Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Neoliberalism

Sustainability

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

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

Alice Rudge

SOAS University of London

Initially published 18 Jul 2025

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

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Contextualising sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plurality

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

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

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

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

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

Commensurability

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

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

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

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

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

Moralities

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

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

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

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

Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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Acknowledgements

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

Note on contributor

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

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

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

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Ethnicity

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 15:52:22 +0000

'Ethnic flavour' potato chips in a supermarket in Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Sara Shneiderman, 2003

Sara Shneiderman Emily Amburgey

University of British Columbia

Initially published 22 Aug 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22ethnicity

Abstract:

Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, the term is popularly understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. It entered public discourse in the US and Europe as early as the 1940s, but only gained significant traction by the 1960s. Emerging as an important frame for anthropological research during the same time period, ethnicity was initially seen as a terminological shift away from loaded, biologically-based concepts such as ‘tribe’ and ‘race’. This made it a potentially more accurate and productive lens through which to understand sociocultural diversity. Yet ‘ethnicity’ also retained associations with primordial forms of group identification, therefore gaining a prominent place within exclusivist nationalist discourses as well as mobilisations of multiculturalism around the world.

This entry shows how understandings of ethnicity have changed over time, and that both structural and affective features continue to define what ethnicity may be in any given context. It highlights the ways in which groups use and embody their ethnicity as a category of their identity, and that ethnicity overlaps with related understandings of identity such as ‘Indigeneity’, ‘nationality’, and ‘tribe’. Recent scholarship has criticised associations between being ‘ethnic’ and being a ‘minority’ to explore the political consequences of ethnic labels, which can serve as tools of both social change and discrimination. The anthropological study of ethnicity shows that ethnic labels are constructed, used, and understood differently by communities, political actors (both state and non-state), and scholars. It also shows that shifting claims over ethnic categories connect to broader debates surrounding authenticity, recognition, and social belonging. Lastly, this entry illustrates that anthropological scholarship has evolved alongside such political claims, and needs to account for their dynamic and often paradoxical outcomes.

Introduction

Ethnicity is one domain of identity: an affective and structural production of social belonging. The concept of ethnicity has two closely related primary meanings. The first is often used at the subjective, individual level to define identity: ‘my ethnicity is …’ This usage denotes the inherent connection between the individual and a larger group based upon a mutual recognition of shared origins and descent, as well as shared cultural practices and political projects of community building. In this sense, ethnicity is often understood as a contemporary successor of the colonial term ‘tribe’, as it refers to ostensibly singular collectivities produced through shared beliefs and practices. The second meaning is an analytical one which defines ethnicity as a social and political structure, a relational system produced through interaction between groups within local, national, transnational, or other overarching frameworks for identification. In this sense, ethnicity departs from ‘tribe’ by situating groups in relation to each other. Both meanings of ethnicity refer to the production of identity as a mutually entangled process of meaning-making, which fuses individual and collective elements of belonging.

Ethnicity can be both a tool of social transformation and a weapon of discrimination, depending upon context. Anthropologists have long criticised interpretations of the term that take group characteristics as inherent and objectively real (often referred to as ‘primordialist’ or ‘essentialist’). Based on empirical studies of group formation, anthropologists instead foreground ethnicity’s constructed nature. Nonetheless, ethnicity has remained a perhaps ever more meaningful category for political representation and practice in the public domain, particularly for marginalised communities around the world. It therefore also remains a key area of study across the social sciences, despite well-known academic critiques. A schematic periodisation of anthropological practice over time reveals how the discipline has shifted from attempting to empirically describe discrete ethnicities (1940s-1960s), to exploring the boundaries between them (1960s-1980s), to deconstructing the concept of ethnicity itself (1990s-2000s), to examining the pragmatic and affective work it does in the real world of politics and cultural practice (2010s-onwards).

This entry begins with a selective chronological overview of the historical usage of the term within ethnography and theory, to demonstrate how the concept has often been linked to marginalised populations in the context of modern nation-state development. It then segues to a regionally focused exploration of how ethnicity has been wielded differently in various global contexts, as a catalyst of social, political, and economic change. Bridging historical context, key theoretical shifts, and ethnographic studies, this entry draws connections between ‘ethnicity’ and terms such as ‘tribe’, ‘race’, ‘Indigeneity’, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘nationalism’. It thereby considers how ethnicity as a conceptual, affective, and political category manifests regionally with distinct connections to other elements of social and political identities.

Lineages of thought

Etymologically, the term ‘ethnicity’ is rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, which implied a collective of humans and is most often understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. Early interpretations in the social sciences often begin with Max Weber’s Economy and Society, published in 1922. Weber acknowledges that ethnicity acts as a facilitator of group formation in political terms that crystallises around a shared acceptance of common descent. Yet Weber does not emphasise the multivocal and dynamic nature of ethnic identity formation. Later interpretations of Weber’s analysis stress that ethnic membership is not some form of passive collectiveness but is rather constructed actively through political action (Jenkins 2008).

Weber further posits that ‘race’ works in a similar way to ethnicity in that both members and nonmembers of ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ groups must recognise their shared distinctiveness and align with others who share a perceptible common trait or phenotype. It is apparent here that the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are historically intertwined, and ‘are not precise analytical concepts; they are vague vernacular terms whose meaning varies considerably over place and time’ (Weber [1922] 1978 as quoted in Brubaker 2009, 27). In the original German, Weber used the term ‘ethnic group’ (ethnische Gruppen), and although the term ‘ethnicity’ appears in English translations, he does not appear to use the German word Ethnizität in the original.

Perhaps the earliest English use of ‘ethnicity’ as an abstract noun is in Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt’s 1941 study of Yankee City in the United States, The social life of a modern community. Stating that, ‘In this volume a great emphasis is placed on descent as a criterion of ethnicity’ (Warner and Lunt 1941, 237), these authors use the term in the group-specific sense to set immigrant groups such as ‘Irish’ and ‘Italian’ apart from ‘natives’ of the New England city. A slightly earlier use of ‘ethnic group’ appears in Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon’s 1935 We Europeans: A survey of ‘racial’ problems. These authors critique the mistranslation of Herodotus’ ethnos as ‘race’ in English, and explain that in their analysis, ‘the word race will be deliberately avoided, and the term (ethnic) group or people employed for all general purposes’ (Huxley and Haddon 1935, 108). These early references demonstrate that the term gained traction in both American and British scholarship around the same time, when embedded assumptions of colonial anthropology began to give way to greater introspection about systems of classification often taken for granted at home. Such introspection came with a recognition of the need for new terminologies that could decouple discussions of human difference and social inequality from the Darwinian hierarchies embedded in biologically-based understandings of ‘race’.

In another North American context, anthropologist Franz Boas critiqued the concept of ‘race’ by debunking anthropometry, that is, the measurement of people’s bodies as an indicator for socio-cultural similarity and difference. While he did not explicitly offer ‘ethnicity’ as an alternative, subsequent commentators have linked his public arguments against essentialist visions of race and their resulting eugenicist policies with this concept (Hyatt 1990, Williams 1996). Recently, Boas’ engagement with Indigenous communities of the Northwest Coast has been reinterpreted by Indigenous scholars as work that at once ‘produced significant, albeit gradual, transformations of racial ideology, but … also perpetuated aspects of colonial modernity’ (Blackhawk and Wilner 2018, xvi). At Boas’ time, native North American communities were not identified as ‘ethnic’ in the same way as the immigrant groups of which Warner and Lunt wrote; it would only be later that ‘ethnicity’ would come to be understood as the overarching relational system for organising difference between groups within the unit of the nation-state. Even so, many contemporary theorists argue that, ‘Indigeneity is distinct from ethnicity, defined by unique representational needs that stem from Indigenous peoples’ relation to the colonial nation-state project’ (Williams and Schertzer 2019, 679). From this brief review, we can understand ethnicity as an inherently relational concept, which remains co-defined by adjacent concepts including tribe, race, and Indigeneity.

Particularly in the years following the Cold War, as notions of ‘race’ had come under heavy scientific and political criticism, ethnicity proliferated as an alternative concept useful to projects of development and social change. For example, it lent itself to proprietary claims by governing bodies over culture, territory, and political recognition (Warren and Kleisath 2019). However, it was not until the 1960s that ethnicity really came into widespread use within and outside the academy, beginning in the United States. As Eric Wolf (1994) notes, the use of ethnicity in American anthropology was part of a larger disciplinary shift from ‘race’ to ‘culture’ to ‘ethnicity’ that was reflective of world politics and public opinion at a time when the post-World War II process of decolonisation and creation of ‘democratic’ institutions were vying to solve the problems of the ‘underdeveloped areas’ of the world (Escobar 1995). At the same time, the rise of ethnicity paralleled the Civil Rights movement within the US itself, which brought into focus the social injustices linked to racial difference at home. Ethnicity was propelled into the limelight as a possible means of recognising difference in a positive sense, without thereby reifying it as an essential trait of certain groups. New disciplinary spaces such as Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies emerged in tandem with these social movements in both the UK and the US, creating possibilities to reclaim ethnicity as a positive source of belonging and self-understanding (see, for instance, Hall [1988] 2021).

By the 1990s, these celebratory views of ethnicity as a marker of diversity and inclusion gave way to critiques from Marxist and post-structural thinkers, who highlighted its constructed nature and associations with exclusivist political movements (Banks 1996). The vast array of scholarly literature on this topic is by no means obsolete, and its significance in and beyond the academy lives on, as new waves of scholarship identify ethnicity as a critical contemporary vector in political projects, as well as projects of commodification, and affective self-production (Meiu et al. 2020).

Ethnic as ‘other’

Anthropology’s nineteenth century ties to imperialism meant that its knowledge about human difference was in large part conceived of as a tool of British and other colonial administration (see Asad 1973). Towards such ends, through projects of enumeration like the census (Cohn 1987), ethnicity was typically associated with discrete, singular, and essentialised categories of social identity that were perceived as biologically determined. In other words, people were understood to have essential, inborn, embodied characteristics that marked them as a member of one group or another. Early scholars in the field such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and Edward B. Tylor were writing at a time when Darwin’s theories of evolution laid much of the groundwork for social inquiry. Their ‘social evolutionism’ divided people into groups and placed them along hierarchies of evolutionary progress. Foundational work among anthropologists of this time period heralded the disciplinary trend of studying seemingly less advanced ‘others’, and it is from this notion of essential difference between the researcher and subject that the designation of ethnic identities became misleadingly associated with ‘minority’ or ‘marginalised’ groups. ‘Ethnic minorities’ are thus often those distinct from, and therefore available to, the anthropologist as subjects of study or the administrator as a representative of bureaucratic universalism.

Referring to a population as ‘ethnic’ still connotes a sense of marked minoritisation in relational difference to whatever the unmarked dominant community is in a given nation-state context, such as ‘whiteness’ in the United States (Jackson and Thomas 2009), or ‘Han-ness’ in China (Mullaney et al. 2012). Yet the anthropological trend of studying ethnic ‘others’ has significantly diminished over the past decades, as much anthropological research has turned to focus on dominant institutional and political networks, often ‘at home’ (Ho 2009; Nader 2011). This disciplinary shift has made studies of particular ethnic groups fall out of favour to a significant extent. Paradoxically, as the rise of identity politics around the world paved the way for a disruptive politics that frames dominant groups as ‘others’ (Adhikari & Gellner 2016; Kaufmann 2004), anthropologists have often sought to disassociate themselves from such movements (Eriksen 1993). Recognising the often highly politicised material consequences of ethnic claims for representation may disrupt dominant scholarly and political discourses that frame ethnicity as an ephemeral, entirely discursive construct. Importantly, identity-based arguments can emerge from both left and right ideological positions. For instance, they define both the Black Lives Matter, and the ‘Make America Great Again’ movements in the US. The power of ethnicity as a category of both self-consciousness and political mobilisation may therefore be equally important for dominant and minority groups (Taylor 1994; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Shneiderman 2020). Such a perspective moves away from demonising ‘ethnicity’ as a necessarily negative political force, and instead seeks to understand its actual operations across fields of power.

