. Diabetes care is also a multigenerational, life-long social activity in Native communities, with friends and family helping one another inject insulin, manage medication schedules, and eat diabetes-friendly meals. In this way, diabetes is transformed from a biological disease into a form of social cohesion against colonial forces that attempt to destroy Native physical and collective bodies.

As these studies and ethnographies highlight, the biological and social spheres of diabetes consistently intersect, and these intersections manifest differently depending on the population and their social, psychological, and structural circumstances.

Syndemic interactions

In keeping with the anthropological emphasis on complex, multileveled interactions that underscore disease perpetuations, scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which structural factors exacerbate diabetes outcomes by focusing on parts of the world that have reported abrupt increases in diabetes prevalence (Mendenhall 2012; Weaver 2018).

The theory of syndemics has gained traction in anthropological diabetes research, as it provides a framework for understanding the social, political, and economic underpinnings of illness and disease interactions. Syndemics examines the concentration and deleterious interaction of two or more diseases or other health conditions in a population, particularly as a consequence of social inequality and the unjust exercise of power (Singer 2009: xv). Multiple anthropologists have observed that diabetes is a common component of syndemics research due to its increased incidence and prevalence (Everett and Wieland 2013; Lerman 2017, 2022; Mendenhall 2012; Ryan and Raja 2016; Weaver 2018; Weaver and Mendenhall 2014). Specifically, diabetes interacts synergistically with two other common occurrences: depression and food insecurity.

Research indicates that slightly over one-third of individuals with diabetes will develop depression and vice versa, and that individuals with diabetes are twice as likely as individuals without diabetes to develop depression (Gask et al. 2011; Katon et al. 2010; McSharry et al. 2013; Mendenhall 2012). While some evidence implicates depression as a precursor and major contributor to diabetes (Joseph and Golden 2017; Mendenhall 2015; Vrshek-Schallhorn et al. 2013), diabetes also increases the risk for developing depression (Katon 2010; Gask et al. 2011; Nash 2013). Depression, in turn, contributes to decreased diabetes self-care and access to healthcare, including decreased glucose monitoring, missed medical appointments, and increased likelihood of diabetes complications through diabetes mismanagement (Nash 2013; Weaver and Hadley 2011). Conversely, diabetes contributes to depression by deteriorating social networks, draining financial resources, and changing dietary patterns (Katon et al. 2010; McSharry et al. 2013). Food is a cohesive force: holidays, meetings, family meals, and casual gatherings often include food sharing (Lerman Ginzburg 2022b). When an individual cannot partake due to diabetes-related dietary limitations, the ensuing feelings of guilt or shame may provoke reluctance to attend the event, adding to social isolation. This is particularly true of women, who tend to be the primary cooks in their families and do not always receive support from their families to prepare healthier meals (Lerman Ginzburg 2022b).

The relationship between food insecurity and diabetes is rooted in structural factors. For example, Olayinka Shiyanbola and colleagues (2018) found that African Americans with diabetes attributed their disease outcomes to eating habits that were rooted in slavery and an ensuing consistent lack of healthy foods. Shiyanbola and colleagues’ work adds on to Lisa Sumlin and Sharon Brown (2017), who found that African American women attributed their diabetes rates to dietary patterns and cultural culinary practices that are grounded in slavery and expounded by centuries of poverty. Populations that have been abruptly introduced to and adopted Westernised dietary patterns, such as the Pima Native Americans in Arizona and the Nauruan Islanders in Micronesia, are exceptionally vulnerable to developing diabetes due to rapid changes in nutrition, through increased consumption of highly processed foods that are high in sodium, fats, and carbohydrates (Hardin 2015; Smith-Morris 2006; Solomon 2016; Weaver 2018). Western eating patterns were oftentimes forcibly imposed on unwilling communities, and these forced eating patterns went hand-in-hand with overlapping structural factors that accentuated the incidence of diabetes among the affected communities (Hardin 2015; Smith-Morris 2006).

Diabetes and food insecurity are also correlated with poverty, particularly in combination with the absence of affordable healthcare and housing (McNaughton 2013; Mendenhall 2015; Vest et al. 2013). In their study on diabetes among Canadians living in poverty, Dennis Raphael and colleagues (2012) found that since the government’s public policy dictates the incidence and experience of poverty, and that poverty and ensuing material deprivation are contributors to increased rates of diabetes, mitigating diabetes levels require changes at the government level, and not merely at the individual level. Studies such as these serve as a reminder that food insecurity cannot be attributed merely to individual-level food decisions, but also depends on government policies that impact access to financial assistance for low-income families. For example, my research in Puerto Rico explores participants’ experiences of eating whichever food was most easily economically and geographically accessible due to an influx of food taxes, high-end supermarkets in gated communities, and economic and political instability (Lerman Ginzburg 2022a). Thus, merely turning health and treatment into easy formulae ignores the agricultural, historical, social, and political specificities that are interwoven into food consumption (Emily Yates-Doerr 2015). This critical scholarship underscores the need for ethnographic research that situates food insecurity and diabetes not merely within biomedical milieus, but also as products of social, political, and economic forces.

Just as structural factors, such as interpersonal violence and poverty, are critical syndemic perpetuators, similarly community responsibility and collective care play a role in diabetes management. Jessica Hardin (2018), in her ethnographic work on cardiometabolic disorders in Samoa, highlights how healing is both individualistic and collective that both ‘transform individual bodies while impacting the broader community, making evident the problems of the collective in the bodies of individual Christians’, a process which she calls ‘embodied critique’ (5-6). Hardin found that her Samoan participants encouraged one another to link illness events with the state of their relationships. Concepts such as embodied critique move beyond individual bodies to encompass the broader community and the structural factors that underlie diabetes aetiology. While part of the responsibility was on the individual to manage their diabetes, including taking medications, structural factors like poverty and unemployment also contributed to diabetes, which made it harder for study participants to make the necessary changes.

In Puerto Rico too, the participants I worked with linked diabetes with broader socio-political problems, such as Puerto Rico's status as a US territory (Lerman Ginzburg 2017, 2022a). The 1917 Jones Act forced food shipped to Puerto Rico to be marked up in price to compensate for the shipping, but this cost is borne by Puerto Ricans. Their experiences of eating whichever foods were most easily economically and geographically accessible connected food insecurity and diabetes with US colonisation and political nepotism. People developed depression because of the high unemployment and crime rates, ate large quantities of cheap high-fat food because of food insecurity and food apartheid, and developed diabetes. Similarly, in tracing the syndemic underpinnings of diabetes and COVID-19, anthropologists like Merrill Singer (2020) have commented that NAFTA created ‘diabetes-inducing’ environments in Mexico by triggering a growing dependence on unhealthy food imports, mostly from the US, amid a national agricultural deficit that limited Mexicans’ access to the fresh produce grown in their own backyards. The rapid change in agricultural output and ensuing urbanisation created situations of stress, identity loss, and profound changes in dietary practices that contributed to diabetes risk.

Corporate influences on diabetes

Most of this entry has focused on the structural factors that impact the lived experiences of diabetes. However, there is also a corporate component to diabetes that impacts the quality of care. Medical anthropologists studying diabetes in the United States have argued that clinical care in the country is increasingly driven by large corporations, with a mounting emphasis on financial and managerial logics that reduce diabetes care to a narrow set of quantifiable metrics (Hunt et al. 2019). Healthcare providers measure successful diabetes management by monitoring glucose and HbA1c levels, medication regimen adherence, and significant weight loss, all of which are easily enumerated but difficult to achieve due to the multiple structural barriers associated with diabetes. Health insurance plans in the US use these quantitative parameters to determine approval of healthcare expenses while ignoring the underlying structural and social barriers that might prevent patients from managing their diabetes. Scholars also argue that screening, diagnosis, and treatment guidelines over the past forty years have changed under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry despite weak evidence of efficacy in order to benefit from promoting expensive medications to unsuspecting patients (Hunt et al. 2019). Additionally, easing the diagnostic criteria for diabetes means that more people are diagnosed with the illness, and therefore required to take medications. In tracing these linkages, scholars have recommended that individual vigilance over diabetes management be augmented with systemic surveillance by healthcare providers and by policymakers who are at the forefront of medical innovations, healthcare funding, and institutional policies (Rock 2003b). Such recommendations reiterate that structural factors that impact underserved populations with high diabetes rates are rooted in unjust policies that can only be remedied at a higher political level.

Conclusion

Diabetes continues to be a globally pervasive disease, particularly in low- and middle-income countries which are facing rapid changes in the mechanisation of labour, political stability, economic independence, and profound social unrest. Despite the advances in biomedical treatment options, diabetes continues to afflict millions of people around the world, which indicates that there is a pressing need for accessible treatment options. For example, the price of insulin is ten times more expensive in the US than in any other developed country, leading many people with diabetes to ration their insulin and risk their health if their health insurance doesn’t cover the cost (Rajkumar 2020). This travesty highlights the need for thorough healthcare reform in the US in particular. Furthermore, it is imperative that the structural factors underlying diabetes in societies throughout the world be considered during treatment. Multiple, overlapping factors, such as colonisation, poverty, and unemployment are inexorably linked to diabetes, and it is those factors which we must address as we move forward with diabetes treatment options. Thinking of syndemics is a useful way for digging more deeply into the aetiologies of diabetes, so that culturally-specific and affordable preventions might be developed and rapidly implemented.

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Note on contributor

Shir Lerman Ginzburg is an assistant professor of public health at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Her research interests include mental health, diabetes, food insecurity, health disparities, Hispanics, obesity, syndemics, and colonisation. She earned her PhD in medical anthropology from the University of Connecticut. She practices yoga and meditation in her free time.

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Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Visual anthropology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:16:08 +0000

Jenny Chio

University of Southern California

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

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

Abstract:

Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the anthropological analyses of media (including films, videos, photography, drawings, etc.). Conceptually, visual anthropology draws on theoretical and methodological connections between human perception and imagination, the use and production of audiovisual media, and ethnography. This entry explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. It also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise critically important questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture that bear on the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others. The production of audiovisual materials in anthropological research is often overlooked. Yet technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities to incorporate filmmaking into ethnographic and cross-cultural research. Since the 1980s, the establishment of visual anthropology programs within some academic departments, combined with the increased accessibility of video and digital media technologies globally, prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use. It also helped develop new approaches to understanding visual experiences as a cultural practice. Four central concerns of visual anthropology at present are ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, the study of visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Taken together, this entry shows how visual anthropology has contested, expanded, and transformed understandings of power, authority, and meaning in media-making practices.

Introduction

Visual anthropology includes both producing anthropological media, such as ethnographic films, exhibitions, and photography, as well as analysing existing media as part of anthropological enquiry. Conceptually, visual anthropology lies at the intersection of the study of human perception and imagination, audiovisual media, and ethnography.^[1] The production of ethnographic films, loosely defined as films based upon ethnographic fieldwork, has been the most well-studied aspect of the subfield, although the research and scholarship of visual anthropologists extend well beyond filmmaking.^[2] This entry primarily explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. However, it also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise essential questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture, making the subfield relevant for the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others.

Four themes and areas comprise the central concerns of visual anthropology in the present moment: ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Even with the wide scope of contemporary visual anthropology that ranges from ethnographic media-making to ethnographies of media, a few common denominators within the subfield exist. First, and most significantly, scholars in this field emphasise that audiovisual recordings and/or visual practices are tools of analysis, rather than merely illustrating text-based analyses. Instead of considering photographs, sound recordings, drawings, or video as supplementary to writing, many visual anthropologists emphasise the complementarity of text and image, where each in turn amplifies the other. For example, some visual anthropologists argue that text need not be the primary mode of communicating ethnographic knowledge for a given project, as is the case for the anthropological biography films of Anna Grimshaw that are focused on the lives of select individuals in a small fishing town in Maine (Grimshaw 2013, 2016). Others show how text and media can work together to amplify anthropological analysis, as in Descending with angels (Suhr 2019) which consists of an ethnographic film as well as a written monograph on Islamic exorscim and psychiatry in Denmark.

A second shared approach defining visual anthropological scholarship is a concern with ethnographic methods and reflexivity; or, in other words, how attention to visual materials and visual practices can make for a more insightful, and more ethical, ethnography. This includes efforts to ‘give back the camera’ and create collaborative modes of filmmaking (see Elder 1995, Moore 1996, Turner 1992, Weiner 1997; also discussed further in the section on Indigenous and activist media) and projects that return historical and fieldwork photographs and films to research communities (see, for example, Strathern 2018 and the film Some Na ceremonies 2015). In these cases, the visual in visual anthropology has afforded anthropologists the opportunity and the responsibility to share research materials and acknowledge the cultural conditions of visual experience. Image-making has also been added to the ethnographer’s toolkit not just for research purposes, but also as a means of giving back to the individuals and communities whose lives and experiences constitute the ‘data’ that makes anthropology possible (Jackson 2004, Lozada 2006). Since anthropological research takes place within global hierarchies of knowledge production, such efforts attempt to ‘question hegemonic Euro/American-centric anthropological and audio-visual aesthetics and epistemologies’ (Flores & Torresan 2018).