Ethnicity as a relational field

As early as 1940, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) had proposed the concepts of fission and fusion to describe the ongoing processes of separation and integration between sub-groups amongst the Nuer of Sudan. These ideas were part of a broader school of thought known as ‘structural-functionalism’, which interpreted the structures of social life as determined by their functional contributions to community livelihood and subsistence capacities. Despite its many shortcomings, such thinking productively identified that patterns of group identification were inherently dynamic. It helped recognise that individuals’ clan membership might differ from one week to the next and that it was not essentially implanted in their bodies in any fixed manner.

Building upon such work, anthropologist Edmund Leach (1964) further identified ethnicity as a fluid vector of power across multiple social domains when he studied socio-cultural group formation and group variance over time. Perhaps the first to define ethnicity as a process rather than a structure, Leach observed the constant state of flux in ethnic belonging between the Kachin and Shan groups of northeast Burma which he had studied in the 1950s and 60s. Individuals and sub-groups would regularly shift their membership between these two seemingly separate categories as external political and environmental disruptions intersected with internal structures of association.

It was the influential work of Fredrik Barth, particularly the introduction to the edited volume Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969), which popularised the notion that ethnicity must be understood as a system of relationships between groups, through a focus on the ever-shifting boundaries between them. Until this time, scholars still largely attributed specific ethnic characteristics as essential to non-Western populations, conceptualising ethnic groups as singular, bounded units. Barth critiqued this vision of a ‘world of separate peoples’ operating in ‘relative isolation’ (Barth 1969, 11), setting off a new wave of ethnic studies that diverged from evolutionary and structural-functionalist understandings of social groups as complete and internally consistent. Barth instead sought to frame ethnicity as a dynamic and processual set of relations between groups, urging scholars to think about how groups established boundaries between themselves and their neighbours, rather than on the shared ‘cultural stuff’ found within those ever fluid boundaries.

Following Barth’s now seminal essay, scholars have since critiqued even Barth’s approach for being too rigid, arguing that his use of the term ‘boundary’ invokes too much of a sense of exclusive group reification (see Cohen 1978). Yet Barth’s work continues to be one of the most cited in anthropological studies of ethnicity today. Most importantly, it signaled a momentous shift in the way anthropologists understood social organisation, moving towards a model of cyclical change where ethnic boundaries are constantly produced through real time encounters between individuals in practice (see also Vincent 1974; Bentley 1983). This type of fluidity is again present in the work of Abner Cohen (1974) who broke new ground by situating analyses of ethnicity comparatively across the US, Britain, Israel, and several African contexts, offering a pitched counterpoint to the received understanding that anthropologists could only study such phenomena amidst ‘others’ in faraway locations. Cohen, like Barth, moved away from the notion of ethnicity as an essential characteristic, focusing instead on practice in real time to postulate that an ethnic group is ‘a collectivity of people who share some patterns of normative behavior’ (Cohen 1974, ix), and he emphasised the power of politics and economic resource competition as drivers of social relationships.

Cohen’s work and other Marxian analyses of ethnicity have been critiqued for overemphasising resource competition and failing to adequately account for culture. Arguably, they do not sufficiently ‘consider the processes, formal and informal, that link the distribution of tasks in this system to embodiments and patterns of cultural enactment’ (Williams 1989, 409). The reference to ‘cultural embodiment’—in other words, the notion that cultural differences shape behaviour at the individual level of the body in a material, physical sense—stands out. It marks the important point of tension between earlier modes of studying ethnicity that tended to view ethnic differences as essential and isomorphic with race and territory, to more contemporary debates in the field that take seriously the socio-political processes that produce both self-selected and externally asserted ethnic labels. In making these arguments, Williams also establishes the need to analyse ethnicity across the multiple registers on which it plays out simultaneously: scholarly, political, and lay (1989).

Deconstructing ethnicity: against groupist ontologies

At the end the of the twentieth century, anthropologists and other social scientists began reconsidering the uncritical use of culture as a concept. Often associated with the seminal book Writing culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), these critiques drew upon the work of poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Edward Said to criticise the knowledge claims of anthropologists in general, and their understanding of ‘culture’ in particular. They argued that many social groups deemed to exist in the sense of fixed or ‘reified’ categories were actually in flux, and far less clear cut than previously assumed. Ethnicity concomitantly began to be viewed as an outmoded reference to a ‘groupist social ontology’ (Brubaker 2009) grounded in the primary inclination to think of the social world with reference to people’s unchanging substances (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 228). People’s identity and culture was beginning to be understood as much more fluid than previously models allowed for.

For example, Arjun Guneratne describes how members of the Tharu community in Nepal created reified, or objectified versions of their own elders’ rituals to transform culture into performance, creating, ‘a tale that Tharus tell themselves about themselves’ (Guneratne 1998, 760). Along these lines, a wave of ethnographies sought to deconstruct the ethnic claims of their subjects (see for instance Fisher 2001; Guneratne 2002). Thereby, they contributed to the parallel rapprochement between history and anthropology, which focused on the all-too-frequent ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). This is the notion that cultural symbols and practices that are held to be ‘traditional’ and therefore in need of preservation are often relatively new inventions that serve a contemporary sociopolitical purpose. This was the case in many nationalist performance traditions such as those mobilised by the Nazis to authorise the idea of a historically continuous Aryan race, for example. Paradoxically, as the use of the term ‘ethnicity’ was beginning to lose its relevance inside the academy due to the systematic critical deconstruction of its symbolic repertoires, its importance for communities began to grow (Banks 1996).

Ethnicity thus came to be seen as a profoundly political concept mobilised within the identity-based politics of difference in various national contexts where state-imposed regimes of recognition required marginalised communities to mark themselves as distinctive (Appadurai 1981; Povinelli 2002; Middleton 2015). This idea lends itself to broader debates over recognition and representation within nation-states and the processes of competition for what Jonathan Friedman (1992) refers to as ‘identity space’. In other words, the increasing hegemony of nation-states and nationalism—understood as both inherently limited and sovereign (Anderson 1991)—means that cultural difference becomes a valuable commodity that can be used to make all kinds of claims upon perceivably scarce state resources (Appadurai 1981; Todd 2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). As the very principal of nationalism ‘holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner 1983, 1), the moment an individual, community, or nation is perceived as threatened, boundaries of identity become increasingly important in resisting the pressure exerted on them (Eriksen 1993). Several scholarly works pertaining to nationalism and ethno-nationalist conflict explore the fundamental element of recognition as a reaction to external pressure or threats. Ethnic recognition is thus political, as much as it is about belonging at an emotional and psychological level (Appadurai 1998; Eriksen 1993; Gellner et al. 1997; Horowitz 1985).

Beyond theoretical debates in the academy, conflicts around the world in the second half of the twentieth century drew increased attention to violence perpetuated in the name of ethnic, racial, or national difference (Malkki 1995). This politicisation of ethnicity marked a transition from ‘the politics of the nation-state to the politics of ethnic pluralism’ (Tambiah 1996, 8), whereby socially constructed ideas of group belonging lend themselves to constructing exclusionary regimes on the basis of a shared identity. Such dynamics have unfolded in both democratic and communist state contexts, with political mobilisation on the basis of ethnicity being linked in complex ways to Marxist and Maoist projects of class-based mobilisation (see for example Ismail and Shah 2015, Shneiderman 2020).

Ethnicity as affective politics

The beginning of the twenty-first century marked yet another significant shift in anthropological engagements with ethnicity. By then it had become generally accepted that ethnic identities were constructed through historical, political, and social processes, and were not concretely real in any essential sense. ‘Constructivism had gained the upper hand over essentialism’ (Wimmer 2013, 2), so to speak. However, attempts to address the social and political processes that maintain divisions of the social world in ethnic, racial, or national terms opened a dialogue around the ‘fluid’ nature of ethnicity (Fisher 2001; Jenkins 2002). They highlighted the need to question why and how ideologies of ethnic identification work in the real world despite our critical recognition of their constructed nature. Anthropologists realised that when debates over ethnicity intersect with racial and national identities they can be a significant locus for the exercise of power and authority in spite of being constructed. Even if ethnicity is not natural or essential, it can be owned and used as an economic resource against and within neoliberal market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), and it can serve as a locus of power and resistance towards dominant social structures (Scott 1985; 2009).

The knowledge that ethnicity is constructed thus does not lessen its social power, nor does it lessen its intimate, emotional, and affective importance in people’s daily lives. Recent scholarship has sought to demonstrate the ways in which ethnicity may thus be simultaneously instrumentalised for external recognition and ‘affectively real’ (Shneiderman 2015), as both a mode of politics and a mode of consciousness. Refocusing debates ‘on the objectification of identity as a fundamental human process that persists through ritual action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm’ (Shneiderman 2015, 285), such scholarship seeks to bridge the bifurcated debates between politics and meaning by suggesting that ethnicity can be both at the same time (Meiu et al. 2020).

One such example comes from an ethnography of the Thangmi community who live across the borders of Nepal and India (Shneiderman 2015). It shows how Thangmi enact certain cultural practices, such as wedding dances, in different registers for different purposes. When dancing at an actual wedding in their home villages, Thangmi may be producing the content of their ethnic identity for themselves through a shared set of practices that are mutually agreed upon as particularly Thangmi by all actors involved. The act of dancing in this way is part of the process of constructing their ethnicity in an affective sense, in the group-internal context of a wedding at someone’s home.

At the same time, those dancers, and other members of the community, may also perform stylised versions of the same dances on stage in a theatre for the express consumption of state officials with the power to recognise the community within state paradigms for ethnic categorisation. Here they are producing Thangmi ethnicity in the political sense, in the group-external context of a theatrical performance organised by state actors. While the latter is certainly constructed, in the sense that it is staged in a very intentional manner to meet certain political requirements, both versions of the dance are real and relevant to those who enact them. Both contribute to the overall ability of the Thangmi community to maintain their traditional knowledge of such cultural forms, which in turn constitute the content of their ethnic identity. The point here is that the political mobilisation of such cultural knowledge does not eclipse or erase its continued existence in community-internal forms. The constructed nature of ethnic identity can thus co-exist with its affectively real power for those who embody it (for further details, see Shneiderman 2015, Chapter 2).

The geopolitics of ethnicity

While we have discussed that ethnicity may shift over time, we now turn our attention to understanding its variation across space by considering regional literatures that bring nuance and texture to the aforementioned general narrative of debates over ethnicity. Grounded in what Richard Fardon (1990) refers to as ‘regional ethnographic traditions’, theories of ethnicity have come to intersect with global and local politics in myriad ways. In calling attention to the disparities between essentialising theories of ethnic difference and ethnographic studies of particular communities (Abu-Lughod 1991), some of the fundamental understandings of ethnicity are complicated by the incommensurability of partial and shifting claims to recognition in various parts of the world.

As scholars whose own research has been grounded in South Asia, we find recent ethnic debates in Nepal and India a good crucible for exploring some of these broader themes. Since the 1990 advent of democracy in Nepal, long-standing internal tensions between historically marginalised ethnic groups and state forces began to be vocally expressed through a range of ethnic and political mobilisations. These were both a product and driver of the tensions between Hindu nationalist ideologies and the diverse groups of people the state of Nepal has come to govern (see Pfaff-Czarnecka et al. 1997; Onta 2006; Hangen 2010). Identity politics thus became the centerpiece of national debates through successive waves of civil conflict (1996-2006) and post-conflict state restructuring (2006-2015), as minority groups struggled to attain recognition and rights within the 2015 constitution and subsequent 2017 administrative restructuring. Beginning with the National Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities Act (NFDIN) in 2002, Nepal passed a series of policy reforms aimed at addressing the limited visibility of adivasi janajati, or ‘Indigenous Nationalities’ (approximately 60 are currently recognised). These policies have become closely linked to conversations around human rights, social inclusion, and development (Shneiderman 2013).

Nepal remains only one of two Asian countries to have ratified ILO Convention 169 on the rights of Indigenous peoples (the other is the Philippines). By contrast, while India has maintained constitutional provisions for the ‘upliftment’ of groups designated as Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes (ST/SC) since the 1950s, it has not recognised Indigeneity as a legal category. This has led to a different politics of ethnicity than that described in Nepal—despite the two countries’ shared borders, and linguistic and religious heritages. In India, ‘tribalness’ has become the category of aspiration to secure a better future (Kapila 2008; Moodie 2015; Middleton 2015; Phillimore 2014; Shah 2010). Using terms such as ‘backwards’ and ‘highly marginalised’, the politics of difference in various parts of South Asia can be seen as echoing early anthropological models of ethnic and racial inferiority.

However, the current politics in both countries provide a counter-narrative to the assertion that ethnicity is something that only minoritised groups have. Instead, as Krishna Adhikari and David Gellner (2016) put it, there is a backlash from dominant communities who seek to label themselves as ‘other’ in response to the growing visibility of erstwhile ethnicised minorities, such as adivasi janajati in Nepal and Muslims in India. In both Nepal and India, once-marginal ethnic labels have become targets of aspiration, as communities vie for entitlements and territorial sovereignty. Showcasing their distinctiveness as tribal, ethnic, Indigenous, and religious groups, ethnicised categories become prized targets of recognition.

The rise of cultural rights activism and increasing struggle for ‘identity space’ among marginal groups has given way to a growing emphasis on neoliberal multiculturalism worldwide. In its simplest form, neoliberal multiculturalism enmeshes pro-market reforms with policies for cultural rights granted to disadvantaged groups. In Latin America, this regime has gained traction in the name of cultural protectionism and human rights discourse in favour of ethnic minorities. Yet contrary to these alleged goals, it can lead to contradictory and oppressive outcomes, as pro-market reforms are often detrimental to the lives of various ethnic and Indigenous groups. Charles Hale (2005) asserts that

the great efficacy of neoliberal multiculturalism resides in powerful actors’ ability to restructure the arena of political contention, driving a wedge between cultural rights and the assertion of the control over resources necessary for those rights to be realized (13).

Hale’s argument is echoed in Shaylih Muehlmann’s description of experiences in northwest Mexico at the end of the Colorado River, where US dam projects and the more recent creation of a protected ‘biosphere reserve’ by the Mexican federal government have denied local Cucapá Indigenous communities the right to fish, creating what a lawyer referred to as ‘cultural genocide’ on its own people (Muehlmann 2009). This conflict between the Cucapá and the state is mired in debates over Indigenous rights, cultural and ethnic difference, and state-regulated discourses of multiculturalism. Rather than allow ethnic groups to control the Colorado Delta, the state has instead used ethnic difference to deny the Cucapá access to their ancestral fishing ground (Muehlmann 2009, 469). Instrumentalising ethnic difference under the guises of global discourses such as multiculturalism and environmental sustainability, the Mexican state has used the politics of ethnicity not to aid the Cucapás, as multicultural policies often insinuate, but to fuel their continued marginalisation. In other instances, claims to Indigenous status have been undermined when communities lose control over the ways they are represented to larger publics (Conklin and Graham 1995; Heatherington 2010; Tsing 2005), or communities may choose to reject legitimate claims to Indigenous status altogether (Li 2000).

Although neoliberal multiculturalism is not unique to Mexico, or Latin America for that matter, the case of the Cucapá shows how in the neoliberal era the intersections between Indigeneity, environmentalism, and state projects become contested sites of ‘authenticity’ (Handler 1986). From an anthropological perspective, ‘authenticity’ is a cultural construct linked with terms like ‘untouched’ or ‘traditional’ that is underpinned by the assumption that cultures are discrete, bounded units that do not change (Handler 1986). The use of ‘authenticity’ as a legitimising framework for evaluating traditions, ethnicity, and cultural heritage persists today. It comes to light particularily through cultural performances for public and political purposes (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Conklin 1997), as well as through private ceremonies and rituals (Shneiderman 2015). As a result, the concepts of performance and performativity emerge as important ways to understand how particular groups are ‘driven by their specific desires for recognition, self-determination, and cultural sovereignty’ (Graham and Penny 2014). As described above in the Thangmi example, performance as a tool to legitimise ethnic claims has emerged both as a powerful means of asserting and expressing difference, and as a way for contemporary governments and international bodies to capitalise on these designations.

This is the case not only in explicitly neoliberal state contexts, but even in an erstwhile communist state such as China, where ethnic classification has been constitutive of national identity since the foundation of the People’s Republic. The Ethnic Classification Project of the 1950s sought to structure the ‘number, names and composition of China’s officially recognized ethnonational groups’ (Mullaney 2010) as part of the Communist Party’s campaign to achieve ethnonational equality. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, during China’s postsocialist reforms, the linguistic and cultural traditions of minority communities came to be appropriated by the state as desireable representations of ‘traditional culture’ (Schein 2000, 24). ‘The figure of the minority, usually feminine, came to be included in what was considered to constitute the authentically Chinese’ (Schein 2000, 24). Today, minority communities continue to renogiate their place within China’s ethnonationalist politics and assert their own cultural identity through performances including tourism events, village rituals, or even scholarly and journalistic encounters (Chio 2014; Jinba 2013). It is in this way that concepts like ‘ethnicity’, ‘minority’, and ‘authenticity’ are interlinking components of ethnonationalist agendas, as well as contested sites of cultural production and representation.

Across the Global North and the Global South, anthropologists have explored similar themes related to the ‘articulation’ of Indigeneity and ethnic identity (Hall 1990; Li 2000), multiculturalism (Turner 1993), and the complex relationships between ‘Indigeneity’ and ‘autochthony’ (McGovern 2012; Pelican 2009). These and other related terms continue to be used by various state and nonstate actors as both platforms for social justice, and to continue the marginalisation of minority communities. Ethnicity can cut both ways.

Conclusion

Whether self-designated or externally imposed, ethnic classifications are regionally and historically diverse, and the entanglement of ethnicity with related terms such as ‘race’, ‘Indigeneity’, ‘minority’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘tribe’ have persisted since its inception within anthropological and popular discourse. A common thread is the association between ethnicity and marginalised groups. Although in some cases this power imbalance has been overturned to render minority groups visible in the global arena of cultural rights, analytical approaches to the study of ethnicity are not exempt from colonial legacies and the politics of exclusion. As Brackette Williams (1989) succinctly states,

ethnicity labels the politics of cultural struggle in the nexus of territorial and cultural nationalism... as a label it may sound better than tribe, race, or barbarian, but with respect to political consequences, it still identifies those who are at the borders of the empire (439).

Finally, to assume that ethnicity as an analytical category and structure of belonging will run its course would be to ignore the realities faced by communities around the world. People will likely continue to find it useful, as they navigate neoliberal policies to secure access to resources in the face of rapidly changing climate conditions, make claims to territory within newly invigorated Indigenous rights frameworks, or attempt to escape the ethnic label altogether. To address ethnicity, and do justice to the highly politicised nature of this term, scholarship must carefully consider histories of marginalisation and social inequality without imprisoning groups in an idealised image of their own past in the process (Li 2000). Ethnicity may carry numerous intimate and affective meanings for one person whilst being of no value to another, and it is through a careful consideration of the politics at stake that future anthropological scholarship can disrupt grand theories of ethnicity to reveal its multivocality and contextual specificity. In this third decade of the twenty-first century, as we see newly invigorated global protests against systemic racism collide with unequal vulnerabilities to the global pandemic and the juggernaut of climate change, it seems ever more important to apply a social justice lens as we reconsider the relationships between ethnicity and its others. Whether in lay, scholarly, and political registers, and whether within or beyond the framework of the nation-state, ethnicity will likely occupy us for years to come.

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Notes on contributors

Sara Shneiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of Rituals of ethnicity: Thangmi identities between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). sara.shneiderman@ubc.ca

Emily Amburgey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University of British Columbia, Canada. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist and visual ethnographer. Her work explores the impacts of climate change and labour migration in high altitude regions of Nepal’s Himalaya. emily.amburgey@ubc.ca

Prefigurative politics

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:51:10 +0000

Guilherme Fians

University of St Andrews

Initially published 18 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22prefigpolitics

Abstract:

‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal globalisation, prefigurative politics involve deploying political practices that are in line with the activists’ envisaged goals. These, in turn, tend to encompass the construction of a democratic and horizontal society, which must be enacted through egalitarian relationships between activists who refrain from resorting to authoritarian, sexist, and exclusionary means to reach political goals. Yet, what are the origins of this concept? What kind of politics are referred to as prefigurative? Since the concept’s consolidation, anthropologists have been at the forefront of answering these questions, as both researchers and activists. They look at how prefigurative politics intersect with themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, social change, community-building, and everyday ways of inhabiting the world. This entry explores how prefigurative politics as a concept and as a series of practices have become relevant among those who build horizontal political and social relations, oppose representative democracy, and embody alternative lifestyles. Exploring prefigurative politics leads scholars to question the seemingly straightforward divide between the New Left and ‘old lefts’. Additionally, asking whether right-wing movements can also engage in prefigurative politics helps us better understand the pervasive practices that transform non-institutionalised activism into laboratories from where people foster change and experiment with new socialities.

Introduction

Prefigurative politics—and its cognate, prefiguration—is one of those concepts that appear to be rather abstruse, but whose meaning actually indicates something ordinary. It refers to the strategies and practices employed by political activists to build alternative futures in the present and to effect political change by not reproducing the social structures that activists oppose. Prefiguration has been widely associated with the modus operandi of the social movements that blossomed after the 1960s, drawing on anarchist-inspired principles, such as participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Via the motto ‘another world is possible’, prefiguration is often part of activist-led social experiments that, rather than serving clearly established goals, create open-ended ways of reimagining society and contesting the entanglements of representative democracy, neoliberalism, social inequality, and globalisation.

Yet, before prefiguration gained prominence with the last decades’ protests against neoliberal globalisation, how did this concept come into being? First used centuries ago to betoken a form of Christian salvation, how did prefiguration acquire a different meaning among political activists? What kind of politics is referred to as prefigurative?

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘new social movements’ and the ‘New Left’. These constituted movements that amplified causes which spoke not only to economic and class-related goals, but also to civil rights, ethics, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Such causes include feminism, environmentalism, the movements for gay rights, animal rights, the American civil rights and other anti-racism movements worldwide, students’ movements and, since the 1990s, alterglobalisation movements (against neoliberal globalisation). Questioning Marxist and social-democratic forms of political action, the prefigurative forms of activism at the heart of these movements do not necessarily seek to mobilise every means available to achieve a pre-established, future-oriented goal. Instead, they aim to create a more egalitarian and inclusive society by equalling a movement’s means with a movement’s ends: reaching a horizontal society requires building horizontal relationships between activists in the present, which will, in turn, prefigure the envisaged end.

Such movements and tactics were labelled ‘new’ when measured against the paradigmatic ‘old’ of institutionalised activism carried out by political parties and trade unions since at least the Industrial Revolution. Thinking about political activism from the perspective of grand narratives and ideologies—as well as of communist theories of comprehensive social change—has stimulated social scientists to regard the success of a given mobilisation as dependent upon the attainment of certain predetermined goals (Maeckelbergh 2011), such as a revolution that will dismantle capitalism and implement a new mode of production. Yet, seeking a revolution as the ultimate goal often assumes that any means are valid to reach a more egalitarian and classless society. Unlike this paradigm, prefigurative politics refrain, for instance, from using authoritarianism to build a democratic society.