Finally, visual anthropology has called into question the limitations of visual representation. The materiality of photographs, the sounds and audioscapes of film and video, the immersive environments of exhibitions, and the interactive possibilities of online platforms push visual anthropologists to look beyond what is obviously visible. Behind this is the recognition that the field of visual anthropology has always included other senses and experiences and that different anthropological questions and different ethnographic contexts may demand, or at least benefit from, different modes of engagement and production. Sensations such as sound and hearing, taste, feel (tactility/hapticity), as well as emotion and affect are all integral to the ways in which human life is experienced, made meaningful, and represented. In 2017, the journal American Anthropologist renamed its long-running ‘Visual Anthropology’ section as ‘Multimodal Anthropologies’ in order to reflect the mixed practices and modes which anthropological scholarship might take. In turn, there have also been numerous initiatives and efforts to change established scholarly practices. Increasing numbers of anthropology programs now accept non-text-based scholarship as part of degree requirements, and more and more discussions have emerged on the evaluation of non-textual scholarship within the discipline (Chio 2017a).

These current concerns about visual analysis, an ethical ethnographic practice, and mixed modes of anthropological knowledge production, are not new. The history of visual anthropology, discussed below, illustrates how technologies and strategies of visual representation are deeply intertwined with the discipline, its theoretical foundations, and its methodological innovations.

Anthropology has always been visual

The history of visual anthropology, and in particular the development of ethnographic filmmaking, is well-studied and illuminates one fundamental truth: anthropology, as a discipline that documents and studies socio-cultural life, has always been invested in the visual (e.g. Banks & Ruby 2011, Grimshaw 2001, El Guindi 2004, Jacknis 2016, Loizos 1995, Ruby 2000).^[3] The production of visual material as a part of anthropological research has occurred since the beginning of the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Arguably, the relationship between visual representation and what became known as anthropology emerged with advances in photography from the mid-1800s onwards. Photography was employed extensively in studies of ‘racial types’ within the nascent fields of physical anthropology, which studied the biological evolution and variabilities of humans, and eugenics, a racist pseudo-science that advocated for the selective breeding of human populations. Colonial governments and administrations, in particular, were deeply invested in using photography to classify and categorise colonised populations by racial and ethnic ‘types’ based upon visible, physical characteristics as a means of asserting their authority to rule, govern, and control populations deemed less ‘developed’ than white Anglo-Europeans (Edwards 1994, Pinney 2011). Indeed, state-sponsored practices of using photographs as evidence of racialised differences lasted well into the twentieth century, with grave and violent consequences (see Morris-Reich 2016).

Early anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon, Franz Boas, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard recognised the scholarly significance of audiovisual documentation as a part of ethnographic fieldwork both as a memory aid but also as means of amplifying their research findings. They produced audio recordings, drawings, and photographs during their field research and also included numerous images in their publications (see also Bunn-Marcuse forthcoming, Joseph 2015). A few decades later, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson experimented with the possibilities of film and photography as a means of anthropological analysis as a part of their fieldwork in Bali (Bateson & Mead 1942, Jacknis 1988). For Mead and Bateson, film and photography allowed for the repeat, more systematic study of human non-verbal behavior and bodily movement through the use of photographic sequences and edited short films, featuring voice-over commentary and analysis.

Technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities for film and photography to play a more central role in ethnographic and cross-cultural research because the actual recording technology was lighter, cheaper, and easier to learn than its predecessors (see Hockings 2003, Collier & Collier 1967). This is exemplified in films like The hunters (1957) and Dead birds (1964) which were produced as part of research expeditions sponsored by Harvard University/Peabody Museum, the films of the Turkana conversations trilogy of David and Judith MacDougall and the Yanomami series of Timothy Asch, as well as the collaborative, shared anthropological films of Jean Rouch, such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) (see also Rouch 2003). Despite the proliferation of ethnographic film during this period, or perhaps precisely because of it, the capacity of film and visual images to communicate anthropological knowledge (or ‘facts’ more generally) emerged as a point of suspicion and anxiety within the discipline. The ‘iconophobia’ of mainstream anthropologists resulted in the marginalisation of the subfield (Taylor 1996; Mead 2003). Whereas text was capable of theory and analysis, the meaning of images was considered less easily controlled and thus more likely to be misunderstood or misinterpreted (MacDougall 1999).

Nevertheless, alongside the rise in global commercial travel and the introduction of more affordable video recording technologies in the 1970s, visual anthropology programs, labs, and centres have been established within a number of academic anthropology departments (see Ruby 2000, 2001). These programs offer more formal research and training opportunities in ethnographic film production, media analysis, and the anthropology of visual culture, although visual anthropology classes are also widely taught in departments without such institutionalised programs. Combined with the ‘writing culture’ debates around power imbalances and representational authority in ethnographic description and analysis, scholarship in visual anthropology has prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use, as well as new anthropological approaches to understanding visual experience as a cultural practice.

Nowadays, it is nearly impossible to imagine conducting ethnographic fieldwork without a camera of some kind, and digital technologies make it possible for nearly every camera to operate in a still or video mode. The global reach of media technologies has also expanded the horizons of visual anthropology, which increasingly overlaps with the subfields of digital anthropology, media anthropology, and sensory anthropology. Furthermore, while the number of visual anthropology degree programs has continued to grow, many more university departments and institutions have laboratory spaces or research groups dedicated to exploring new and re-newed theoretical and methodological potentials of visual and/or media-based scholarship in anthropology. This growth reflects the continued relevance and appeal of visual and other non-text based forms of anthropological work. The revival of interest in the photo-essay, and more broadly the critical use of photographs in anthropological scholarship, is one such recent development in visual anthropology.^[4] Nonetheless, ethnographic film continues to be the most recognisable ‘product’ of the field.

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

The prominence of ethnographic film in the history of visual anthropology cannot be overstated, despite the fact that photography and sound recordings were also fundamental parts of early ethnographic fieldwork. The history and development of ethnographic film over the twentieth century has also been extensively studied (see, for example, Henley 2020, Loizos 1993), including the connections between ethnographic film and early cinema (especially travelogues) (see Griffiths 2002, Groo 2019), and the parallel development of ethnographic film and documentary film practices and theory (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Rony 1996). Films made by anthropologists or as part of ethnographic research projects quite literally make visible and more accessible the work of anthropology, from the process of fieldwork to the analysis of cultural values, beliefs, and behaviours. Moreover, with its combination of sound and moving image, the film medium can be regarded as more akin to lived experience, more immediately apprehensible, and more capable of communicating anthropological insights to a broader public.

Comprehensive accounts by and analyses of various influential ethnographic filmmakers have been published (Grimshaw 2001, MacDonald 2013, MacDougall 1999 and 2006, Rouch 2003, Ruby 2000). Among the many oft-cited ethnographic filmmakers includes Margaret Mead, who sought to harness the pedagogical, scientific, and public-facing possibilities of the film medium. For Mead, film was a way to show and analyze human cultural lives in ways that text could not, although her films relied heavily upon intertitles and didactic voice-overs to interpret the filmed materials for viewers (see Trance and dance in Bali [1952]). Later, Jean Rouch, working in France and postcolonial West Africa, upended the expectation that an ethnographic film necessarily had to record ‘real life’ in front of the camera in favor of what he called a ‘shared anthropology’ (Rouch 2003). In films such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) which explored migrant youth experiences and masculinity, Rouch worked collaboratively with long-term friends and interlocutors, producing ‘ethno-fictional’ films composed of pre-planned scenes coupled with voice-over narrations added during post-production. The resulting films are both fictional, in that they are not direct recordings of an event or experience, and ethnographic, in that they explore and reflect socio-cultural lives, belief systems, and values.

Other key figures in ethnographic film history include John Marshall for his films on the lives and experiences of Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa (present-day Namibia), beginning with The hunters (1957) and up to the five-part A Kalahari family series (2002). Marshall’s many films on Ju/’hoansi began as part of research programs intended to ‘document’ a hunter-gatherer society that was presumed to be ‘disappearing’ in the modern era, and led to his continued advocacy with Ju/’hoansi and !Kung for the next half-century (see Anderson & Benson 1993). The films of Robert Gardner, whose early work was also conducted as part of research expeditions, reflect and challenge the capacity of film to communicate anthropological arguments (Gardner 2008). Dead birds (1964) utilised many formal elements associated with anthropological filmmaking at the time (explanatory voice-over and a focus on a so-called ‘primitive’ society), although the film addressed the more universal subject of human warfare and violence. However, by the time Gardner made Forest of bliss in 1986, he plunged viewers into the Indian city of Benares and local patterns of worship and religious experience without any explanatory text or narration, thus leaving the ‘meaning’ of the film ostensibly open to viewer interpretation (though of course the film was deliberately and carefully edited).

The stylistic and formal differences between Gardner’s Dead birds and Forest of bliss represent a broader formal development in ethnographic film in the second half of the twentieth century. While many ethnographic films from the 1950s through to the 1970s tended to rely upon voice-over narration to explain or describe film sequences, an observational mode of ethnographic filmmaking gradually came to dominate the aesthetic and formal style of ethnographic film today (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Henley 2020). Known as ‘observational cinema’, it reflects a perspective on social and cultural lives, emphasising an ‘unprivileged camera style’ (MacDougall 1982), where the filmmaker and the camera’s presence are a part of (but not dominant in) the filmed encounter. What is presented should, to the best extent possible, reflect what one could actually experience in a particular socio-cultural context.^[5]Formally, this meant eschewing voice-over narrations and montage editing, and relying on long takes that reflect the pace of life and conversation as it unfolds. David and Judith MacDougall were among the first ethnographic filmmakers to utilise subtitles in their films and thus ‘give voice’ directly to the film’s characters (see MacDougall 1995); their Turkana conversations trilogy films from the 1970s are widely regarded as embodying the concept and practice of observational cinema.

The approach and aesthetic of observational cinema continues to largely define ethnographic filmmaking at present, albeit with slight differences in styles and techniques. This formal ‘style’ of ethnographic film, the ways in which ethnographic observation can be represented in and through film, and the power dynamics alternately revealed and obscured by formal choices in filmmaking continue to constitute central issues in ethnographic film theory (MacDougall 1999, Grimshaw 2001 and 2009, Suhr & Willerslev 2012). Since the early 2000s, some of the most widely discussed films within and beyond anthropology have been produced by scholars and students affiliated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University.^[6] An attention to sound (spoken and ambient), sequence and temporality (especially the long take), and image composition characterise these films (see Nakamura 2013, Lee 2019). Films such as Leviathan (2012), Manakamana (2014), and Demolition/Chaiqian (2008) have prompted much-needed discussions within anthropology on the question of aesthetics, ethics, and representations of other lives (human and non-human) (on Leviathan, see the special issue of Visual Anthropology Review 31(1); also Spray 2020 and Sniadecki 2014). Taken together, what can be called the contemporary ‘observational-sensory’ convention of ethnographic film-making reveals an unease with the limits and possibilities of ethnographic film to both convey cultural experiences and to respect (and reflect) cultural differences (Chio 2020).

Even more important for the future of visual anthropology, increasing numbers of anthropologists now engage in filmmaking as a means of presenting knowledge to broader publics, including to research communities. They push the possibilities of film as a mode of ethnographic inquiry while also offering a much-needed expansion and diversification of the ethnographic film ‘canon’. Anthropologist-filmmakers such as Harjant Gill, Anna Grimshaw, Lina Fruzzetti and Ákös Öster, Hu Tai-Li, Karen Nakamura, and Deborah Thomas and John Jackson, Jr., among many others, have produced ethnographic films that formally range from the more ‘purely’ observational (Seed and earth [1995], At low tide [2016]) to more interview-driven (Mardistan [2014], Bad friday [2011]). One commonality across many recent ethnographic films is the self-conscious filmmaker, whose presence or absence is posited as a deliberate and meaningful choice to yield the cinematic space to the film’s subjects and their experiences/expertise (see Grimshaw’s four-part series, Mr. Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine woods [2013]) or to emphasise the role of the anthropologist in unraveling and motivating the encounters thusly filmed (see Death by myth [2002], the final film in Marshall’s A Kalahari family series; Coffee futures [2009]). Frequently, the anthropologist-filmmaker is positioned somewhere in between these poles – acknowledging her/his place within the film through carefully chosen moments of direct address (see 农家乐 Peasant family happiness [2013]).