Anthropology has shown a long-standing interest in prefigurative politics since this concept’s first links with social movements. Mostly through the work of anthropologists-cum-activists, prefiguration has been approached alongside themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, inequality, social change, community-building, and the ways in which everyday lives are lived. While political scientists and sociologists have mostly concentrated on political strategies by drawing parallels between several cognate social movements, anthropologists have employed participant observation to explore particular movements, collectives, and networks. In such manner, they have produced a nuanced understanding of how prefiguration takes place on the ground—without losing sight of its shortcomings.

Due to ethnographers’ particular attention to prefigurative politics in Europe and the United States, the existing body of literature may convey the idea that prefiguration thrives particularly in the Global North. Existing analyses have also tended to focus on disruptive, contentious politics. By contrast, fewer studies stress the pertinence of prefigurative practices in the everyday lives of people in the Global South, and of those who are not full-time protesters. Even fewer have considered how right-wing activists also mobilise prefiguration. While scholars generally agree on what constitutes prefigurative politics, some highlight an apparent paradox when the anarchist-inspired principles underlying prefiguration are mobilised by activists who are, content-wise, anything but anarchists. Other scholars, in turn, accentuate prefiguration as a political strategy that can be similarly deployed by activists advancing progressive as much as conservative content. Lastly, as I will discuss, several researchers have used prefiguration as a rather problematic umbrella term to label which movements and forms of activism have a prefigurative character and which ones have not.

To explore the historical and current significance of prefigurative politics, as well as its limitations, this entry analyses how this concept and the practices it designates have come to bear relevance among those who oppose representative democracy, build small-scale politically organised entities as horizontal micropolities, and embody alternative lifestyles. Questioning the seeming straightforwardness of the divide between the new and old lefts and bringing right-wing movements to the discussion, this entry provides anthropologists and non-academics with a gateway to better understand the pervasive practices that aim to turn activism into laboratories from where people foster change by experimenting with new socialities.

Revolutions that dismiss the revolution

The concept of prefiguration is often credited to Carl Boggs (1977) to describe the logics and practices of left-wing movements that, mostly since the 1960s, opposed Leninism and the working-class politics aimed at structural reform. Yet, little did Boggs know that the term had been previously used by Augustine in the 4^th century BCE to explain a key tenet of Christianity. Examining the fall of lust-laden Rome, Augustine ([1470] 1998) pointed out that, to enjoy spiritual salvation and avoid collective perishing, people should resign their paganism and commit to charity and moral integrity. Only by prefiguring a divine beatitude could one near a state of holiness to be partially enjoyed in the present and fully realised in the future (Scholl 2016, 321; Buts 2019, 17).

Whereas Augustine heralded spiritual salvation via the earthly enactment of God’s conduct, centuries later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([1848] 2015) would call for political salvation via overthrowing the bourgeoisie and bringing an end to class struggle. Moving away from prefiguration, the Communist manifesto (1848) urged proletarians to fight the monopoly of the means of production held by the few, in a form of political salvation that ousts reformisms and entails revolutionary macropolitical changes. Toppling all existing social conditions, according to Marx and Engels, makes the revolution the means to reach the ultimate end of inaugurating a communist, classless society. Yet, means and ends frequently clashed here: major streams of Marxism ended up reproducing the authoritarian state power and highly bureaucratic hierarchies characteristic of bourgeois society (Boggs 1977, 5). Thus, Marx’s anti-statist theories often gained materiality via statist practices.

Contrasting with such statist orientations, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a new wave of radical politics. With the May 1968 uprisings in France and the civil rights movements in the US as their core symbols, the new social movements and New Left (Epstein 1991; Polletta 2002) reinforced the centrality of collective identity, civil rights, and lifestyles in activist agendas. In the French case, the emergence of youth mobilisations—initially associated with the fight against university funding policies—promptly gained the support of broader society. Via street barricades, occupation of universities, and France’s largest wildcat strikes, protesters—factory workers, students, and feminists, among others—built a communal agenda without having much in common. This implied replacing each group’s specific claims with broader demands, thus turning May 1968 into an open-ended experiment of society-building. Through grassroots practices collectively decided and enacted on the go, May 1968 had a long-lasting effect, enabling environmentalist, anti-fascist, and feminist perspectives to enter into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Italian autonomism was gaining ground since the 1950s. Starting on factories’ shop floors, the worker’s autonomy movement (Autonomia Operaia) in Italy came to involve university students, women, artists, migrants, and other subaltern groups not traditionally conceived as ‘proletarian’ (Katsiaficas 2006). While occupying factories, universities, and abandoned buildings, autonomists sought to enact self-management and carry out everyday, small-scale revolutions by circumventing representative decision-making bodies (such as corporate boards, trade unions, governmental ministries, and political parties). On the other side of the Atlantic, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the US succeeded in connecting students and workers, Black Panthers and pacifists, upper-middle-class white people, feminists, church organisations, anti-nuclear activists, and war veterans. Initially an uprising against warmongering, this coalition orchestrated a display of generalised political dissatisfaction despite not having a single, unifying agenda.

Operating outside the institutional frameworks of the state, political parties, and trade unions, these new social movements took shape through autonomous activists who organised in a mostly non-hierarchical, network-like manner. They sought to break with hierarchical and institutionalised politics in two main ways. Firstly, they expanded the scope of politics by bringing to the table previously marginalised political agendas. Mobilising prefiguration as an activist strategy, the New Left underscored issues from feminism and structural racism to drug policy reforms and environmental issues. Conservative activists equally deployed prefiguration to increase the relevance of anti-abortion and anti-drug advocacy. Secondly, the new social movements gave visibility to principles according to which the political means to achieve an end had to be consistent with that end. To build a more democratic and egalitarian society, one had to deploy democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots activism. Likewise, building a white supremacist society means enacting ‘racially pure’ small-scale communities (Futrell and Simi 2004). Such uses of the concept have brought prefiguration to the core of post-1960s social movements’ political repertoire (Boggs 1977; Calhoun 1993).

Despite the diversity of prefigurative practices and the fact that the movements analysed here do not constitute a homogeneous whole, these practices tend to have in common ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practise of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs 1977, 6-7). Hence, prefiguration is a way for activists to anticipate the changes they seek. And while everyday micropolitical action may not trigger a revolution or herald political salvation, it may progressively transform our ways of thinking, behaving, and imagining what society should be like.

An activist and anthropological field of action take shape

After its surge in the 1960s, prefigurative politics gained new momentum in the 1990s. With the dissolution of the USSR, social movements had to reinvent themselves beyond statism and rethink the capitalism versus communism divide. The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico, for instance, gathered peasants, indigenous peoples, and marginalised urban groups in protest against the neoliberalism imposed by the Mexican state’s land reforms and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, the Zapatistas did not address the government or political parties in their political demands: they fought for autonomy to implement by themselves the local-level changes they envisaged (Stahler-Stolk 2010). Ultimately, the Zapatistas managed to establish autonomous zones in the Mexican state of Chiapas, with local communities having more say in shaping state policies and school curricula. Twenty-four years on, in 2018, the Zapatistas put forward Marichuy, an indigenous woman, to run for the presidency of Mexico. Aware of the unlikelihood of her victory, the Zapatistas aimed to use the presidential elections to highlight to the subalterns at the margins of Mexican society that their reality can be changed for the better, especially outside the framework of institutionalised, representative politics (Ansotegui 2018). Prefiguring alternatives to market-controlled globalisation and state politics since 1994, the Zapatista uprising inspired movements that would increasingly tackle global issues.

Prefigurative politics gained even wider visibility with a movement that placed neoliberal globalisation as its nemesis: the 1999 protests in Seattle against the austerity, deregulation, and large-scale privatisation measures laid down by the Washington Consensus and advanced by international bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Following months of planning, the activists and collectives loosely gathered under the Direct Action Network formed a human barricade around the venue hosting the WTO ministerial conference. Contrasting with the WTO’s hierarchies and formalities, protesters wore costumes, danced, carried placards, and chanted anti-capitalist slogans, followed by marching bands performing in the blocked streets. Violence was also present, coming from police repression and from some protesters’ tactics of fighting neoliberalism by damaging institutional buildings, banks, and multinational corporations. Such lack of a consensus between partisans of violent and non-violent forms of direct action evinces the inherent diversity of activist tactics subsumed under the label ‘prefiguration’.

While the protesters prevented the WTO delegates from reaching the conference venue, activist crowds turned into a commons—a free space where people developed, at least for a limited number of days, an alternative sphere of social (re)production involving care, education, food, and housing (Varvarousis, Asara and Akbulut 2021). Through general assemblies, workshops, and encampments, they sought to prefigure locally the kind of relationships they envisaged for the world. In bonding with each other through solidarity, informality, horizontality, and inclusiveness, the activists sought to oppose, through their practices, the formality, authoritarianism, and exclusionary character of neoliberal organisations. The commons also created opportunities for radical learning: in a dialogical process of horizontal education (Backer et al. 2017), activists co-produced knowledge, learned from each other’s prior political experiences, and materialised alternative socialities. Keeping the movement constantly open to dialogue was their way to give justice to and make real their motto ‘another world is possible’.

Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) aptly illustrate the significance of open-endedness for prefigurative politics. Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), the authors argue that capitalism operates through apparatuses of capture by creating boundaries to autonomous thinking and paralysing collective action. In remaining open to multiple ways of imagining and rebuilding society, the Seattle protests had a ‘rhizomatic’ character: for being non-institutionalised, spontaneous, and made up of activists supporting diverse causes, viewpoints, and activist strategies, these kinds of protests are meant to be more resistant to capture by institutional politics. An open letter, petition, or even a march against the WTO conference would have constituted a more easily recognisable repertoire for politicians and the police. It would have enabled them to enact standard protocols to either repress or ignore such expressions of dissatisfaction. A carnivalesque demonstration, on the other hand, shows how resistance can also be aestheticised, making it difficult for politicians, business people, and the police to curb the protest.

In this fashion, Seattle sought to depict neoliberal globalisation not as an abstract, unstoppable process, but as a set of concrete austerity and deregulation measures that can be challenged and mocked by ordinary people. This power of the crowds was later underscored by the motto ‘we are the 99%’, made famous by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, via the argument according to which the majority of the world’s population cannot pay for the mistakes of the upper-class minority.

The Seattle protests also consolidated prefigurative politics not as an ‘anything goes’ way of showing dissatisfaction, but as a strategy in itself (Maeckelbergh 2011). In opposing summits of the G8, NATO, and the World Bank (Graeber 2009), the New Left draws its political action on grassroots democracy, direct action, and the creation of alternative micropolitical relations of power (Yates 2015a). Holding voluntary working groups to set up tents in occupied squares, serving food to participants, protecting them from police action, and keeping spaces of protest clean work to turn hierarchical power relations into inclusive and participatory practices.

In anthropology, the prefiguration debate gained popularity mostly through the work of David Graeber. Actively participating in alterglobalisation movements and demonstrations mainly in the US, Graeber (2002; 2009, xvii) asserts that political activism in the twenty-first century will be increasingly influenced by anarchist imperatives and practices. What Graeber refers to as ‘anarchism’ emerges directly from the left-libertarian tradition that fosters social equality alongside individual freedom. Expressed via direct action, this conception of anarchism is grounded on prefigurative practices that turn activist settings into concrete examples of what ‘real democracy is like’ and how society can take alternative forms—even though such forms do not necessarily reflect left-wing contents. Social scientists who document how such strategies unfold in real life placed prefiguration at the heart of their analyses of mobilisations such as the Occupy movement (Graeber 2009; Razsa and Kurnik 2012), feminist movements (Polletta 2002; Ishkanian and Saavedra 2019; Carmo 2019), France’s Nuit debout protests (Kokoreff 2016), the 15M movement in Spain (Flesher Fominaya 2020), and the World Social Forums held mostly in the Global South (Juris 2005; Teivainen 2016). Going beyond Western urban spaces, some authors have brought anti-state forms of activism for self-determination among Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Amazonian indigenous peoples to this discussion (Petray and Gertz 2018).