In addition to internal debates over ethnography and the use-value of film, advances in relatively more affordable video technologies and a growing interest from mainstream media networks in cross-cultural issues and documentary film (see Grimshaw 2001, Henley 2020) mean that the ethics, power dynamics, and reception of ethnographic films have been increasingly questioned. Experimental filmmakers such as Chick Strand, Maya Deren, and Trinh T. Minh-ha revisited documentary assumptions, ethnographic film aesthetics, and anthropological authority in their works. Their films pose searing critiques of cross-cultural representation and the ways in which documentary filmmaking has reinforced oppressive hierarchies of power and knowledge (see Ramey 2011, Rony 1996, Russell 1999, and Suhr & Willerslev 2013). Another key factor that has shaped visual anthropology since the 1980s has been the widespread movement to engage in more collaborative research and analysis. As discussed in the following section, the rise and recognition of Indigenous and activist media productions around the globe have prompted new research directions and new forms of critique, collaboration, and reflexivity.

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

Concerns between ethnographic film and media practices by Indigenous, minoritised, and other cultural activist communities tend to converge, though not necessarily in agreement, around questions of power, cultural identity, and colonial/post-colonial conditions. This has been succinctly described by Faye Ginsburg (1995) in her influential concept of the ‘parallax effect’. For Ginsburg, the parallax effect suggests that while both ethnographic film and Indigenous media are cinematic representations of culture, Indigenous media offers ‘slightly different angles of vision’. Namely, while the ostensible subject of the films may be the same (Indigenous or other non-majority cultural lives), the perspectives offered diverge, often dramatically, between what can be simplified as an ‘outside’ (or etic) approach by ethnographers and an ‘inside’ (emic) view from the community or an individual within the community thusly represented. When considered together, Ginsburg argues, the effect can be a ‘fuller comprehension of the complexity of the social phenomenon we call culture and those media representations that self-consciously engage with it’ (1995: 65). The concept of a ‘parallax effect’ is grounded in earlier debates on the ‘crisis of representation’ in anthropology broadly, as well as calls for ethnographic film and filmmakers to acknowledge and yield authorial power to the voices of those who are more typically the subjects of film, rather than the creators (see Chen 1992, Ginsburg 1994, Nichols 1994, Weinberger 1994, Weiner 1997).

Indigenous media in particular has pushed scholarship in visual anthropology to confront the imbalance of power between the filmmaker and the ‘filmed’ and to concede some authorial control over the creation and content of media. It includes any and all ‘forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by Indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication’ (Wilson, Hearn, Córdova & Thorner 2014). Projects to ‘give the camera back,’ including Through Navajo eyes (Worth & Adair 1972), Video nas Aldeias (Carelli 1988), and the Kayapo video project (Turner 1992), provide equipment and basic training to Indigenous individuals without delineating a particular product or goal beyond what participants themselves deem important or significant. Such earlier efforts were subject to critique, however, because regardless of good intentions, questions of power, authority, and control permeate throughout any media-making endeavor, beginning with the provision of resources (cameras, editing suites, microphones, and time to participate in training) to the distribution of the productions (networking with television stations and film festivals, storage requirements, and so on) (see Moore 1996).^[7]

Nowadays, Indigenous media ranges from national television broadcast programs to radio, experimental arts, documentaries, and narrative film. They are united by a commitment to representing the experiences, perspectives, and values of Indigenous communities from their points of view, rather than from that of dominant, mainstream society. Assertions of political self-determination, sovereignty, and cultural preservation tend to be at the forefront of much Indigenous media (e.g. Angry Inuk [2016]), although these are by no means prescriptive or absolute limits on the possible diversity of themes and topics that they can and do address (Aufderheide 2008, Ginsburg 2016, Wilson & Stewart 2008). Visual anthropologists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have been involved and engaged with Indigenous media ethnographically by studying Indigenous media productions, from visual arts (Mithlo 2009, Myers 2002, Hennessy, Smith & Hogue 2018) to radio (Fisher & Bessire 2012) to film (Dowell 2017), but also professionally, for example as consultants for television programming (Deger 2006, Michaels 1991 and 1993) and as curators (see, for example, Mithlo's curatorial work at the Venice Biennale). Recent collaborations between anthropologists and Indigenous media makers, such as Miyarrka Media (2019), the Karrabing Film Collective (Lea & Povinelli 2018), and a forthcoming digital publication that reassesses Kwakiutl films and audio recordings made with Franz Boas (Bunn-Marcuse), emphasise a more equal foundation for media-making in an increasingly media-saturated world.

Activist media by minoritised, oppressed, and marginalised communities have further amplified the need to confront the often unquestioned, or under-addressed, ‘authority’ of mainstream media practioners, scholars, artists, and global political elites to depict and represent ‘other’ cultural lives. Scholarship on activist media, in turn, offers a much-needed challenge to reconsider and reshape media practice by confronting, head on, how media representations are a means of political control and potential resistance (see Osman 2019 on the interpellation of African Americans, Muslims, and Muslim Americans in US media in the post-9/11 era). Autoethnography, which adopts a deliberately self-concious and personal perspective on social conditions, has been an especially powerful mode of activist media-making (for example, see Russell 1999 on autoethnographic queer films and queer filmmaker networks in the United States). Autoethnographic films by anthropologists, such as Postcards from Tora Bora (Dolak & Osman 2007) about a young Afghan-American woman’s return to her childhood home two decades after fleeing Afghanistan with her family, and In my mother’s house (Fruzzetti & Östör 2017), tracing a personal journey through a matrix of Eritrean, Italian, and American colonial and post-colonial kin relations, further demonstrate the possibilities of a self-reflexively active, if not explicitly activist, approach. Taken together, Indigenous and activist media have freed visual anthropology, and ethnographic film in particular, from the confines of representing a fixed, or observable, cultural ‘reality’ in favor of exploring the possibilities of film and media practice for understanding and questioning social, cultural, and political conditions.

An anthropology of the visual

The analytical approaches taken by visual anthropologists towards Indigenous and activist media make clear the doubled ambitions of the subfield: to communicate anthropological knowledge through visual and other non-textual media as well as to engage in anthropological analyses of the visual world, including bodily gestures, visual practices, and different forms of media (for example, see Banks & Morphy 1997). The anthropology of the visual shares broad concerns with the emergence of visual culture studies and the ‘visual turn’ in the humanities (Jay 2002, Mitchell 2005). These emphasise how visual practices and visual media circulate and create meaning within culturally specific contexts.

As noted earlier, the deeply intertwined relationship between photography and the development of anthropology from the late 1800s to the present has been one of the most significant ‘cultural contexts’ studied. The history of photography in anthropology illuminates the critical theoretical work of visual anthropologists in understanding photography, and how the specific qualities of the photographic medium as still images with a specific materiality, and distinct photographic genres such as portraiture, convey meaning. At the same time, photographs have shaped the discipline and its core assumptions and concepts (Edwards 1994 and 2001, Pinney 2011). They have served as evidence of anthropological insights and concepts, as in Mead and Bateson’s Balinese character (1942) discussed earlier; likewise, photography functioned as a medium of power and a means of questioning power relations in anthropology (Edwards 2011). Both photo-elicitation and participatory photography are methodological interventions that have been adopted by visual anthropologists in order to address historical and existing power dynamics within the ethnographic encounter and also to explore the processes through which individuals make meaning out of and from visual representations (see Bowles 2017, Fattal 2020).

Ethnographies of photography situate photographs within specific histories and conditions of image production and circulation. Significant, for visual anthropology, is the close attention to the visual image as a material object in the world that leads to specific material practices. Insofar as photographs exist on paper, on hand-held screens, or otherwise they are not just as ‘representations of’ an assumedly more real reality elsewhere (Pinney 2011, Pinney & Peterson 2003, Wright 2013). Methodologically, the ethnography of photography requires the work of ‘visual detection’ (Gürsel 2018) and a practical as well as theoretical perspective on how particular kinds of photographs are made. For example, Brent Luvaas (2016 and 2019) ethnographically analyzes the production, aesthetisation, and creation of ‘street style’ fashion photography both on the ground as a photographic practice and online as genre of (commercially valuable) social media. Zeynep Gürsel, exploring how editorial newsrooms select news photographs, has called this process ‘formative fictions’ because the editorial process itself is where social meaning is created and communicated (2016). Similarly, Rebecca Carter (2019) analyzed the news circulation of a photograph of her family’s home as it was burning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Studies of studio portraiture especially have revealed how photography has been valued and productively deployed in imagining social status and belonging (see Banfill 2020, Sprague 1978a and 1978b). Portraiture, whether photographic or painted, commissioned or literally taken in the case of early anthropometric photography, provides a wide arena for reconsidering representation and the power of the image in assertions of agency (see Buggenhagen 2017 on post-colonial portraits by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop).

Although photography occupies a significant place within the anthropology of the visual, visual images as they exist and are seen in the world today surpass it. Focusing on these images in general addresses the image-saturated condition of the contemporary moment and the nature of ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2020). As a political process, Karen Strassler posits, image-events acknowledge how images can become central to political and social contestations in public and across different publics. Images of all kinds are active agents in shaping society and social expectations, as Arlene Dávila (2012 and 2020) has shown in her studies of Latinx marketing, media, and art. This focus on visuality, or taking the visual as an analytic, allows for an anthropology of the visual that can look beyond the making of representations and towards the ways in which representations in turn shape lived experiences (see, for example, Chio 2014 and 2017b on the visual expediencies of rural ethnic tourism in China).

The theoretical and thematic overlaps between scholarship in the anthropology of the visual, media anthropology, and visual culture are indicative of how multi-layered visual media really are. Any single image, whether a photograph, a drawing, a film still, or a digital rendering, can now be relatively easily printed, stored, digitised, animated, shared, and so on, making it ever more difficult and important to critically examine disciplinary assumptions about what images mean and whether and how the medium itself may be the message (following McLuhan 1994 [1964]). The anthropology of the visual also underpins and buttresses calls within visual anthropology to take medium specificity more seriously and to consider the wide array of possible media for the communication of anthropological and ethnographic knowledge.

From visual to multimodal?

In recent years, the term ‘multimodal anthropology’ has emerged alongside the term visual anthropology. The argument for ‘multimodal anthropology’ is to reflect changes in the media ecology and to acknowledge the diversity of media long employed by anthropologists (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 142). One central impetus for the wider adoption of ‘multimodal’ to describe non-text scholarship by anthropologists is the fact that ‘visual’ as a term is limiting and not entirely accurate when describing the vast scope of genres and media utilised by anthropologists. Films and videos, most obviously, incorporate careful and deliberate soundtracks, whether spoken, musical, or ambient; photographs are images and material objects; sound and sonic experiences themselves constitute particular ways of encountering and understanding (see Feld 2012, Phillips & Vidali 2017); performance, from dance to theatre to improvisational, have all been utilised and theorised by anthropologists as a scholarly form of knowledge communication (Kondo 2018). The term ‘sensory ethnography’ has also been used to capture some of these dynamics, whether through film and sound work (as in the Sensory Ethnography Lab) or through ethnographies of sensory experience (Howes 2019, Pink 2015). Multimodal anthropology, more broadly, asserts the possibility to reinvent anthropology itself, by foregrounding the ‘multiple ways of doing anthropology that create different ways of knowing and learning together’ (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019: 220).

This recent attention to multimodality in anthropology can, in part, be traced to the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art practice (Foster 1995, Grimshaw & Ravetz 2015, Rutten, van Diederen & Soetaert 2013, Takaragawa & Halloran 2017). In fact, artists share many of the concerns of anthropologists over the politics, ethics, and poetics involved in multiple media. For example, Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial collective that organised annual exhibition programs alongside the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association from 2009-2019, staged installations that deliberately combined works from anthropologists and artists to interrogate key conceptual and theoretical intersections. Annual themes included communities of practice (2011), memory and the archive (2014), and the past and future of the photo-essay (2016). WakandaAAA University, a project aiming to build ‘an ethno-future space beyond whiteness that challenges anthropology from the ground up’, appeared for the second time in 2019 as a part of the final Ethnographic Terminalia. Featuring open spaces and scheduled events, including a 'cyborg sandbox', a virtual reality gallery, and a silent rave, the project advocated for, in its own words, ‘Down with heroes and their narratives. Up with genre-busting and serious play’.^[8]

The effect of the move towards multimodal anthropology has not only been the acknowledgement and creation of different forms of anthropological scholarship. More importantly, anthropologists are challenged to imagine a multitude of possible anthropologies, to experiment with the methods and practice of ethnography, and to look beyond other anthropologists for inspiration and direction.^[9]Of course, this is not to say that multimodal anthropology, as a concept, is without its own blinders and assumptions. Just as visual anthropology has often been equated with the production of ethnographic film, multimodal anthropology is frequently associated with the use of digital media as a supposedly more accessible and democratic mode of engagement. But ‘[t]here is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’ (Takaragawa et al. 2019: 517). After all, earlier research showed clearly that ethnographic films often reinforced stereotypes among audiences, instead of challenging or dismantling them (Martinez 1995). Likewise, the uptake of digital or multimedia technologies is not, in itself, transformative. Rather, as Stephanie Takaragawa et al. argue:

as our discipline(s) increasingly advocates for the multimodal in the service of anthropology, there is a need for deep engagement with the multimodal’s position as an expression of technoscientific praxis, which is complicit in the reproduction of power hierarchies in the context of global capitalism, 'capital accumulation' (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 144), and other forms of oppression (2019: 517).

The conversation around multimodal anthropology has continued to press anthropology, writ large, to take account of and interrogate its own structures of status, hierarchy, and privilege in what ‘counts’ as scholarship. More importantly and more widely, multimodal anthropology has the potential to expand the tools and theories at hand for engaging in cross-cultural research, analysis, and representational projects. This discussion is rooted in the very nature of the work of visual anthropology, which from its very beginnings has been committed to the search for more compelling means of communicating the insights of ethnography.

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

In a way, visual anthropology as a separate subfield is arguably no longer needed. The number of ethnographic film festivals globally continues to increase, not decrease. Related subfields of media anthropology, digital anthropology, and multimodal anthropology seem to encompass much of what used to be considered the analytical terrain of the visual. If anything, however, these developments underpin the ongoing influence and importance of visual anthropology. From early efforts in ethnographic filmmaking to the self-critique brought about by Indigenous media to the desire to work differently embodied in the calls for multimodality, visual anthropology has always been concerned with the ethics and epistemology of ethnography and theory building.

The proliferation of image-making and image-sharing technologies in the world today thus circles back to a fundamental question: how might all of these different ways of doing research and analysis make for better anthropology? And who gets to decide what is better, or what needs improving, in the first place? Clearly there are no firm or final answers to these broad questions, which by necessity should return time and time again. What visual anthropology has done and must continue to do is to carve out space for scholars, artists, and activists to learn from the visual experiences of others and to open themselves to visual experiments of their own.

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Rouch, J. 2003. Cine-ethnography (trans. S. Feld). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ruby, J. 2000. Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2001. The professionalization of visual anthropology in the United States: the 1960s and 1970s. Visual Anthropology Review 17(2), 5-12.

Russell, C. 1999. Experimental ethnography: the work of film in the age of video. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rutten, K., A. van Dienderen & R. Soetaert 2013. Revisiting the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. Critical Arts 27(5), 459-73.

Sniadecki, J.P. 2014. Chaiqian/demolition. Visual Anthropology Review 30(1), 23-37.

Sprague, S. 1978a. Yoruba photography: how the Yoruba see themselves. African Arts 12, 52-107.

——— 1978b. How I see the Yoruba see themselves. Studies in Visual Communication 5(1), 9-29.

Spray, S. 2020. Filming the other. In The Routledge international handbook of ethnographic film and video (ed.) P. Vannini, 40-8. London: Routledge.

Suhr, C. 2019. Descending with angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry: a film monograph. Manchester: University Press.

Strassler, K. 2020. Demanding images: democracy, mediation, and the image-event in Indonesia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Strathern, M. 2018. Portraits, characters and persons. Social Anthropology 26(2), 197-210.

Suhr, C. & R. Willerslev 2012. Can film show the invisible? The work of Montage in ethnographic filmmaking. Current Anthropology 53(3), 282-301.

——— (eds) 2013. Transcultural montage. London: Berghahn.

Takaragawa, S., T.L. Smith, K. Hennessy, P. Astacio Alvarez, J. Chio, C. Nye & S. Shankar 2019. Bad habitus: anthropology in the age of the multimodal. American Anthropologist 121(2), 517-24.

Takaragawa, S. & L. Halloran 2017. Exploring the links of contemporary art and anthropology: archiving epistemologies. Critical Arts 31(2), 127-39.

Taylor, L. 1996. Iconophobia. Transition 69, 64-88.

Turner, T. 1992. Defiant images: the Kayapo appropriation of video. Anthropology Today 8(6), 5-16.

Vannini, P. (ed.) 2020. The Routledge international handbook of ethnogrpahic film and video. London: Routledge.

Weinberger, E. 1994. The camera people. In Visualizing theory (ed.) L. Taylor, 3-26. New York: Routledge.

Weiner, J.F. 1997. Televisualist anthropology. Current Anthropology 38(2), 197-234.

Wilson, P. & M. Stewart (eds) 2008. Global Indigenous media: culture, poetics, politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wilson, P., J. Hearne, A. Cordóva & S. Thorner 2017. Indigenous media. Cinema and media studies: Oxford bibliographies online (available online: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0229.xml). Accessed 26 August 2020.

Wright, C. 2013. The echo of things: the lives of photographs in the Solomon Islands. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Worth, S. & J. Adair 1972. Through Navajo eyes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Films and Videos Cited

Archei, O., T. Blumenfield & R. Duoji 2015. Some Na ceremonies. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 31 minutes, digital video.

Arnaquq-Baril, A. 2016. Angry Inuk. National Film Board of Canada, 85 minutes, digital video.

Asch, T. 1968-1976. Yanomami series (22 films). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 428 minutes, film.

Castaing-Taylor, L. & V. Páravel 2013. Leviathan. New York: Cinema Guild, 87 minutes, digital video.

Chio, J. 2013. 农家乐 Peasant family happiness. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 71 minutes, digital video.

Dolak, K. & W. Osman 2007. Postcards from Tora Bora. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources, 82 minutes, digital video.

Fattal, A. 2009. Trees Tropiques. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 30 minutes, digital video.

Fruzzetti, L. & Á. Öster 1995. Seed and earth. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 36 minutes, film.

——— 2016. In my mother’s house: tracing a family history from Italy to Eritrea. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources. 82 minutes, digital video.

Gardner, R. 1986. Forest of bliss. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 90 minutes, film.

——— 1964. Dead birds. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 83 minutes, film.

Gill, H. 2014. Mardistan (Macholand). Washington D.C.: Tilotama Productions, 30 minutes, digital video. (available online: https://vimeo.com/120182667, accessed 31 August 2020).

Grimshaw, A. 2016. George’s place: the cellar. 83 minutes, digital video.

——— 2016. At low tide. London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 63 minutes, digital video.

——— 2013. Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods (including Spring in Dickinson’s Reach [83 mins), A summer task [47 mins], Autumn’s work [47 mins]; Winter days [59 mins]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media and London: Royal Anthropological Institute, digital video.

Gürsel, Z.D. 2009. Coffee futures. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 22 minutes, digital video.

MacDougall, D. & J. MacDougall. Turkana conversations trilogy (including Lorang’s way [1980, 70 minutes], The wedding camels [1980, 108 minutes], and A wife among wives [1982, 72 minutes]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media, film.

Marshall, J. (dir.) 1957. The hunters. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 72 minutes, film.

——— 2002. A Kalahari family (!Kung series). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 360 minutes, film and video.

Mead, M. (dir.) 1952. Trance and dance in Bali. Library of Congress, 22 minutes, film (available on-line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8YC0dnj4Jw). Accessed 31 August 2020.

Rouch, J. 1958. Moi, un Noir. New York: Icarus Films, 70 minutes, film.

——— 1967. Jaguar. New York: Icarus Films, 88 minutes, film.

Sniadecki, J.P. 2008. Demolition/Chaiqian. New York: Cinema Guild, 62 minutes, digital video.

Spray, S. & P. Velez 2014. Manakamana. New York: Cinema Guild, 118 minutes, film.

Thomas, D., J. Jackson Jr. & J.G. Wedderburn 2011. Bad friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. New York: Third World Newsreel, 63 minutes, video.

Note on contributor

Jenny Chio is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. Her ethnographic film, 农家乐Peasant family happiness (2013), examines ethnic tourism in rural China. She has served as co-editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review and co-director of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.

Jenny Chio, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 3501 Trousdale Pkwy, Taper Hall 356, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-0357. jchio@usc.edu

Image credit

Nuosu college students pose in vintage clothing, creating a retro aesthetic. Chengdu, China. See also Banfill 2020. Photo by Kaitlin Banfill, 2018. Used with permission.

[1] Visual anthropology encompasses more than just the visual, as this entry will elaborate, and when referring to films and video it is more precise to use the term ‘audiovisual’. For consistency, in this entry I mostly use the more widely employed moniker of 'visual anthropology'.

[2] ‘Ethnographic film’ as a genre has been notoriously difficult to define because it has been used to describe both films by anthropologists and ethnographers as well as films about topics and concepts central to anthropology; see Chio 2020, Durrington 2013, Friedman 2017, Vannini 2020, Crawford & Turton 1993, Barbash & Taylor 1996.

[3] Anthropological research and writing has also depended upon other senses, especially listening/hearing. However, visual representations, in the form of photographs or museum exhibitions/object displays, have been more widely discussed and theorised.

[4] Publishing initiatives, such as The Page in Visual Anthropology Review and Writing with Light in Cultural Anthropology, aimed to foster contemporary critical conversations around the photo-essay as a mode of anthropological inquiry.

[5] The phrase ‘observational cinema’ is attributed to the filmmaker Colin Young, who established the Ethnographic Film Unit at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1960s and trained a generation of anthropological filmmakers, including David and Judith MacDougall whose films and publications are widely considered exemplars of this mode of filmmaking (see Henley 2018).

[6] Many other well-known programs train students in ethnographic filmmaking, including the long-running Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, the Culture + Media program at New York University, and the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

[7] David MacDougall offered his reflections on a participatory media project he was a part of in Aboriginal Australia, stating ‘... in a sense it was a kind of idealisation, perhaps, of a notion of solidarity between Aboriginal people and sympathetic Whites. My view of it now is that it was a kind of film-making that rather confused the issues. In those films one never really knows quite who’s speaking for whom, and whose interests are being expressed. It is not clear what in the film is coming from us and what is coming from them ... it’s a slightly uncomfortable marriage of interests that masks a lot of issues’ (quoted in Grimshaw & Papastergiadis 1995: 44-5).

[8] WakandaAAA University (available online: https://wakandaaaa.home.blog/, accessed 29 August 2020).

[9] See, for example, the research, teaching, and events of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professionals

Felix Stein — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:51:42 +0000

Elizabeth Hull

SOAS University of London

Initially published 21 Apr 2020

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

Abstract:

Professions are institutionalised bodies of specialised knowledge and practice around which divisions of labour within contemporary societies are organised. As well as performing a collective function, membership within a profession offers individuals upward social mobility and meritocratic recognition. Professional expertise is so ubiquitous in societies around the world that we tend not to ask how and why specialised occupational groups have emerged, how they produce, control, and apply their knowledge, and how the meanings of professionalism differ from one context to the next. Anthropologists’ early focus on colonial settings attuned them to view professionals as instruments of political power and control, particularly in biomedical contexts. Subsequent studies have produced a diverse array of interpretations, seeing professionalism as a performative or aesthetic practice that sits apart from the messy realities of work, as a marker of prestige and class mobility, and as a site of ethical engagement and debate. Recent approaches tend to focus on the ways in which professional identity is made through everyday practice and the struggles entailed in maintaining it, rather than viewing it as a label conferred automatically on the basis of training. Finally, the study of professionals has prompted renewed attention to anthropologists’ own claims to professionalism, and the social networks, institutions, and epistemic assumptions needed to sustain it.

Introduction

In a conversation between Scottish physician David Livingstone and a Tswana ritual expert in 1857, the mission doctor attempted to disprove the rainmaker’s arguments about his influence on rain. Livingstone drew on European models of empirical reason, referring to himself as the ‘medical doctor’ and to the rainmaker as ‘rain doctor’. He implied ironically that their contest of ideas was being fought on equal ontological terms (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991: 211). Thereby, Livingstone also suggested something about the way in which an incipient ideology of professionalism served as a marker of expert knowledge and authority in this colonial setting of southern Africa.

This interaction took place during a period in which the professionalisation of spheres of expertise such as medicine and law was occurring alongside the acceleration of industrial capitalism and technological development in the nineteenth century. It was aided by various institutional forms such as associations, systems of accreditation, and ethics codes, which demarcated the formal parameters of professional knowledge and served as barriers to entry. As such, professionalisation was an exclusionary process of formalising and limiting claims to expert knowledge. It standardised expertise in ways that made it quickly transportable around the world. For instance, from the late-nineteenth century, the professionalisation of medicine rendered population health amenable to state intervention. Professionalism emerged as a new form of governance, intertwined with state projects at home and in the colonies.

The study of professionalism, tied to the emergence of modern state bureaucracies, traditionally fell under the remit of sociology rather than anthropology. Key figures studying it include the sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett Hughes, influenced by the foundational works of social theorists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Both Weber and Durkheim witnessed the emergence of occupational groups in Europe’s transforming societies.^[1] Durkheim had asserted early on that professionals were custodians of morality and collective interest. Professional ethics provided solidarity in an industrial society that risked moral dissolution under the sway of free market philosophy (1992). Weber focused less on professionals and more on bureaucracies, maintaining that power in society becomes legitimised and regulated by rational and depersonalised bureaucratic systems that impose rules on human behaviour.