Materialising participatory democracy

Prefigurative politics does not just refer to specific forms of protests in which the very process of planning, carrying out, and embodying political action becomes part of the message activists aim to convey (Flesher Fominaya 2014). It also denotes direct ways of living democracy. One of the most closely examined enactments of prefigurative politics are therefore the general assemblies, which are consensual decision-making spaces within occupied squares. As part of a ‘generalised revolt against representation’ (Tormey 2012, 136), participatory democracy carried out by the activists/individuals themselves has become a mechanism to counter representative democracy, which is epitomised by political parties and elections. In general assemblies, participants are placed in a circle to hear those at the centre. No one must block the view of others, so that those who are hard of hearing or far away can understand the speaker through lip reading and body language. When the circle is too wide, participants employ a technique known as ‘the people’s microphone’: people gathered immediately around the speaker repeat everything they say in unison, to make the speaker’s voice reach those at the edges without the need for amplification devices (Deseriis 2014).

General assemblies are expected to give voice to potentially everyone: once joining the speaking queue, participants should speak for themselves, not as spokespersons of any collective or institution (Teivanen 2016; Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Interestingly, giving voice to the 99% starts with empowering activists individually, by placing autonomy at the core of ideal-typical prefigurative politics. General assemblies and decentralised workshops make room for direct action and convergence of thought and action. For instance, middle-class environmentalists may ask manual labourers for guidance on preparing posters on veganism that could find broader appeal, and feminists may advise anarchist students on how to convey their agendas in neutral language. Workshops also propose self-reflection on the commons, raising awareness of issues like racism or ableism among activists, as in this 2011 Occupy Boston workshop:

The facilitator, a white male, began the activity by asking for 20 diverse volunteers to line up side by side at the front of the crowd assembled at the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square. He then issued a series of declarations: ‘If your ancestors lost land by the conquest of the U.S. government, step back; Step forward if your ancestors gained assets through the slave trade; Step back if your ancestors were brought here in chains to be slaves; Step back if you or your ancestors arrived as immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean’. These and other statements produced a visible line of stratification, with mostly white participants at the front and people of color toward the back (Juris et al. 2012, 434-5).

Opening the microphone and refusing fixed leadership invite activists to enact horizontality and to develop a do-it-yourself attitude. In not belonging to any institutionalised group or political party, such activist spaces are meant to become potentially everyone’s. Joining these spaces involves showing a willingness to leave aside a world driven by discrimination, authoritarianism, and neoliberal practices and setting a ‘frame’ (Bateson 1972, 177–93) wherein hierarchies are temporarily suspended. This frame encourages each participant to act and express oneself not as a representative of given political agendas, social status, or cultural backgrounds, but as individuals who autonomously question, for instance, oppressive, sexist, and colonialist regimes of truth.

Yet, building a new society from the ashes of the old entails carrying with it some of the vicissitudes that activists try to purge from their settings—which evinces the shortcomings of prefigurative politics. Firstly, however globally-oriented and inclusive such movements attempt to be, at times they reproduce gender, racial, and class segregation, as white, richer, better-connected, and male citizens from the Global North (Tarrow 2006: 44; Juris et al. 2012) tend to have more resources and possibilities to afford the time to activism. Regarding horizontality, the assemblies’ open microphone is counterbalanced by how more experienced and articulate activists often dominate these spaces. Sometimes this may entail that marginalised and less educated people will be less prone to talk—and, as open as the microphone might be, less often heard (Beeman et al. 2009; Wengronowitz 2013). Ultimately, horizontal forms of activism may thus lean towards authoritarianism, especially on occasions when more charismatic activists become seen as quasi-‘leaders’ or spokespersons of entire movements.

In addition, while the assembly format implies participatory democracy and gives everybody a say, it means ideas will often be repeated, frequently slowing down the pace of decisions and actions. Paradoxically, processes aimed at consensual decision-making often result neither in decisions nor in consensus, which either hampers the political action or leaves the final decision to the most active and influential activists, thus reproducing the centralised power that prefigurative politics oppose. In a number of movements, the open-endedness and inclusiveness that prevail in prefigurative politics also result in the absence of a coherent overall agenda (Chomsky 2012; Graeber 2013). Although being a feature, rather than a flaw, of these movements, this is read by some as activists being clueless about how to reach their goals (Lipset and Altbach 1966), resulting in movements that may be more expressive than instrumental, privileging spectacle over substance (Polletta 2002: 1-2).

These critiques and seeming flaws stress that creating a democratic culture and experimenting politics differently are forcefully long-term processes. Yet as the commons offer people solidarity and mutual support, they may well emerge as the first steps for people to collectively challenge the mainstream while prefiguring the new.

Rebuilding communication and the media

As the previous discussion on the open microphone suggests, communication technologies and the media play a crucial role in gathering people around political agendas. Just as the screening of the Vietnam War boosted pacifist movements worldwide in the late 1960s (Mandelbaum 1982), recent years have seen the rise of digital media as major networking arenas triggering contentious politics.

Several ethnographies have analysed the emergence of activism on digital media, particularly revolving around hashtags (mostly on Twitter) such as #Ferguson (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), #MeToo (Pipyrou 2018), and #BlackLivesMatter (Yang 2016). While indexing information online, hashtags also create mediatised spaces of peer support and solidarity when people share about their struggles with racism, sexism, and state violence. Due to the heightened temporality in digital media, hashtags mimic the dynamics of face-to-face activism, enabling users to engage almost in real-time with what happens in in-person protests. Thus, the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Athens’ Syntagma Square, Paris’ Place de la République, and Cairo’s Tahrir Square have been supplemented by the ‘occupation’ of Facebook timelines, YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds with global calls for action and constant updates from the streets (Postill 2014; Castells 2015).

The Arab Spring (2010-2012, beginning in Tunisia) and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution offer a prime illustration of how digital media enable the prefiguration of a more egalitarian society. Bringing together Christians who used to socialise primarily in church and Muslims who tended to gather in and around mosques, the internet helped these groups find commonalities and recognise their shared dissatisfaction with state violence and the Egyptian government. Learning via digital media about protests taking place in neighbouring countries in North Africa and the Middle East, a great number of Egyptians saw their outrage matched by the hope conveyed by activists abroad (Castells 2015). Thus, territorial activism in city squares fed and was fed by deterritorialised activism online, amplifying activists’ voices and the reach of their support. While digital media may usually serve mainstream purposes, they emerge in prefigurative politics as platforms to both build activist networks and critically rebuild communication. In this sense, digital media empower anyone to communicate their own narratives and challenge mainstream regimes of truth by sidestepping the mediation of journalists and the one-to-many functioning of mass media (Castells 2008, 90).

Thinking of the arts and citizen media as prime examples of what John Downing (2001) calls ‘radical media’ enables us to highlight the media’s potential to report state violence in protests and violation of human rights in war-laden countries, as well as to give voice to those who are systematically excluded from mainstream sources of news. In this vein, the 1999-born Independent Media Center (IMC) was a landmark in covering the Seattle protests in real time (Downing 2003). Through its call for arms—‘Don't hate the media, become the media!’—the IMC became the forerunner of analogous grassroots initiatives producing content online without links to corporate news outlets.

Bypassing mainstream mass media does, of course, not always correspond to left-wing forms of prefigurative politics. Aside from bolstering the Arab Spring, digital media also provided the mechanisms that granted the electoral victory to far-right presidential candidates such as the US’s Donald Trump in 2016 (Tufekci 2018) and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 (Cesarino 2020). The same can be said about the COVID-19 anti-vaccine campaigns. On the one hand, presidential campaigns do not concern prefigurative politics entirely as they resort to institutionalised politics and the state in people’s quest for change. On the other hand, online campaigning does retain some of the core traits of prefiguration: it empowers the individual as a key campaigner, who is outside the scope of mass media and is capable of being heard upon producing and sharing content on digital media with relatively little mediation. Campaigners supporting political candidates also enact alternative communities—taking the shape of an online commons—whose members feel safe and welcome to share their political agendas, be they left-leaning or conservative, in line or out of step with a scientific consensus.

Just as media is deconstructed and rebuilt, languages are equally repoliticised in attempts to foster horizontal and inclusive communicative practices. Across the world, translators-activists gather in transnational collectives such as Translator Brigades and Tlaxcala to translate politically engaged articles and subtitle activists’ videos. Translating from hegemonic languages (such as English and French) into non-hegemonic and minority languages, such collectives make multilingual content available online and update activists on the fringe on what is happening elsewhere. Similarly, translating from non-hegemonic languages ensures that language minorities can be heard in activist spaces (Baker 2013, 2016). Relatedly, to fight linguistic discrimination in a different manner, an international collective of left-wing activists resorts to Esperanto—a non-national, easy-to-learn language—to materialise anti-national and anti-imperialist activist spaces. Through face-to-face meetings, mailing lists, and zines, this collective raises people’s awareness of how activism can only be effectively horizontal if everyone has the linguistic and technological means to be equally included in consensual decision-making processes (Fians 2021). Hence, prefigurative politics involve the creation of non-hegemonic communicative and media practices, giving voice and ears to potential participants.

Beyond occupied squares: communities, lifestyles, and the old left

As the aforementioned scholarship illustrates, social scientists have systematically associated prefigurative politics with the ‘movement of the squares’. This invites us to address David Snow’s call to ‘broaden our conceptualisation of social movements beyond contentious politics’ (2004, 19). One way to do so is by exploring prefigurative aspects of community-building, alternative lifestyles, and forms of activism that do not quite fit the New Left label.

First of all, the results of social experiments become more long-lasting when prefiguration meets community-building. This is the case, for instance, of eco-villages, whose participants prefigure their sought-after ecological imaginaries on a daily basis. Eco-villages enable their participants to bridge a consumerist wider society and more eco-friendly forms of sociality by collectively enacting sustainable lifestyles through organic farming and self-sufficiency (Casey et al. 2020). Along analogous lines, other forms of intentional communities—such as ashrams in India and Catholic communities in the UK (Firth 2019, 497)—gather people willing to live according to their spiritual and religious beliefs. This is largely in line with the aforementioned use of prefiguration by Augustine ([1470] 1998), as prefiguring links between spirituality and social justice relates to enacting a spiritually exemplary behaviour that would bring people closer to God and desired forms of spirituality.

A further remarkable illustration of prefiguration in community-building is the celebratory arts community Burning Man. Taking place once a year in the Black Rock Desert, in the US, Burning Man advertises itself as an ‘invitation to the future’. Starting in 1986, it progressively came to gather more than 60,000 participants who spend a week per year living in tents, joining concerts, and co-organising arts projects. While working together to prepare this festival with community-building ambitions, participants fight the perception of labour as alienating. By partly replacing commodification with ‘communification’ through their community-building practice, they infuse mundane labour with a meaning that emphasises one’s connection with the larger Burning Man collective of participants. This altered approach to labour bears long-lasting significance: after having experienced human relations otherwise, participants return to wider society with a renewed perception of how things can work, which eventually encourages them to try and reproduce some aspects of this short-lived experience over their year-long everyday lives (Chen 2016).

While eco-villages, ashrams, arts communities, and even kibbutzim (Simons and Ingram 2003) may be read as escapism, the building of intentional communities does not necessarily mean evading mainstream society. Even within urban settings, community forms such as cooperatives, social centres (Yates 2015b), free schools (Swidler 1979), and communes (Kanter 1972) provide people with the opportunity to temporarily step out of their hierarchical surroundings and join in more horizontal and participatory spaces. These, in turn, do not need to be face-to-face: on the internet, hackers jointly develop free and open-source software as a way of opposing proprietary intellectual property. Through online communities, like-minded activist-developers prefigure the ownership relations, work ethics, and creative aesthetics they envisage by exchanging programming expertise and the source codes they develop (Coleman 2013; Kelty 2008).