Writing in the 1930s during a period in which society risked collapsing into fascism, Talcott Parsons, was fascinated with the question of how society’s fragile stability was maintained. He held that professions did maintain stability but differed from bureaucracies because they emphasised collegial and individualist values rather than hierarchies. Yet both bureaucracies and professions shared important commonalities: they demarcated specific, restricted functions in the workplace and they formalised standards of practice, making people’s roles distinct from their personalities and individual circumstances. For Parsons, professionals—like bureaucrats—were essential components of ‘modern’ industrial society, harbingers of rational principles holding society together through the creation of shared values and goals. Concepts of ‘mandate’ and ‘license’ were later developed and deemed necessary for professions to exist, as they formalised relationships of trust within society (Hughes 2009). As well as entrusting some of its necessary functions to these contained spheres of expertise, society could offload onto the professions responsibility for its more disturbing elements. For instance, disease would be dealt with by medical professionals and crime by lawyers (Dingwall 2008: 4–5).

By the 1970s, the idea that professionals served as a kind of ‘glue’ for social cohesion gave way increasingly to a view of professionalism as a mechanism of control and elitism. This position was exemplified in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who viewed professionalism as a source of power, or what he called ‘social capital’, that could be used to gain political and social status (Bourdieu 1990).

Given anthropology’s original focus on so-called ‘traditional’ societies, Parsons’ contemporaries in anthropology limited their interest in expertise to a focus on ‘ritual experts’, such as the rainmaker in Livingstone’s account. But as anthropologists turned their attention to colonial actors and to the bureaucratic workings of the state, they began to focus on professional expertise itself. Today there exists no distinct subsection of anthropology devoted to the study of professionals. Instead, work on professionalism is disparately nestled in a number of different areas, including the anthropology of expertise, science, and technology studies and the study of states, bureaucracies, and corporate settings. This entry therefore draws together some key strands from different sub-fields of the discipline. They include considering professionals as agents of social control, status, and class mobility, as well as a more recent focus on professionalism as an ethical and aspirational project.

Professionals as agents of social control

Anthropology’s early encounter with professionals, aside from within the academe itself, began in colonial settings. The study of colonialism highlighted early on that professionals are not just the benign experts they often see themselves as, but that they are also social actors embedded within colonial and other power relations. The aforementioned conversation between Livingstone and the rainmaker is a good example of this. In addition to the more overt forms of conversion, it was through assertions of professionalised expertise that the Tswana were drawn subtly and inexorably into the hegemonic structures of colonising culture (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991). Professional knowledge, religious authority, and colonial power converged to produce new regimes of domination. Medical missionaries and military doctors throughout the European colonies set out not only to ameliorate ill-health—often brought about or exacerbated by brutal labour regimes—but to ‘civilise’ colonised populations.

While medicine was a key locus of professional expertise in colonial settings, it was not the only one. In Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in the early twentieth century, colonial administrators were concerned about feeding a growing population; in particular, how to sustain rural populations while extracting the labour of male migrants who travelled for work to the mines. Worried about constraints on the self-sufficiency of ethnic groups such as the Bemba, they drew on the expertise of scientists who determined that the widely practiced agricultural method—a semi-nomadic, slash and burn system known as citimeme—was wasteful (Richards 1995 [1939]). A study by an anthropologist and a historian fifty years later revealed that a series of highly adaptive and varied aspects of citimene had been overlooked by colonial officials, tasked with the job of defining and controlling such practices (Moore & Vaughan 1994). Professional expertise in this instance reproduced narratives compatible with political agendas. The authors revealed, moreover, that the colonial preoccupation with citimene was not only to do with food supply but with how to control populations and to create permanent residences in order to implement taxation. However, the study is careful not to arrive at a singular conclusion, showing that while professional knowledge could not be taken at face value, neither could it be dismissed as mere colonial representation.

The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault equipped anthropologists with a language to understand professionals as instruments of political power. Foucault was particularly influential in studies of medical settings. In The birth of the clinic, published in 1963, he argued that biomedical knowledge, formalised through systems of professionalism, rendered patients’ bodies passive objects of control and intervention (Foucault 2002 [1963]). His approach made it possible to describe how a ‘medical gaze’ became embroiled in systems of racialised exploitation. One ethnographic history of a mission hospital in the Belgian Congo shows that medical missionaries became ‘colonial agents of a form of indirect rule’ (Hunt 1999: 165). Nancy Rose Hunt describes the medicalisation of childbirth, in a context where concerns of colonial administrators about a falling birth rate motivated medical attention to safe childbearing. Locally trained midwives became valued professionals and important culture brokers, ‘inviting, persuading and compelling’ women to attend a clinic, despite growing fears prompted by caesarean deaths (Hunt 1999: 230-1). Notwithstanding their suspicions, local women also brought themselves to hospital during difficult births and appropriated colonial items such as soap and birth certificates to suit their needs. Colonial powers often viewed this process as a ‘civilising’ practice, using doctors in rural hospitals to implement hygiene and other state directives in what the author describes as a project of ‘medical, bodily and demographic control’ (Hunt 1999: 6). Yet through detailed descriptions of professionals such as the midwife Malia Winnie, Hunt resists straightforward arguments about colonial intrusion and local reaction. The experts in this setting – teachers, nursing men and midwives – were ‘colonial middle figures’, engaged in a process not just of control, but of cultural mediation and negotiation, such as between local and medical meanings of bodily incision. Professional practice was one of translation, ‘a necessary condition of colonial life’ (Hunt 1999: 13).

In contemporary hospital settings, ethnographic studies show how ‘professional logics’ exert control over patients. In the United Kingdom, for instance, enactments of professional identity can construct asymmetrical power relations in which patients become subordinate. ‘Professional logics’ place demands on patients, who must display ‘due deference’ to medical staff and their expertise as a prerequisite for accessing care (White et al. 2012: 78). Take the example of a distressed elderly woman who arrives in a UK Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department with a bleeding nose caused by a fall. An on-looking doctor remarks that ‘many people here have nothing wrong with them’ (White et al. 2012: 72). Since the doctor perceives the woman’s condition as too minor to require his clinical expertise, the patient is deemed undeserving of care and rendered a ‘problem’. Professional knowledge demarcates patients as either legitimate or unworthy, impeding ‘the recognition of patients as persons’ (White et al. 2012: 72).

Ethnographic attention to professional practice suggests the ways in which professional hierarchies may reproduce the kinds of ‘indifference’ (Herzfeld 1993) that have long been associated with bureaucracies. Professions are embedded within, and may help to reproduce, power relations prevalent in society.

Performance and aesthetics of professionalism

A key feature that unites studies of professionals is the attention to the work process itself. It reveals that activities involved in performing and hence maintaining one’s professional status may be quite distinct from other aspects of professional work.

In a volume on international development professionals, David Mosse describes their tendency to move towards agreement and coherence, and focuses on the political effects of such convergences. Professionals must navigate the messiness, complexities, and disagreements entailed in their everyday practice while maintaining the appearance of coherence upon which their professional identities rely. In his research about an international development intervention in India, Mosse encountered ‘a professional habitus that automatically transferred the actuality of events into the preconceived categories of legitimate meaning and ideal process’ (Mosse 2011a: 22). By reproducing models and templates, engaging in ‘group think’ (Woods 2007), or forming closed networks built around certain norms of social interaction (Eyben 2011), they can create an appearance of efficiency and disguise the complex problems encountered in daily work.

Documents are a key technology through which the official narratives of professionals are produced (Riles 2006). However, the ways that documents are used vary depending on professional cultures. In certain contexts, their creation may have as much to do with building consensus and reproducing convergence, as with the stated purpose or content of documents (Green 2011; Hull 2012). Yet, the uses of paperwork change in contexts where professionals operate with relative impunity, as work on the Nigerian gendarmerie suggests (Göpfert 2013). Gendarmes are military police operating in rural areas, responsible primarily for traffic control, public order, and criminal investigations. They closely associate their professional status with their training in writing, a skill which they perceive distinguishes them from the police and military. In criminal investigations, gendarmes produce a procès-verbal, a document containing information about events, observations, and evidence pertaining to a crime, to be transferred to a public prosecutor. In the absence of scrutiny by seniors regarding the accuracy of the reports, gendarmes produce documents that are ‘aesthetically satisfying’ and through which they express their individual identities and statuses. While adhering to the required template, they alter font, type size, spacing, and use of symbols in the place of certain letters to personalise the appearance of the document. Verbose or technical language signifies professional status. It entails translating a witness’s words in a way that prioritises the ‘dramaturgy’ of the document over the accuracy of its claims (Göpfert 2013: 330). Crucially, gendarmes operate in an environment in which professional worth is achieved through the appearance of documents, while processes ensuring the reliability of content are absent. To be a professional in this context is to perform one’s individualism and intellect through presentation and writing style.

The performance of professional status is similarly important among international development professionals, albeit taking a different form (Eyben 2011). Travelling abroad for work, development professionals are physically and socially distant from the communities they are sent to assist (Eyben 2011: 145). Instead, they encounter host countries through enclosed, elite spaces of expatriate sociality, forming friendships with one another at picnics, sporting events, and parties. It is in these spaces that meanings of professionalism are made, because socialising brings a donor community into being, a necessary step towards policy coherence. However, because these ways of socialising do not include ‘getting to know the country and its people’, these activities reproduce the gap between policy agendas and grounded realities, a well-known problem in development practice (Eyben 2011: 141). In these examples, the performance of professionalism—whether in documents or in social gatherings—is more important than the specificities of official roles that people might play.

A discourse of professionalism also provides a language for disciplining people's physical appearance at work, especially of women. In a data-entry firm in Barbados, women are expected to perform ‘professionalism’, defined by their seniors in terms of their appearance and comportment (Freeman 1993). Yet women were explicit in describing their jobs as a far cry from their understanding of ‘professional’, remarking that jobs in agricultural and domestic labour were better paid than theirs. Contradictions emerged since some women said they preferred these jobs because they liked to work in a ‘professional enterprise’. They thereby acknowledged the higher status it conferred to them, all the while recognising its façade-like quality. Here, professional identity turns out to be ambivalent, as both a source of social value and an empty signifier.

Despite their claims to meritocratic values, professions may be as likely as other kinds of labour practices to mobilise differences such as gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or citizenship status. This applies even to sectors we tend to think of as the most formally rational and calculative, such as finance. In London’s banking sector, a cohort of culturally working class ‘barrow boys’—defined as ‘streetwise dealers from East and South London’—dominated the trading floor, where conspicuous consumption and homophobic jokes signified status and belonging at work (Zaloom 2006: 77). This changed dramatically when managers diversified their staff and began to recruit graduates—especially women and ethnic minorities—whose diverse, individual approaches, it was felt, could be harnessed for greater economic success. Managers viewed this as a process of ‘professionalisation’, suggesting that meanings of professionalism are derived at least partly from performances of class and social status.

The idea of professionalism as a performance is captured by economic anthropologist David Graeber’s provocative claim that large numbers of professional, middle-management and administrative roles are ‘bullshit jobs’; that is, jobs lacking any meaningful contribution to society and existing ‘just for the sake of keeping us all working’ (Graeber 2018). These jobs include those located in industries such as financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, public sector administration, human resources, and public relations—as well as the various roles that exist to support these industries. There is a performative quality to the jobs since, Graeber suggests, those who occupy them would readily admit that their roles lack meaningful social purpose. However, this point of view may overlook the ways that such roles, even if failing to contribute to loftier projects of the public good, may meaningfully signify personal, aspirational goals, especially in places where upward mobility is by no means assured. This brings us to the next theme of professionalism: as a route to upward mobility.

Status, aspiration and class mobility

As well as focusing on cultures of work itself, anthropologists studying professionals have also shed light on class mobility and aspiration. They followed professionals not only in their official roles at work but also in their lives beyond the workplace, as family and community members and as citizens. They have sought to understand the role of professional identity within wider life projects shaped by lifestyle aspirations and class trajectories. Witnessing the burgeoning bureaucracies and professional networks emerging in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, Weber recognised the importance of education and occupation as features of one’s ‘life chances’. New cultures of professionalism and white-collar employment were coming into being in ways that oriented scholars towards a focus on a growing yet differentiated middle class.

In India, professional employment in the government sector was formerly viewed as the hallmark of what it meant to be middle-class. Yet new cultures of consumerism have made middle-class lifestyles more widely accessible (Donner & De Neve 2011). Anthropologists turned their attention from workplace identity to cultures of consumption in trying to understand this so-called ‘new’ middle class. This shift partly reflected that labour casualisation and the decline of secure employment made it harder and harder for people to build their identities around their workplace. Instead, consumerist ideologies emerged that offered alternative forms of inclusion as well as opening up new lines of exclusion (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). These insecurities also meant that middle-class lifestyles were increasingly precarious and were often funded by risky borrowing (James 2015). From these studies, it emerges that a focus on consumption practices is insufficient for understanding middle-class experiences. Instead, it may be necessary to look at the intersections between values created at work and the ways that status and aspiration are formed beyond it.

While consumption is a marker of class status, forms of belonging created by professional identities equally persist. In India, a rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry has created demand for highly skilled jobs. This is accompanied by a growing disdain among young, educated people towards public-sector employment, which they associate with low salaries and the draconian hierarchies of an earlier era (Fuller & Narasimhan 2007: 142). Reflecting on what this shift means for people’s identification with ideas of Indian nationhood, C.J. Fuller & Haripriya Narasimhan draw on research with IT professionals in Chennai to repudiate assumptions that globalisation leads people to abandon a commitment to the Indian nation. While many of these young professionals seek to gain ‘exposure’ by working overseas, they aspire to settle and build their lives back in India, assured of a highly paid job in the sector. This optimism orientates people towards new ideas of nationhood that depart from earlier ideas associated with Nehruvian nationalism (cf. Saxenian 2016).

Elsewhere in India, professional work is less secure. In a remote, rural region of Uttarakhand, government programmes are increasingly delivered through the quasi-independent institutions of government-funded NGOs (Bear & Mathur 2015). These organisations are populated by ‘young professionals’, a term borrowed from international development jargon. They are university-trained engineers and computer programmers holding short-term contracts. While their salaries were on a par with those who held permanent state employment, their temporary status and lack of housing or health insurance made their positions more insecure than their government-employed counterparts. Nonetheless, many were relieved to have found employment at all, and hoped that it would pave the way to a job in the city, a gateway to the middle-class milieu they wished to participate in. They did not hold ‘government jobs’ and actively dissociated themselves from what they saw as an anachronistic workplace order of draconian hierarchies and deferent submission embraced by their permanently-employed colleagues. This represented a distancing from the state because of their insecure contractual positions and because of the appeal of the growing private-sector industries of the kind described by Fuller and Narasimhan. In Ghana, too, professional qualifications do not necessarily lead to economic fulfilment or middle-class status. Yet professionals in Accra’s media and knowledge economy nonetheless view themselves as bearers of ‘respectable nationhood’ (Kauppinen 2017: 270).

The meanings of professionalism are influenced by wider social and political shifts. In China, new values of professional autonomy came about as market-based practices of labour allocation began to emerge in the 1990s (Hoffman 2010). Formerly, the government allocated jobs to graduates according to a system known as ‘iron rice bowl’, leaving them with no choice about which job they would do or where they would live. In a new market-based system, emphasis is placed on individual choice, which is nurtured through events such as graduate job fairs. Yet the government continues to influence this process, through managing and funding some of the recruitment events and through an on-going ‘moral education’ of university students and graduates. New market practices encouraging choice and personal responsibility combine with earlier socialist ideas about service to the nation to produce a ‘patriotic professionalism’ among these young adults (Hoffman 2010). Despite the choices that people now have, the previous security provided by the state as part of the ‘iron rice bowl’ has given way to a more precarious set of circumstances with less secure pensions and poor access to health care (Hoffman 2010; Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Since the collapse of Chinese socialism amounted to a process of de-institutionalisation, understanding its aftermath requires studying the ways that institutions are being constructed (Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Hence, professional practice becomes an important site for understanding contemporary China.

Anthropologists have reflected on a number of other ways that people articulate ideas of belonging through their professional identities. For young urbanites in Nairobi, Rachel Spronk shows, professionalism offers a source of identity that allows them to bypass ethnic differences which they have come to view as divisive (Spronk 2012). Similar observations are made about civil servants in Ghana (Lentz 2014) and nurses in South Africa (Hull 2017).

Migration offers many professionals a route to new forms of prestige. But as professional expectations are formed in one context, working overseas can produce a jarring reassessment of one’s own credentials. Czech nurses felt their self-worth as professionals undermined when they discovered themselves ill-equipped to perform the strict workplace protocols they encountered in hospitals in the UK and Saudi Arabia (Bludau 2014). When they returned to the Czech Republic, some were frustrated by the absence of such protocols and were motivated to initiate change as a way to sustain the professional identity they had come to associate with overseas practices. Consequently, we can understand professionalism to be ‘rooted in one’s personal history and built on through professional and personal experiences’ (Bludau 2014: 877, italics in original). Migration offers a particularly useful lens for exploring this issue.

Professional status can also offer an alternative workplace ethic to ‘clientelism’. Among civil servants in Ghana, for example, professionalism is associated with the ‘state’ and with a universalist ethos of service to the nation. In contrast, patronage is associated with ‘government’, and was practiced ‘unofficially’ and less readily spoken about (Lentz 2014). Here, professionalism offers a language of political neutrality that is part of workplace ethos. Thus, we may need to investigate further how patrimonial practices frequently associated with post-colonial government dovetail with workplace configurations. Notions of professionalism promise to be important pieces of this puzzle.

Professional ethics and care

Viewing professionalism as a site of governmentality, a performance, or a route to prestige risks overlooking ethical projects at work. Recent anthropological debates have highlighted that bureaucracies do not only reproduce indifference, governmentality, or structural violence but are also sites in which ideas about the ‘public good’ come to be debated, contested, and developed (Bear & Mathur 2015). Bureaucracies are ‘an expression of a social contract between citizens and officials that aim to generate a utopian order’ (Bear & Mathur 2015: 18). A focus on professional values and practices offers a mode for investigating the ways that such ethical practices come into being.

As my own study of nurses in a rural government hospital in South Africa shows, a professional ethic can be located in a long history of mission medicine as well as in more recent forms of public sector management and post-apartheid ideas of citizenship (Hull 2017). Work and citizenship are in South Africa indelibly linked in the post-liberation period. If apartheid was to be understood partly as a system of racialised exclusion from the workplace, especially from professional work, then to be fully a citizen was to become synonymous with salaried employment as an entitlement and a signifier of national identity. Yet far from being an automatic entitlement, the identity of ‘professional’ can be precarious, especially for an occupation that has struggled historically to legitimise its status vis-à-vis the male-dominated world of medicine. Nurses struggle with the dilemma of how to care in a situation where ideas of public accountability are reduced to narrow techniques such as audit. In this setting, nurses build their identities as professionals in relation to memories of mission medicine, contemporary religious practice, and ideas of ‘calling’, as they negotiate and reimagine their role as carers. Professional identities have as much to do with the ‘relational, affective, and ritualistic’ dimensions of work, and the meanings of care that they produce, as with the disciplining practices more frequently associated with management professionals (Brown 2016: 592). Approaching public administration through the lens of ideologies and ethics of professionalism focuses attention on the ethics of care that are entailed.

In many of these studies, well-documented themes in the sociological literature reappear, such as the tension between collective values and individual reputation. For foreign news correspondents, professional legitimacy is less about official accreditation and more to do with in-house socialisation in which one absorbs organisational culture and builds one’s individual reputation through ‘face-to-face acquaintance’ (Hannerz 2004: 81). In a social-media dominated world increasingly oriented towards a work ethos of ‘self-as-business’, the imperative to engage in personal branding characterises many white collar fields (Gershon 2017). Such tensions have long featured as part of the search for professional identity, rather than being singularly located in the turn to neo-liberalism. Nonetheless their intensification during a period of privatisation and outsourcing raises interesting questions about the shifting parameters of professional legitimacy, autonomy, and ethics. So too do tendencies towards de-professionalisation, as more sophisticated technologies reduce the human skills required in certain fields. Challenges to professionalism have also been launched by professionals themselves: for instance, as development workers attempt to locate expertise in the realm of ‘local knowledge’; or new forms of participative, citizen engagement work to subvert the hierarchies that produce taken-for-granted expertise (Mosse 2019).

The study of professionals may lead anthropologists to turn a critical eye on themselves. It can be difficult if not impossible to carry out ethnographic research among professionals, since anthropologists often discover that their interlocutors refuse to be objectified according to the knowledge regimes of a different field of expertise (Boyer 2008: 39-40). Anthropologists might be most effective through a collaborative approach with their interlocutors and by becoming attuned to the scepticism and reflexivity that professionals harbour about their own practice. Attempts to achieve these aims in practice often encounter obstacles. Reflecting on his experiences of researching an international development intervention in India, David Mosse described the objections that professionals raised to his claims about the successes and failures of the project. They made official complaints, fearing their professional reputations were being compromised by his research findings (Mosse 2011b: 21). For Mosse, this tension had to do with the need for professionals to deny or suppress complexity as a core feature of sustaining professional identity and legitimacy. In their complaints, the concept of professionalism was drawn upon explicitly as a basis for denying that such informal practices existed. Mosse argues that professionals were ‘professionally committed to their denial’ (2011b: 21). This problem returns us to a central epistemological challenge for the anthropological study of professionalism, as outlined by Dominic Boyer: ‘How can I [the anthropologist] document another expert culture without precisely re-framing their expert knowledge in the analytical categories of my own, thus absorbing them into my jurisdiction?’ (Boyer 2008: 41). In order to reach a collaborative approach, anthropologists may have to recognise the contingencies of their ways of knowing and accept a kind of epistemic parity with the theoretical and technical frameworks of other professional fields.

Conclusion

A profession is generally understood as a standardised body of knowledge and practice situated within organisational or institutional contexts. Its authority is widely recognised, popularly mandated, and relies on state-sanctioned systems of training and accreditation. Yet as we scratch below the surface of formal definitions, it is evident that rather than denoting a fixed meaning, the category of ‘professional’ is produced and reproduced through messy organisational practices and socially embedded systems of knowledge production and power dynamics. Rather than being a label conferred automatically on the basis of formal accreditation, the term ‘professional’ is always in the making. Moreover, the work entailed in producing an appearance of coherent, successful professionalism can often sit apart from the ‘real’ work of professionals from day to day. Professionalism may best be understood, therefore, as ‘process rather than product’ (Mosse 2011a: 3). Running through the study of professionals is a core tension: are professionals seeking private advancement, perhaps even at the expense of those who rely on them, or are they committed to collective, ethical endeavours? The question is partly the legacy of early sociological understandings of society as a moral project existing in tension with private pursuits. It becomes more nuanced as we turn attention to the lived experiences of professionals, who strive to build satisfying working lives while navigating expectations of all sorts in their families, communities, and workplaces.

References

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Boyer, D. 2008. Thinking through the anthropology of experts. Anthropology in Action 15, 38-46.

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Dingwall, R. 2008. Essays on professions. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Hull, E. 2012. Paperwork and the contradictions of accountability in a South African hospital. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, 613-32.

––––––– 2017. Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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James, D. 2015. Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kauppinen, A.-R. 2017. Accra’s professionals: an ethnography of work and value in a West African business hub. PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom (available on-line: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3706/). Accessed 19 December 2018.

Lentz, C. 2014. ‘I take an oath to the state, not the government’: career trajectories and professional ethics of Ghanaian public servants. In States at work: dynamics of African bureaucracies (eds) T. Bierschenk & J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, 175-204. Leiden: Brill.

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Mosse, D. 2011a. Introduction: the anthropology of expertise and professionals in international development. In Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development (ed.) D. Mosse, 1-31. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2011b. Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2019. Can the experience of participatory development help think critically about ‘patient and public involvement’ in UK healthcare? Sociological Research Online 24, 444-61.

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Note on contributor

Elizabeth Hull is a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS University of London. She is author of Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital (Bloomsbury 2017).

Dr Elizabeth Hull, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, WC1H 0XG, London, United Kingdom. e.hull@soas.ac.uk

[1] A detailed discussion of the sociology of professionalism is provided by Robert Dingwall (2008).

Water

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 14:42:27 +0000

Veronica Strang

Durham University

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

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

Abstract:

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising water’s essentiality to life, health and well-being at every scale. This often translates into the use of ‘living water‘ in religious rituals, such as baptism or mortuary ceremonies, in which water expresses important ideas about social identity and spiritual movement between material and non-material domains.

The material control of water has long been recognised as vital to gaining and maintaining political power. In recent decades anthropology has focused increasingly on debates about water ownership and rights of access to water, and considered how the control of water reflects social, economic and political relations. There is growing interest in water infrastructures, and how they have often enabled unsustainable practices in water use and management. Today, as the world faces an anthropogenically-created ecological crisis, water issues are central to concerns about climate change, global warming, and increasing volatility and uncertainty in water flows. This has encouraged a new area of anthropological focus on non-human as well as human rights in relation to water. Thus the anthropology of water extends from its multiple uses in everyday life to the major issues that all societies urgently need to address.