Apart from building communities, prefigurative practices can also aim at personal change as the primary means to foster social change. This is the case in lifestyle movements, made up of individuals who seek change by cultivating everyday behaviour in line with their political agendas. These include being vegetarian, reducing one’s carbon footprint, practising ethical consumption (Haenfler et al. 2012), or embracing alternative therapies. Popular psychology, self-help, new-age spiritualities, and mindfulness are recurrently regarded as depoliticising forces that promote conformism. Nevertheless, embodying values that make life meaningful otherwise can also be a political act; one that gives its practitioners a sense of agency amidst disillusionment with collective and institutional ways of fostering social change (Salmenniemi 2019).

Lastly, even though social movement scholarship often associates prefiguration with the post-1960s New Left, prefigurative practices are also present in left-wing parties, trade unions, and hierarchical pre-1960 labour movements. Seeking to explore how anarchist-inspired prefigurative practices have been adopted by a wide range of activists, Graeber (2002, 72; 2010) outlines what he calls ‘capital-A’ and ‘small-a’ anarchists. While the former tend to act within anarchist groups, the latter mobilise characteristically prefigurative practices despite not conceiving of themselves as anarchists—or even as activists.

Despite such practices not being limited to strictly anarchist groups and New Left movements, prefiguration continues being largely conceived of as a marker dividing the New Left from other forms of activism. Why, instead, do not we approach prefiguration as a perspective that highlights the self-exemplification and horizontality inherent in several social movements and forms of activism?

Partly addressing this point, Craig Calhoun (1993) argues that the novelty researchers often associate with the new social movements is analytically misleading, since the issues, strategies, and constituencies that distinguish the New Left and the ‘old lefts’ have been in place for at least two centuries. Ultimately, this leads to a critique of the concept of ‘new social movements’ itself. Cooperativism and the 1871 Paris Commune, for instance, involved activists that, when fighting for their causes, also prioritised the establishment of non-hierarchical relationships. Similarly, issues related to sexuality, lifestyles, women’s rights, and child labour may have become increasingly visible after 1968, but have run alongside class-based demands for centuries. Lastly, exceeding the left versus right divide, conservative movements also deploy prefiguration as a core strategy. This is the case of anti-abortion and white power activists in the US, many of whom are involved in the establishment of Aryan settlements whose residents and visitors receive paramilitary training and cherish white supremacist music and books (Futrell and Simi 2004).

These three forms of prefigurative politics—as a feature of intentional communities, a means to shift individual behaviour, and a building block of New Left, old left, and right-wing movements alike—foreground how pervasive such practices can be, and, therefore, how important it is to understand them.

Coming to a close—but not to conclude

Prefigurative politics—as well as anthropological approaches to it—invite us to rethink social life and its foundations. In placing participation, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action at the heart of the social values and practices to be addressed, prefiguration works by changing the world on a small scale. While revolutions foster macropolitical changes, prefigurative politics dwell on micropolitics. Reimagining society locally may not bring about immediate large-scale changes, but it models the society one seeks to build, thus informing its participants’ practices and ways of thinking beyond local activist settings. This work of imagination is not to be underestimated: as climate change, structural racism, and a global pandemic require shifts of mentality and behaviour, practices involving open dialogue, solidarity, and mutual support can provide us with alternative answers to issues that appear not to be sufficiently addressed by institutional politics.

Since most scholars exploring prefigurative politics seem sympathetic to it, there is a lack of studies on prefiguration’s antagonists, such as the police and mass media who frequently link anarchism with chaos and direct action with violence detached from clear political agendas. For similar reasons, few studies analyse prefiguration among old left and right-wing activists, which culminates in the aforementioned misapprehension of prefiguration as a strictly New Left strategy. Aside from helping us to better understand the present-oriented efforts to build alternative societies, learning about prefigurative politics also provides us with tools to experiment with grassroots initiatives in our everyday lives and in our academic discipline. Ultimately, would not action anthropology (Smith 2010) be in line with such horizontal and inclusive practices? Remaining true to prefiguration, it is better to just leave this and other questions open.

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Note on contributor

Guilherme Fians is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (Netherlands/USA). Guilherme’s current research project—on social movements, language politics, and digital media, with a focus on France—is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Esperantic Studies Foundation. In line with his commitment to multilingualism in academia, he has published and presented his research outcomes in English, Portuguese, French, German, and Esperanto.

Dr Guilherme Fians, Institute for Transnational and Spatial History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, KY16 9BA, St Andrews, United Kingdom, gmf7@st-andrews.ac.uk

Depression

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 18:40:59 +0000

Junko Kitanaka Stefan Ecks

Keio University & University of Edinburgh

Initially published 30 Mar 2021

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

Abstract:

Depression, which psychiatrists regard as a most common mental illness, has been examined by anthropologists especially closely since the 1980s. While most medical experts consider depression as a universal, neurobiological disease that requires a global public health intervention, anthropologists instead ask why the illness known in psychiatry as ‘depression’ appears to have been extremely rare in much of the world until very recently. They also investigate how a supposedly neurobiological disorder could possibly arise with increasing frequency in so many places in such a short time. Some anthropologists suggest that the apparent rise of depression is co-constituted by changes in diagnostic criteria, a medicalisation of normal distress, as well as the growing influence of the global pharmaceutical industry. They have questioned the assumption of a clear-cut border between normalcy and abnormalcy, illuminated depression’s social origins, and problematised the extension of medical power into spheres of life that used to lie beyond the reach of medicine. This entry shows how anthropologists investigated depression before and after its alleged global rise in the 1990s, and how this phenomenon can be understood as a cultural, historical product profoundly influenced by socioeconomic transformations of the current time.

Introduction

Depression, which psychiatrists define as a constellation of low energy, low self-worth, and low mood, has emerged as a global concern since the 1990s. Calculated in terms of disease burden through disability-adjusted life years (or DALYs), depression is deemed the world’s second most common disorder after cardiovascular disease (Murray et al. 2013). It reportedly affects more than 264 million people worldwide (Ritchie & Roser 2021). Most medical experts and epidemiologists consider depression to be a universal, neurobiological disease that requires a global public health intervention. Anthropologists, on the other hand, ask why the illness known in psychiatry as ‘depression’ appears to have been extremely rare in much of the world until very recently, and how a supposedly neurobiological disorder could possibly arise with increasing frequency in so many places in such a short time. Some anthropologists suggest that the apparent rise of depression is co-constituted by changes in diagnostic criteria, a medicalisation of normal distress, as well as the growing influence of the global pharmaceutical industry. Anthropologists tend to be critical of biologising perspectives that see moods and emotions as the same across the world, irrespective of cultural and social contexts (Ecks 2016).

This entry will survey some anthropological works on the subject before and after the alleged global rise of depression in the 1990s. The ascent of depression mirrors that of suicide, which was a global concern at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to its sustained epidemiological study and a theory of individual mental distress as a symptom of collective malady (Durkheim 1952 [1897]). The rise of depression at the turn of the twenty-first century has provided a fertile ground for new anthropological concepts and ethnographic approaches. This entry will show how anthropologists have frequently questioned the assumption of a clear-cut border between normalcy and abnormalcy, illuminated depression’s social origins, and problematised the extension of medical power into spheres of life that used to lie beyond the reach of medicine. Anthropologists tend to challenge biomedicine’s one-size-fits-all prescriptions for treatment and its underlying assumption that a person with symptoms of depression can be treated as an individualised and decontextualised being, cut off from social interactions and complex power relations (Kleinman & Good 1985). The entry also examines the historical implications of the current rise of depression by considering its relationship to wider socioeconomic transformations, including the neoliberalisation of selfhood.

Culture, gender, and situated biologies

If few psychiatrists dispute the universality of depression today, it was still a matter of debate in the mid-twentieth century, when the level of depression reported from most non-Western societies was low. Some psychiatrists even wondered if depression was a culture-bound Western illness, which they saw as reflecting a supposedly more mature and introspective Western self (see Littlewood & Dein 2000). This model of depression derives in part from the Western concept of melancholy that preceded it and that is rooted in Greco-Roman humoral medicine. Melancholy was not just a pathology, but was also seen as a source of reflexivity and creativity (Jackson 1986, Radden 2000). This line of thinking led some psychiatrists to assume that the relative lack of depression among non-Westerners was a sign of their immaturity and lack of insight, even a lack of Christian guilt, which made them immune to depression (see Littlewood & Dein 2000). One of them even echoed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theme of ‘noble savages’ in claiming in a WHO report that Africans were not prone to depression because of their ‘lack of responsibility’ (Carrothers 1953, cited in Beiser 1985: 273).

Residue from these racialised and ethnocentric ideas continued to be found in later twentieth century psychological and psychiatric discussions that depicted Westerners as introspective and intellectually articulate ‘psychologisers’ and non-Westerners as unreflexive and more instinctual ‘somatizers’ (see White 1982). They explained the relative absence of depression among non-Westerners in terms of their alleged incapability in recognising psychological distress, which would instead be expressed as bodily symptoms (for criticism, see White 1982 and Kirmayer 1999; Ecks 2013, Kleinman & Good 1985). Women and the working class tended to be depicted as ‘somatizers’ well into the late-twentieth century (see Kirmayer 1999), speaking to the continuing presence of gender, class, and ethnicity biases in the psychiatric discourse about depression.

Anthropologists made a case against conventional psychiatry by arguing for the ‘work of culture’ (Obeyesekere 1985). They showed that local habits and traditions, such as Buddhism, can protect people from depression by transforming negative affect into publicly acceptable narratives and symbols. In an influential yet controversial article, Gananath Obeyesekere (1985) discussed the case of a Sri Lankan man whom psychiatrists would diagnose with depression but who, in a Buddhist context, was revered for achieving enlightenment because he saw the world as full of suffering. No society distinguishes categorically between mental illness and health (Keyes 1985). Sorrow and grief are often linked with inner depth and dignity, not pathology (also see Good, Good & Moradi 1985). Given these alternative perspectives of experiencing the world, some anthropologists argued that the high rate of depression in the US was a product of an American ethnopsychology that prioritises the constant pursuit of happiness as a basic aim of human existence (Lutz 1985).

One important instance of historical and regional variations of depression is its gender ratio. Although depression today is said to affect women twice as much as men, even in the West at the turn of the twentieth century, elite men used to be depicted as more prone to depression (as an illness of reflexivity) than women. For women, a diagnosis of hysteria was more likely (Showalter 1985; Raden 2000; see also Metzl 2003). Cultural perceptions of women in distress, and the ways in which people perceive and engage with these women, are associated with regional prevalence of depression, along with symptom-reporting and help-seeking behaviours. For example, postpartum depression is a major public health issue in the US and Europe, but it is not universally discussed or even recognised elsewhere. Anthropologists have found that a social and ritual structuring of the postpartum period protects women from depression. This structuring includes ‘1) protective measures and rituals reflecting the presumed vulnerability of the new mother; 2) social seclusion; 3) mandated rest; 4) assistance in tasks from relatives and mid-wives; and 5) social recognition through rituals, gifts, etc. of the new social status of the mother’ (Stern & Kruckman 1983: 1039). The authors also suggested that regional differences in prevalence might stem from the fact that most cases of postpartum depression are mild, not psychotic, and that such milder forms of depression are more easily shaped by cultural influences (Stern & Kruckman 1983).

In a study that introduced the influential concept of ‘local biologies’ (later redefined as ‘situated biologies’), Margaret Lock (1993) argued that experiences of disease and illness need to be understood as products of interplay between individual biology and sociocultural environment. Lock noted a statistical anomaly in the WHO’s cross-national depression survey, which reported that Japan not only showed lower rates of depression than its Western counterparts but that it was the only country included in the survey where slightly more men than women appeared to suffer from depression (Sartorius & WHO 1983). She explored this epidemiological puzzle by researching women at menopausal age in Japan and North America, and argued that an individual’s genetics, lifestyle (including diet), social environment, and culture interact to create vastly different experiences of aging. Combining epidemiological and ethnographic methodologies, Lock also showed that the lower rate of depression among menopausal Japanese women was because they did not recognise ‘depression’ as such, and regarded menopause as part of a natural aging process. Importantly, the women in Lock’s study, even those in trying socioeconomic circumstances, kept telling her that their suffering was insignificant, that they were even ‘fortunate’, when compared to their own mothers, who had survived WWII and its aftermath. This cultural, collective rendering of their suffering seemed to protect women from medicalisation, which would have turned natural processes of living and aging into matters for biomedical intervention.

The studies mentioned so far show that individual biologies are heterogeneous as they are formed out of particular local contexts, which also intersect with local politics of recognition and legitimisation of people’s distress. Examining how certain symptoms and certain types of suffering elicit more sympathy and concern from others, anthropologists help to explain differences in prevalence rates of depression as well as in health-seeking behaviours and care provision. In Lock’s study, for example, local politics that had an important, protective aspect for many women in distress also meant that the suffering of some other women, who did experience severe symptoms of menopause or depression, was often rendered invisible and left untreated, increasing their physiological and psychological pain. Given that cultural discourse can be a double-edged sword, anthropologists pay close attention to the fact that local forces do not have the same effects on all people. At the same time, reducing depression to these women’s physiological differences and/or neurochemical imbalances would be to omit, among other things, the socioeconomic environment and local gender politics that structure their distress in the first place^.[1]

Distress, misunderstandings, and the politics of psychiatry

Recognising that people in much of the world experience and express their distress by means other than the psychiatric concept of depression, anthropologists from the 1980s began employing the notion of ‘idioms of distress’ as culturally diverse ways of expressing psychosocial distress (Nichter 1981). This concept has proven highly productive for clinicians as well, as the term ‘idiom’ does not presuppose pathology and can be used to capture a wide range of local experiences, symptomatology, and help-seeking behaviours that might previously have gone unnoticed (see Lewis-Fernando & Kirmayer 2019). Mapping out regional idioms, anthropologists found depression-like experiences expressed in a wide range of descriptions of nervous conditions such as ‘nervos’ in South America, ‘nerve exhaustion’ in East Asia, as well as other psychophysiological idioms like ‘heart distress’ in the Middle East. They noted how common these depression-like symptoms were across cultures when they included somatic expressions of psychosocial distress, leading them to question the definition—based in Western psychiatry’s mind-body dualism—that defines depression predominantly as a disease of the mind (also see Marsella 1982, Kleinman 1988, Ecks 2021).

National politics and state medical systems also help shape distinctive forms of medicalisation. In a pioneering work on this topic, Arthur Kleinman’s ethnography of China (1986) showed how a particular Chinese usage of ‘neurasthenia’ (a psychiatric term for depression-like symptoms common at the turn of the twentieth century) emerged in the 1980s as part of a powerful, state-sanctioned discourse, unthreatening to the political status quo. Showing how people used this idiom to channel their anger against injustice suffered during and after the Cultural Revolution, Kleinman proposed an analysis of medicalisation that moved beyond the idea of a top-down process of labelling and social control by medical professionals. Instead, he demonstrated how medicalisation can be a bottom-up process, where people’s desire for social recognition of their suffering is intrinsically linked with state/biomedical legitimisation, which together produce an ambivalent form of liberation and empowerment for those in distress (cf. Yang 2018 on the official, individualising usage of ‘depression’ in China today).

Local notions of depression do not merely remain at the level of popular or folk knowledge but in fact shape and are shaped by professional psychiatry, which shows remarkable regional variation. This became apparent when a US-UK comparative study (Kendell et al. 1971) showed that, given the same set of symptoms, American psychiatrists were far more likely to diagnose schizophrenia while their British counterparts were more likely to diagnose manic-depression. Such differences in localised theories and practices are also expressed in the varying ‘prototypes’ of depression, or psychiatric ideas about what or who constitutes a ‘typical’ case (Young 1995). The typical subject of depression in Japanese psychiatric literature, which developed in close dialogue with the German psychiatric concept of typus melancholicus, has long been regarded as a burned-out white-collar worker, in sharp contrast to the North American psychoanalytic prototype of depression as an illness of melancholic housewives (Kitanaka 2012). Even at the level of hard scientific terms, depression is a malleable, multifaceted idea, and psychiatric language remains inextricable from the reality that it co-creates the illnesses it attempts to represent (Foucault 1973 [1961], Hacking 1999).

The heterogeneous nature of depression at the local level often goes unaddressed in biomedicine, in part due to the division between medical science and psychiatric practice (Young 1995, Luhrmann 2000). As Allan Young (1995) has shown, medical science, at its core, depends on a paradigmatic ‘style of reasoning’ (Hacking 1982) with a remarkably stable body of knowledge and ideologies about objectivity and universality; clinical medicine, on the other hand, remains protean and multiplicitous, working in tandem with local knowledge and discourse. A scientific style of reasoning provides practitioners with a sense of stability, order, and coherence via an understanding that not all scientific facts have equal ‘truth’ values (Gilbert & Mulkay 1984, Young 1995). Scientific psychiatry (i.e. research-based, academic psychiatry) emanates from only a handful of European and North American power centres and spreads to the ‘periphery’, while clinical psychiatry frequently remains a ‘local knowledge’, rarely traveling to the knowledge-production centres of scientific psychiatry (Cohen 1995). Communication is mostly unidirectional, and when medical science further distances the data from the world of local clinical practice, patients’ individual stories are replaced by fragments of voiceless material bodies in the laboratory. At this stage, the lack of dialogue between scientific psychiatry and local practice becomes more gravely problematic (Young 1995).

Given the power asymmetries in scientific psychiatry, ‘discovering’ depression in the non-West and imposing a decontextualised and universalised Western concept of depression on these societies may amount to a ‘category fallacy’. That is, it may give seemingly universal legitimacy to a culturally constructed concept and its use among those engaged in cross-cultural research (Kleinman 1977, Lutz 1985). Kleinman (1988) cites Obeyesekere (1985) in discussing the culture-bound syndrome among Southeast Asian men called dhat, a feared ‘semen loss’ that results in draining energy and weakness (Ecks 2013). Kleinman and Obeyesekere show how absurd it would seem to Westerners for psychiatry to adopt the concept, standardise it, train psychiatrists globally to correctly diagnose it, educate the public about it, and work with pharmaceutical companies to invent and market a drug for it. To most observers, this would create unnecessary anxiety and a desire for therapeutic treatment for an illness that does not exist as such. Yet when it comes to Western psychiatric concepts such as depression, a similar process is normalised and might even be praised as a form of medical humanitarianism. This is because depression is regarded by the Western psychiatric establishment as a ‘real’ phenomenon, but semen loss is not. Psychiatry has also been criticised for depending on databases mostly developed with and for the ‘mainstream population in Western societies’ (i.e. ‘middle class whites’) and naively applying it to all other people (Kleinman 1988: xii). Given such subtle but important power disparities, the anthropologist’s job is to attend to differences and ask how local knowledge is produced and what remains ‘local’, how local and global psychiatry might communicate with one another, and how local psychiatric concepts might influence the production of global and scientific psychiatric knowledge (Cohen 1995; also see Pentecost et al. forthcoming).

Globalised depression

Sensitivity to local differences has become more important than ever with the global rise of depression since the 1990s. Previously understood as a culture-bound syndrome of the West, depression has become regarded by many as a universal disease of epidemic proportions. This change was brought about partly by the broadening of the concept of depression in the DSM-III (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, published in 1980), the development and marketing of a new generation of antidepressants, and the movement for global mental health. As anthropologists working in places where depression used to be rare witnessed its sudden rise, they began documenting the ‘making of depression’ on the ground, or the process by which a constellation of low energy, low self-worth, and low mood comes to be regarded as a clinical symptom and then a disease. In analysing these processes, they have often used Ian Hacking's (1995) notion of a ‘looping effect’ in which people’s experience living with the label of depression alters how they experience the condition itself. As the label is more frequently applied, people appear to change in ways that affect both how depression is classified and how people describe and live with it (Hacking 1999). Such changes prompt us to wonder if psychiatric globalisation serves to erase regional theories and homogenises understandings of depression.

Initially, many social scientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers were particularly concerned about the global spread of antidepressants even to areas where depression had not been widely recognised. They noted that pharmaceutical companies carefully tailored their marketing strategies to cultural contexts by employing the most effective local idioms of distress in promoting antidepressants. Thus, they spoke of ‘mind food’ in India and of ‘a cold of the soul’ in Japan (Ecks 2013; Kirmayer 2004, Applbaum 2006). Critics worried that the aggressive marketing of pills like Prozac might serve to replace pre-existing local understandings with biomedicalised approaches to depression. This, they thought, might instil a concept of a neurochemical self (Rose 2007), making people think that ‘we are our brains’, possibly impoverishing our understanding of human nature (see Vidal & Ortega 2017; also see anthropological critiques of neurobiology and how to integrate it with an ecological perspective in Raikhel 2015). Such biological reductionism, occurring in the era of neoliberalism, might further create ‘happy’ productive workers, who voluntarily soothed their dissent with pills in exchange for the illusion of control.

However, anthropologists have since discovered that both lay people and diagnosed patients are usually not fully persuaded by such biological reductionism (Vidal & Ortega 2017, Elliott 2003). Therapeutic effects of drugs do not just rely on neurochemical change but also on cultural attitudes (Rose 2007: 100; Ecks forthcoming). While American discourse initially suggested that people could recover their ‘true selves’ through the use of antidepressant medications (Kramer 1993), in Argentina, antidepressants were offered as treatment for symptoms which were understood to be political and economic ills (Lakoff 2005). In India, psychiatrists linked antidepressants with widespread cultural notions around nutrition, digestion, and somatic balance, encouraging patients to see them as moner khabar (‘mind food’; Ecks 2013). In Pelotas, Brazil, economically-poorer youth tended to use antidepressants for longer periods and in a long-standing interpretive frame that encouraged them to subtly internalise the assumption that their psyches are inherently weak and immature. In contrast, middle-class youth used antidepressants to temporarily facilitate the crucial work of refashioning a resilient internal self. These different uses served to reinforce long-standing views of the psychological inferiority of marginalised populations (Béhague 2015). These wide-ranging discourses surrounding antidepressant use demonstrate that, despite its globalisation, depression continues to be a localised ‘polysemic symbol’ (Barrett 1988: 375) in which ‘various meanings and values are condensed into a syndrome’ (Lock & Nguyen 2010: 73).

Even in the US, where antidepressants like Prozac were initially hailed as magic happiness pills during the 1990s, scepticism grew about whether it was wise to even try to achieve such constant happiness. Leading psychiatrists began to debate whether the pharmaceuticalisation of everyday distress might render people less tolerant of negative emotions such as sorrow and grief, leading to what Allen Frances, the chairman of DSM-IV, called the ‘loss of sadness’ (Frances 2013). Many critics are concerned about how the loss of what was previously considered ‘normal’ sadness could weaken the traditional resources people have used to confront hardship or loss (for example Elliott & Chambers 2004). This debate was heightened when a crucial clause in the DSM-5, which used to make an exception for bereavement in the diagnosis of depressive disorder, was altered. Since 2013, even people dealing with a loved one's death can receive a diagnosis of depression (Ecks forthcoming). As Kleinman and others have argued, no reliable scientific evidence exists that can determine how long a 'normal' bereavement period should be (Kleinman 2012). These psychiatrists warn that when even grief is made an object of pharmaceutical intervention, resulting social pressure means pharmaceutical treatment of depression is normalised.