Introduction

As the element essential to life and to all processes of production and reproduction, water permeates every domain of human existence. It has always had a background presence in anthropology’s ethnographic literature, where it appears in religious rituals; shapes human spatial organization around water sources; and structures people’s lifeways and modes of production, as well as their ecological knowledge and environmental engagement. However, water itself has not been the focus of anthropological studies until relatively recently. It came to the fore with growing interest in the relationship between the control of water and political power and, more strongly, when environmental anthropology emerged as a lively subfield in response to increasing concerns about sustainability. As societies have begun to realise that the world is facing a human-made ecological crisis, water has become the focus of intense research in multiple disciplinary areas. Anthropology brings to this a vitally important capacity to illuminate its diverse social and cultural dimensions (Hastrup 2011, Hastrup & Hastrup 2015, de Wolff et al. 2019, Wagner 2013).

Human engagements with water take place on every scale, beginning with the most basic physical needs for clean water to maintain health and to ensure bodily and domestic hygiene. Recognition that water is literally essential to all biological organisms means that it has cross-cultural meaning as the ‘substance of life’. This understanding supports important concepts of water as a common good, to which everyone must have rights of access and use, and this fundamental principle permeates many discussions about water ownership and governance. Yet many people lack access to clean water and sanitation for a variety of reasons, including the overuse of limited local resources; disruption of rural lifeways; economic imperatives to migrate to marginal and poorly served urban areas; and insufficient fiscal or technical capacities to create infrastructures for water supply. Such a lack of access to clean water is a key indicator of governmental capacities to provide for people’s most basic needs, and of the deep inequalities existing both within and between societies.

Religion, health and wealth

Anxieties about meeting basic human rights of access to sufficient clean water tend to obscure other aspects of people’s immediate engagement with it, but these are also powerful influences on how people respond to a range of water issues. Water’s essentiality to life means that it has a central place in multiple religious belief systems. In many place-based societies, where what are often described as ‘nature religions’ pertain, its elemental powers are frequently manifested in deities responsible for rain, fertility, and the creation of life. For example, in Africa, Mami Wata, a water goddess valorised in many parts of the continent’s west coast, provides all of these things (Drewal 2008). In Aboriginal Australia, water is the source of cosmogenesis in the creative era known as Dreamtime, in which the world was formed, while the Rainbow Serpent, which is a manifestation of the powers of water, continues to generate life from within the land (Merlan 1998, Strang 2009). In the monotheisms of larger societies, water features as a vital manifestation of a humanised deity’s divine beneficence or, in the form of floods or drought, as an expression of god’s wrath. Thus for many people, access to sufficient and timely water carries an important moral and religious dimension.

Whatever the form of the providing deities, many religious schema also conflate ideas about water and the human spirit, generating visions of ‘living water’, vital to physical and spiritual well-being (Krause & Strang 2013). Such beliefs are central to a host of rituals in which water cleanses, heals, and blesses, and metaphorically carries the spirit between material and non-material domains. The notion of living water is also a response to people’s phenomenological engagement with it as an animated and animating element that is always in motion: shimmering, flowing, appearing, and disappearing. Physical and immediate interactions with water – bathing, drinking, swimming, and observing – provide a range of compelling sensory experiences, which lend emotive weight to people’s thinking about water and what it means (Krause 2016, Strang 2005). Thus, an understanding that water flows through, enlivens, and connects people and places supports important ideas about common substance and identity. These are neatly expressed, for example, in the use of water for rituals of baptism that welcome individuals into particular groups or congregations, or which conjoin them in marriage (Mallery 2011). The inevitable dark side of this understanding is that a vision of identity as literally ‘substantial’ also allows for many anxieties about social and/or physical pollution, and invasions of ‘otherness’ that might compromise individual or collective health and well-being (Strang 2004).

Concepts of holiness, health, and wealth are both etymologically and conceptually related. They express capacities for maintaining (spiritual, bodily, or fiscal) wholeness and flourishing. As well as being seen as fundamental to physical health, the relationship between health and water has seen a transition from assumptions about water’s intrinsic healing qualities (as assumed, for example, in the thousands of holy and healing wells in many parts of the world) to more material notions about the healing properties of water’s mineral content, which led to a major fashion in Europe for spas and baths (Anderson & Tabb 2002). Water’s centrality to processes of production leads to cross-cultural acknowledgement of its essential role in enabling human agency and generating wealth. What constitutes wealth is culturally diverse, but in many societies the relationship between water and wealth is often demonstrated in the ways that the ownership of water, displayed in landscaped gardens, fountains, and pools, provides a key signifier of wealth and social status.

Power and control

As the above implies, the control of water is intrinsically related to economic and political power, and historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that how water is controlled and distributed provides a precise mirror of social, political, and environmental relations. A classic study of Balinese water temples, for instance, describes the carefully balanced social and hydrological relations mediated by local priests acting as both religious leaders and water managers (Lansing 1991). On a larger scale, it has famously been argued that major infrastructures such as irrigation schemes, requiring the centralisation and coordination of labour, were foundational to the creation of nation states (Hocart 1970). The importance of water in political organization is particularly clear in the historical emergence of ‘hydraulic societies’ dependent upon major irrigation schemes, such as those in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley (Butzer 1976, Giosan et al. 2012, Tvedt & Jakobsson 2006). Karl Wittfogel’s historical analysis of water in China suggested that state capacities to control a vast network of canals was vital for the establishment of powerful imperial dynasties (1957). However, subsequent writers have rejected the argument that the control of water necessarily leads to ‘despotic regimes’, observing that relationships between water and power can take many different forms (Krause & Ley forthcoming).

However, Wittfogel’s more fundamental point, that power and the control of water are inextricably related, remains influential, and contemporary ethnographers have continued to explore how the control of water mediates relations between states and citizens, with access to water often demonstrating persistent social inequalities. For example, the manipulation of weirs, sluices, and water flows in a South Indian irrigation scheme has been shown to reinforce the advantages of village elites (Mosse 2003). In multiple development contexts, gender inequality influences women’s access to and control over water (Coles & Wallace 2005, see also Lahiri-Dutt 2006). The provision of water in Mumbai turns out to be linked to social identity and recognition of ‘hydraulic citizenship’, and leads to the exclusion of marginal groups lacking such recognition (Anand 2017). Shifts in ideology are similarly reflected in water. A strong focus on instrumentalism – a determination to act directively on the material environment – in industrialised societies has been exported, via literal and economic colonialism, to many parts of the world under the guise of development (Lewis & Mosse 2006).

Focusing on the history of the American West, the commodification of water into an asset may mean that ‘capitalism has created over the last 100 years a new distinctive type of hydraulic society, one that demonstrates once more how the domination of nature can lead to the domination of some people over others’ (Worster 2006: 50, see also Escobar 2005, Josephson 2002, Reisner 2001).

Water has its own material powers, of course, in the force provided by water flows. Many societies have harnessed these powers, via channels, water wheels, and mills, to do ‘work’ to support their processes of production, and to direct irrigation to their crops. But water is not always amenable: it also has its own agentive effects in making and unmaking environments and impacting upon human lives. In a world dominated by dualistic ideas of nature as the ‘other’ to culture, water is commonly seen to represent the capacities of the non-human world to reject the authority of human instrumentality. Water’s material forces highlight that such efforts often involve an intrinsic tension – a wrestling for control (Edgeworth 2011). This brings to the fore the reality that every cultural landscape is also a cultural waterscape. Control over water flows is achieved via the imposition of dams, canals, drainage, reservoirs, pipes, and other directive infrastructure that materialises societal ideas, values, and practices in relation to water. As with other forms of infrastructure, such concretization inscribes long-term patterns of human-environmental engagement upon the land and waterscape (Bichsel 2016, Harvey & Knox 2012, Larkin 2013).

Over time, human communities have engaged with water with varying degrees of determination to control its movements and direct its flows into serving their interests. Early societies, and those that have retained pre-industrial economic modes of hunting and gathering, horticulture, and small-scale agriculture, have tended to be conservative in their practices, working with the inherent processes of local ecosystems, and imposing relatively low-key forms of manipulation of the landscape for their purposes. In many larger societies, however, trajectories of human-environmental engagement have been very different, as population growth and technological developments have encouraged more assertive efforts to control water flows. Social and religious changes, in particular movements from nature religions to monotheistic beliefs, have led to notions of ‘dominion’ and the desire to impose patriarchal authority on ‘nature’, often feminised as alternate to male ‘culture’ (Plumwood 1993, 2002). The objectification of nature has also been encouraged by a more scientific lens upon the world, through which ideas about what water is have become ‘disenchanted’, leading to its reconceptualization as H₂O (Illich 1996, Linton 2010).

Greater dominion over water has been realised through new forms of science and technology enabling extensive engineering of the landscape and increasing capacities to direct water flows into supporting the needs and desires of rapidly enlarging human populations. Water usage has risen, in part because of more profligate domestic habits, but also in its use to support societies’ growing dependence on irrigated agriculture, as well as industry itself, which – due to the embodied water in goods and production processes – often results in the movement of water globally from arid environments to densely populated and wealthier temperate regions (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007, Meissner 2012).

The commoditization of water, and its reductive reframing as a resource or economic asset, has further encouraged utilitarian ideas about the material world as the basis for the provision of ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ to humankind. Patterns of water use in many societies have reflected the dominance of these ideas. In the last century there has been a race to build large dams, canals, and other infrastructures designed to direct water into enlarging urban areas; into hydro-electric generation; and into irrigated agriculture (Khagram 2004). Today over 70% of the Earth’s freshwater is directed into irrigation, and the World Bank has stated that a further 15% will be needed in the next decade to provide sufficient food and energy for the expanding human population.^[1]They are predicting major shortfalls, which raises the prospect of a range of problems, including rising numbers of environmental refugees.

Infrastructure and conflict

Shortfalls in water supply also exacerbate the issues surrounding the management of transboundary water flows which provide opportunities for both collaboration and conflict. The United Nations reports that 145 states share transboundary lakes or rivers (2019). In the last fifty years, 295 international water agreements have been signed, but there have also been thirty-seven ‘acute transboundary water disputes’ and two-thirds of the 263 transboundary river basins lack any framework for cooperative management. With rising demand, and with water flows becoming less reliable (in particular where global warming has diminished the water storage provided by glaciers), there is obvious potential for greater conflict.

Such tensions are readily evident in the controversies relating to the construction of big and ‘mega’ dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (built in 1936); the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River (funded by the World Bank in the 1950s); and, more recently, the Sardar Sarovar Damon the Narmada River, and the Three Gorges Dams on the Yangtze River. 57,0000 large dams have been constructed over the last century: these generate nearly 20% of the world’s energy, and assist much of its irrigation. They have supported worldwide population movement into urban areas, and the development of industries. Thus – like the earlier hydraulic infrastructures noted by Arthur Hocart – they have often been seen as integral to the building and flourishing of the nation state (Biggs 2012, Mohamud & Verhoeven 2016, Verhoeven 2015).

However, the human and environmental costs of such large-scale directive engagements with water have also been massive (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). As well as increasing the potential for transboundary conflicts, their focus on water storage for resource extraction, urban supply, and cheap hydro-electricity has resulted in many human rights violations and, with concomitant social impacts, the displacement of thousands of people living in riparian rural communities (Hwang et al. 2007, Mathur 2006, McDonald-Wilmsen & Webber 2010, Oliver-Smith 2009). Such projects have also resulted in extreme violence at times – such as the massacre of 400 Indigenous people to make way for the Chixoy Dam in Guatamala in 1982. Thousands more have been killed by dam failures; for example the collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam in 1975 killed an estimated 171,000 people.^[2]Huge dams, because of the enormous weight of water that they contain, have also been implicated in causing earthquakes: thus the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan is thought to have triggered a major earthquake in 2008.

Many of the costs of dams and related water infrastructures are less dramatic but no less damaging. Financially, large dams tend to be uneconomic: they typically overrun predicted levels of investment by up to 96% (Ansar et al. 2014). They also incur major social, economic, and environmental costs. In disrupting hydrological flows, dams are hugely destructive to aquatic ecosystems, and there are human costs as well in the loss of access to water for downstream farmers, fisheries, and tourism. More broadly, irrigated agriculture in many regions has led not only to diminishing harvests, but also to widespread land salination, rendering vast areas infertile even for native vegetation. This is particularly the case in ecologically vulnerable areas such as Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southern United States, where irrigation has been aimed at producing profitable – but for arid regions, unsuitable – crops, such as cotton, rice, and wheat.

But, as Peter Bosshard, the policy director for International Rivers (an international NGO seeking to protect rivers) notes, ‘[m]any actors have vested interests in building dams’ (2014). It is an area rife with corruption, in which major engineering contractors, irrigation consortia, and others stand to gain considerably, either through huge profits on construction, or through the gaining of water allocations for massive irrigation or hydroelectric schemes.