The recognition of the limitation of pharmaceutical cures has led to the flourishing of other psychosocial interventions and local reflections about the nature of depression. In post-dictatorship Chile, both antidepressants and group psychotherapies are offered to the poor as part of the National Depression Treatment Program, aimed to combat the world’s second highest prevalence of depression. Clara Han (2012) shows, however, that women living in poverty see such neuropsychological intervention as little more than a temporary respite with little efficacy for solving their everyday struggles. As these women bear the burden of redeeming themselves both from the nation’s traumatic past and the economic precarity brought on by radical monetary policies, they discuss depression as embodying the interconnectedness of domestic troubles, debts, and social insecurity, problems for which neuropsychology has little to offer (Han 2012). Similarly, in Iran, depression has served as an idiom for working through generational traumas, where the past memories of the revolution and international conflicts are woven together to express today’s collective and personal predicaments (Behrouzan 2016). The rise of psychotherapy in Mexico (Duncan 2018) and China (Zhang 2020) since the 2000s has helped cultivate people’s desire for an ‘entrepreneurial self’, even as it seems to also generate a space for reflecting on the psychological toll that this new self may bring. These regional discourses about depression suggest that medicalisation can provide a ‘structural possibility’ (Corin 1998) for people to detach from and reflect on pathogenic cultural expectations and to effect important social transformations.

Signs of profound structural changes can be found in areas where depression has been widely debated as an illness of labour and a problem of productivity at the national level (on economy and depression, see the classic sociological work by Brown & Harris (1978). The increasing number of distressed workers in Finland sparked a public concern as it was seen as a sign of the decline of the welfare state (Funahashi 2021). A diagnosis of depression has become a weapon of the weak for signalling their socioeconomic precarity and social pathology in Italy, where the debate about workplace bullying and workers’ psychopathology, including depression, arose. As people place the blame on neoliberalism, which they see as destroying their culture of safeguarded work, ‘mobbing experts’ are engaged to diagnose and intervene into the high stress level of the workplace, paving a way for a solution at an organisational, structural level (Mole 2010). The national debate regarding ‘overwork depression’ and ‘overwork suicide’ in Japan has turned these diagnoses into powerful tools workers and families can use to highlight the dire cost of work stress and emotional labour on their health. After medico-legal debates about the exact cause of depression—whether it is a problem of workers’ neuropsychological vulnerability or a pathogenic environment—the government has changed labour policies to remedy the psychologically toxic work environment. At the same time, work is seen as both a cause and a cure for depression, as new forms of surveillance technologies and occupational therapies have emerged as ways for managing and recovering the depressed (Kitanaka 2012; also see Bowen forthcoming on the near-absence of depression among ‘occupational mental disorders’ in Chile).

Global therapeutics: quantified selves, resilience, and anonymous care

The advent of digital psychiatry is shaping a global platform for the prevention of depression. This also raises concerns about novel forms of biomedical surveillance. While recording one’s moods has long been part of a psychiatric treatment for depression (Martin 2007), the accessibility of digital technologies today is encouraging more and more people to keep track of their biorhythms, cognitive patterns, behavioural habits, and moods (Ecks forthcoming). Digitalised neuropsychological management and interventions now include computer software that can quantify stress via heart rate through interaction with input devices. These prevention and early intervention technologies expand the number of people who begin to identify with the idea of the ‘quantified self’, which refers to both self-tracking technology and the community of users of such tools (Lupton 2016). While these tools can be empowering for those who want to be in control of their own health, such technologies might have the effect of taking depressed people out of the emotional realm and the particular social contexts where they feel their symptoms, and relocate them to the public, quantifiable realm of human engineering and rational management (Kitanaka 2015). Compared to previous forms of therapeutics technologies that often incorporate historical reflections on the nature of one’s predicament, these digitalised systems of state/corporate/market ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 1990, Foucault et al. 1988) are far from engaging with social origins of depression and largely remain at the level of merely encouraging individual transformation (cf. Borovoy & Zhang 2017). The spread of such therapeutic/surveillance technologies prompts us to ask whether they will end up reshaping social understandings of depression within the discursive limits of biopsychiatry, with its tendency to depoliticise illnesses and promote ideologies of individual responsibility and commodified health (cf. Comaroff 1982, Gordon 1988; also see Lovell & Susser 2014.).

Enhancement technologies for the depressed are another facet of emerging global therapeutics. To keep patients from developing depression and to help them recover from it, medical professionals based in the world’s power centres increasingly emphasise resilience, a seemingly benign concept, as well as ‘resilience training’, with the stated aim of rendering people better able to handle stress. Particularly in the US, the military promotes positive psychology through resilience training and encourages soldiers to adopt a positive attitude as a tool for becoming more psychologically ‘fit’ (MacLeish 2013). Resilience glamorises the individual’s transcendental power, which creates a potent lure for adopters. At the same time, it renders people’s ability to independently recover from distress and live healthy lives into a therapeutically managed process. Young points out that handling everyday stress is being redefined as ‘something to be achieved with the help of experts’, so much so that resilience might, before long, ‘displace effortless “normality” as the default condition of human life’ (2012, 2014). Emily Martin (2007) shows how even mania, the opposite pole of depression, is now fetishised and commodified in corporate America as a source of creativity and high productivity. As some companies offer training to boost both one’s manic power while maintaining healthy mood cycles, mood disorders like depression may become an entry point to one’s subjectivity for experts promoting the further corporatisation of psychological health (also see Chua (2011) on resilience training for suicidal youths in Kerala).

As suicide is said to kill one person every 40 seconds,^[2] treating depression as a way of preventing suicide has also become an urgent global issue. Globalising suicide prevention programs often take a universal form, despite the fact that their efficacy at the local level is often left unexamined. Problematising this and illuminating the high rates of suicide in the Canadian Arctic, Lisa Stevenson (2014) investigates the persistently high rate of suicide among Inuit youths, in particular, despite all the care that is given to them. Going beyond psychiatric conceptualisations of suicide and tracing Canada’s history of ‘welfare colonialism’, she identifies one problematic factor in care services driven by mechanical, bureaucratic rationality—what Stevenson refers to as ‘anonymous care’—whereby ‘it doesn’t matter who you are, just that you stay alive’ (Stevenson 2014: 7, emphasis in original). Questioning this form of humanitarianism, she criticises the global suicide prevention programs that seek to define at-risk populations and provide a set of protocols that would enable volunteer carers to deal with suicidal individuals at a distance, without needing to invest themselves in the specificity of those individuals’ suffering. The distance and anonymity afforded through this approach provides a certain freedom for both parties, but it also renders the suffering individual into a depersonalised ‘case’. Stevenson discusses how these Inuit youths, a group all too often regarded as a ‘problem’ to begin with and who are ultimately not well served by the humanitarian care provided to them, come to see in suicide a ‘leap into another way of being in time’ (Stevenson 2014: 147)—and asks how they can begin to reconstruct themselves in an alternative regime of life, one that recognises other ways of living and dying (also see O’Nell 1996; Davis 2012, Garcia 2010, Meyers 2013).

Depression and neoliberal selfhood

In asking what might be the universal implications of the global spread of depression, let us take a step back and ponder the broader historical meaning of the rise of the neuropsychological management of the self. Sociologist Alain Ehrenberg (2010) argues that depression is the typical disorder of the current era. Ehrenberg’s analysis focuses on understandings of mental illnesses from the 1900s to the 2000s. Social relations have changed from more hierarchical to more egalitarian, with a more equal distribution of wealth and status. In the 1900s, the prototypical mental conflicts came from struggles with authority and from deviance from clearly defined social norms. Conflicts lay between people. Since the second half of the twentieth century, flattening social hierarchies enhanced inner conflicts about motivation and decisiveness. Since then, conflicts lie within people's own selves. Ehrenberg describes how, today, all decision-making has to be done by oneself, within oneself. In other words, the rise of depression has to do with this fatigued self at a time one has to make so many decisions (Ehrenberg 2010: 223).

Building on Ehrenberg’s argument, Stefan Ecks (forthcoming) analyses the new regime of ‘neoliberal self’ that serves to extend market competition within the self. According to Ecks, neoliberalism accelerates the dual process of fewer social distinctions coupled with an intensified drive at self-enhancement and becoming an entrepreneur. In earlier forms of capitalism, the goal of all this striving was the accumulation of capital through ascetic self-denial (Weber 2010 [1904/05]). In neoliberalism, the goal is not self-denial but self-satisfaction, even its maximisation. Homo economicus replaces outside partners of exchange with his own inner self (Foucault 2008: 226; Rose 1990; Brijnath & Antoniades 2016; Hardt & Negri 2017; Martin 2007). As the self takes itself as its own competitor in a market for getting the best deal from every moment of life (Scharff 2016), this creates a pathogenic condition where one feels that one can never do enough, never improve enough. Slow or stalled decision-making becomes a dreaded symptom; inability to act becomes a pathology of the current era (Leykin & DeRubeis 2010), which may have contributed to the global rise of depression.

The global desire for therapeutics from depression is thus a search for a new form of psychological governance. Ecks (forthcoming) argues how depression’s main symptoms—of devaluing oneself, devaluing one’s life possibilities, and having no motivation or energy to enhance life—all go together in this new regime of self. He points out that, just as much as sadness, depression is associated with being numb and without emotional sensitivity. As emotions guide decisions, they literally move the person ‘out’ from where they are. The numbing of emotions makes deciding harder, not easier. To live is to value, and to value means to feel, with the whole body, that one thing is better than another thing (Ecks forthcoming). The numbness of emotion is also another symptom, where affective indifference can lead to indecisiveness (Ratcliff 2015). Thus a recovery from depression involves recovering emotions, and all forms of therapy involve giving people the belief that they can heal and that alternatives to the current impasse exist (Csordas 2002; Hinton & Kirmayer 2017). As the feeling of hopelessness is related to not being able to imagine a better future, or to believe that improvement could be possible, recovering from depression means regaining the ability to see different possibilities for action as possible. How such therapeutics can be made available is a question that needs further investigation.

Conclusion

The global medicalisation of the concept of depression points to the ‘maximum universality’ of depression, whereby it has become an object of biopsychological, scientific investigation. At the same time, it highlights depression’s extreme heterogeneity (Ehrenberg 2010: 74). As a result of the plasticity of the notion of depression, it has been subjected to widely varying local interpretations and responses. Psychiatry has largely aligned itself with the universalist stance, emphasising genetic and neurobiological research and promoting methodological individual reductionism. Anthropology, in contrast, illuminates the vast variation of depression experiences across time and space, thereby providing a key counterpoint to reductionistic psychiatric views on causality and personhood (Kleiman 1988, Kirmayer 1999). The fact that biomedicine as a whole has shifted away from simplistic models of genetic determinism (Lock & Pálsson 2016, Rose 2018) suggests possibilities for collaborative engagement between psychiatry and anthropology that may encompass both biological and sociocultural views of depression (Kirmayer et al. 2015).

Anthropologists, with their historically strong interest in local life worlds and native points of view, have shed light on dimensions of depression that may not be easily accessible through a psychiatric lens. Such perspectives are becoming more important than ever given the politics of medicalisation today, as a multiplicity of social actors and institutions including psychiatrists, lawmakers, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and NGOs all exert their own ideas as to the nature of depression and how best to respond to it. This heterogeneity of views on depression—and indeed on human nature—provide the backdrop to anthropological research on the subject that is at once multifaceted and nuanced. As depression allows no easy answers to questions about its causality or effective cures but seems to touch more and more people as part of the spread of capitalism, it will continue to be an important focus for further investigation and ethnographic engagement.

Note

Parts of this paper are adopted from Kitanaka (2012). Junko Kitanaka’s further research was funded by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 19K01205.

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Note on contributors

Junko Kitanaka, is a professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Human Sciences, Faculty of Letters, at Keio University in Tokyo. Her book Depression in Japan: psychiatric cures for a society in distress (2012, Princeton University Press) has won the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize in 2013 and has been