A notorious example is provided by Cubbie Station: an irrigation venture in south Queensland, so large as to be visible from space (Strang 2013). Cubbie Station’s directors persuaded the Queensland Government to allow it to buy up over 50 water licences, and to build a series of dams along twenty-eight kilometres of the Culgoa River. The station is situated just above the New South Wales border, and diverts about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River, and thus into the Murray Darling Basin, one of the most intensively farmed and ecologically compromised river basins the world. Unsurprisingly, this upstream abstraction has fuelled considerable inter-state conflict. As well as depriving downstream farmers and other local communities of water, irrigation has destroyed over 90% of the wetlands in the Basin, which formed critical breeding areas for migrating birds. The major beneficiaries are the station’s owners (an international consortia) its directors, and shareholders, and to a lesser extent the rural community for which it provides some employment and other local economic benefits.

Owning water

Major irrigation schemes such as Cubbie Station, and the thousands of other companies and consortia around the world taking control of water through dam building and the acquisition of water allocations, bring to the fore key questions about the ownership of water. For much of human history, water’s status as a common good remained the norm, albeit with some managerial control exercised by powerful groups: for example, the dynastic rulers of hydraulic societies or, in the medieval period, the Church, whose monasteries often provided communities with hydrological expertise and management (Tvedt & Oestigaard 2010). Although many of the traditional common property regimes described by Elinor Ostrom (1990) have undergone major alterations, water continued to be seen, until recently, as a common good.

Patterns of water ownership changed, however, as societies began to build major urban areas which demanded greater investment in technologies for water supply and waste removal. The Industrial Revolution introduced a new level of complexity, both in enlarging conurbations, and generating increasing levels of domestic and industrial pollution. The impacts of these developments were so challenging as to require major reform. In early twentieth century Britain, for example, water supply and waste removal services were initially provided by a mix of municipal authorities and Victorian philanthropists. The results were patchy, leading to considerable inequality within cities, in terms of access to piped supplies, and between cities and rural areas, the latter often remaining reliant upon local wells and pumps well into the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, democratic ideals demanded comprehensive provision of piped supplies and the public ownership of water. A national network of local water authorities was established, with water users paying for services via property rates. This worked well until the costs of maintaining aging water infrastructures became more pressing, and politicians were faced with the vote-losing prospect of raising charges for water. The Thatcher government, in accord with its conservative ideologies, decided (despite angry public protests) to privatise water, leading to a situation in which British water companies today are largely owned by international corporations (Bakker 2003). This proved profitable for water company directors and shareholders, but as water charges jumped by 60% in the following five years, rather less so for domestic water users (Strang 2004). The UK-based water companies made further profits by exporting to many parts of the world their expertise on how to privatise water.

This process proved even more controversial in countries where increases in water charges have more extreme impacts. In 2000, when the government of Bolivia responded to pressure from the World Bank to pay off its international debts through water privatization, and invited an American company, Bechtel, to enact this, citizens revolted and a violent water war erupted that succeeded in retaining public ownership (Albro 2005). However, although governments internationally have subsequently become wary of such wholescale national water privatizations, the process has continued in various forms: for example, through types of public-private partnership, and through mechanisms such as Government Owned Corporations which, as the name suggests, reform local or regional water authorities along the lines of privatised companies, sometimes separating the profitable operational (supply) side from the more costly infrastructural maintainance, with only the latter remaining a wholly public responsibility.

There have also been more covert forms of enclosure, as illustrated by the example of Cubbie Station in Queensland, Australia. Following the colonial appropriation of land and water from Indigenous groups, European settlers’ rights to water generally came with riparian land ownership. As pressure on limited resources increased, farmers were given volumetric water allocations. In the 2000s, these were effectively privatised and transformed into tradeable commodities, which could be bought up en masse (as with Cubbie Station) or, in other cases, traded away from the related land, leaving ‘dry blocks’. The conversion of allocations into profitable assets meant that those using water for the most profitable purposes (mining, cotton, rice, and wheat production) could readily outbid small farmers, or conservation organisations hoping to preserve wetland areas. This has resulted in higher levels of water use and environmental degradation.

In Australia and elsewhere, the creation of virtual water markets, whether in the form of allocation trading or as shareholding in water companies, has effectively detached water from the landscape. This process of ‘disembedding’ material things from their local environments and creating virtual global markets (Polanyi 1957) raises some key questions about social and environmental accountability. There is an important recent trend towards more ownership and trading of water (and other resources) by transnational corporations who are not physically present in the social communities or in the material environments where the water is located. Cubbie Station, for example, was bought up by a Chinese consortium; most large oil and mining companies are owned transnationally, as are other extractive industries. Regulating water users, even when these are locally based, is complex and challenging, and becomes more so when regulators have to deal with major transnational corporations. There are more fundamental questions, too: if a government hands control of the country’s most essential resources to external agencies, how does this affect its decision-making capacities about these resources? And does it uphold democratic processes? (Strang 2016).

Similar patterns can be seen in the use of marine resources, where overfishing has led to a process of formalising quotas and creating virtual trading schemes (Minnegal & Dwyer 2010). Competitive economies have done little to address the inequalities that pertain in both areas: customary rights to fishing have often been overridden by commercial interests, just as local rights to freshwater have been overtaken by the commodification of the water industry.

The loss of customary rights of access and the devastation of local waterways by extractive industries have been particularly distressing for place-based Indigenous communities, who retain close and affective attachment to their homelands, and for whom local land and waterscapes are often both sentient and sacred. As their land and other material resources have been appropriated, enclosed, and privatised, many groups have protested, and continue to do so (Berriane 2017, Strang & Busse 2010). Given the meanings of water within their cultural landscapes, the misuse and despoilation of waterways has evoked particularly anguished protests; exemplifed, for example, in response to the downstream pollution caused by mining on the Ok Tedi, in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2003), or in relation to rivers in northern Australia (Rumsey & Weiner 2004).

Over the last several decades, Indigenous communities have created international networks, working with each other, and with conservation organisations, to tackle these issues. In 2016, for example, the Dakota Sioux brought together a range of like-minded groups to stage a major protest at Standing Rock about the impacts of an oil pipeline on their land and water. Indigenous communities are challenging not only the appropriation of their traditional ownership of water (Morphy & Morphy 2009), but also the imposition of ideologies that in their view fail to value it properly. In New Zealand, in the 2000s, the Māori Council, on behalf of all iwi [tribes], fought a legal battle to try to reclaim Indigenous people’s ownership of freshwater, taking a case through the Waitangi Tribunal, the High Court, and the Supreme Court (Strang 2014). Although the claim did not succeed, the debates resulted in a robust co-management agreement, ensuring that Māori iwi would have a substantial voice in decisions about their related waterways (Muru-Lanning 2016, Ruru 2013).

Water in the Anthropocene

There is a readily discernible link between the enclosure and privatization of water and constant growth and intensification in the use of freshwater and other resources. Such intensification, and humankind’s impacts upon the planet, have become so extreme that we have now entered an age described as the Anthropocene (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stensrud & Hylland-Eriksen forthcoming). It is equally plain that water is a central factor – and a key area of vulnerablity – in climate change. As well as melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, higher planetary temperatures are melting the glaciers that store freshwater for many of the world’s major rivers, and destablising global weather patterns. Meanwhile, the clearance of forests and wetlands for further agricultural expansion continues. The result is much greater volatility in water flows, and higher risks of unmanageable floods and droughts.

The impacts on ecosystems are not only felt by human communities, but also by their non-human inhabitants. The Anthropocene marks the first human-caused mass extinction event on par with earlier planetary devastations. In the last century, species extinctions have spiked dramatically: a report by the World Wildlife Fund (Grooten & Almond 2018) documents the loss of 60% of species since the 1970s, and rates of extinction are continuing to rise.^[3]As Donald Worster observed, this pattern of environmental destruction goes hand in hand with an extremely exploitative mode of environmental engagement, and the widespread control of resources by commercial corporations, rather than by local communities with long-term attachments to places:

Whatever they [major corporations] may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately anti-ecological. Immense, centralised institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving (2006: 332).

It is not a given that relocating environmental control locally will necessarily produce less exploitative kinds of engagements with land and water. However, it is useful to consider the alternative values promoted by place-based communities in relation to non-human interests. Many retain traditionally egalitarian and reciprocal positionality towards non-human beings, locating humankind within living systems, rather than as rulers over them. This way of thinking has been inspirational for environmentalists, and interactions between Indigenous peoples, conservation groups, and scholars has produced a serious critique of notions of human dominion, and of the anthropocentricity and the entitlement implicit in exploitative practices (Brightman & Lewis 2016, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010, Orlove & Caton 2010). This critique argues that there is an urgent need for a repositioning that – for both ethical and pragmatic reasons – gives greater parity to non-human interests, with a view to halting (and hopefully reversing) the wholescale destruction of ecosystems and their dependent species, including, of course, human communities (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2015, Kopnina & Washington 2019). The proponents of this critique recognise the centrality of water in this regard, and thus protecting waterways has become a key part of their endeavours.

Indigenous communities have approached this challenge in various ways. Some, such as the Kogi in Columbia, have spoken up to warn about the consequences of rampant exploitation of the environment (Ereira 2009, see also de la Cadena 2010, Fienup-Riordan 2005: 233). There have been protests (as in the case of Standing Rock), and some have pushed their governments to make constitutional changes. Thus, in 2008 Ecuador passed legislation affirming the rights of nature, and a few years later Bolivia established the Rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama). Some groups have campaigned for rivers (such as the Atrato River in Colombia, and the Ganges in India) to be acknowledged as living persons with concomitant legal rights. In New Zealand, Māori iwi succeeded in gaining legal rights for the Whanganui River. In 2017, the New Zealand government announced that the river had been granted the status of a living entity, ‘comprising the River from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole’ (Finlayson 2017: 129(1); see also Strang 2019).

At an international level, there is growing pressure from environmental activists to persuade the UN to make a formal declaration about the rights of nature (Cullinan 2003, Gray & Curry 2016).^[4]Some are trying to establish ‘ecocide’ as an international crime.^[5]There is a widening conversation about ecological justice (Baxter 2005, Schläppy & Gray 2017) and the ethics of human-environmental relations, and for some groups this is connected with ideas about spiritual engagement with the world and, most particularly, with water (Sponsel 2012, Taylor 2010). There has thus been a refocusing on the spiritual meanings of water, which as well as permeating traditional religions, has an important role in New Age movements long aligned to environmental activism. New rituals are appearing to celebrate the spiritual or social meanings of water: in the UK, this has taken the form of well dressing, a revival of an ancient Roman ritual, fontanalia; in Australia, there are events such as the Splash! Festival in Queensland, in which people bring containers of water from their home places, and pour them into a central vessel to celebrate the social and spiritual connections between communities (Strang & Toussaint 2008).

The input from Indigenous, environmental, and related groups into global debates, along with widespread concern about societies’ unsustainable direction of travel, has led international NGOs, state governments, religious leaders, and the United Nations to focus on the issue of values. In 2016, the UN established a High Level Panel on Water to focus on water and values, which, in their terms, meant ‘economic’, ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural and spiritual’ values. Their aim was to produce a set of principles for water to underpin the Sustainable Development Goals declared in 2015, with the aim of encouraging heads of state to rethink their policies and practices in relation to water (UN 2018a). This was followed by a wider World Water Development Report, which advocated an infrastructural turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ (UN 2018b). These aim to work with the processes inherent in ecosystems and to therefore move towards more sustainable practices (Thomé et al. 2016). There are thus concerted efforts to address the urgent issues that societies face in relation to water. Whether these endeavours will change human engagements with water ecosystems sufficiently, and quickly enough, to avert social and ecological collapse, remains to be seen. It is therefore vital that the anthropological study of water continues to elucidate the relationships between human societies, non-human beings, and the material world, and assists efforts to reform these relationships to ensure that the rights, needs, and interests of all are sustained.

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[1] Water (1 Jul 2019). Topics: understanding poverty. World Bank Group Water Global Practice (available on-line: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/overview).

[2] Fish, E. The forgotten legacy of the Banqiao Dam collapse (8 Feb 2013). The Economic Observer (available on-line: http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2013/0208/240078.shtml).

[3] Summary statistics. The IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2019-2. International Union for the Conservation of Nature (available on-line: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics).

[4] See also Universal declaration of river rights (17 Sept 2017). Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (available on-line: https://therightsofnature.org/rights-of-nature-laws/universal-declaration-of-river-rights/).

[5] See, for example, the work of lawyer Polly Higgins (available on-line: ecocidelaw.com).

Note on contributor

Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and a Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004), Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009), and Water, Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2015). She is currently working on a major volume about long-term trajectories in human engagements with water. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/staff/?id=10491.

Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Cosin’s Hall, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, UK. veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk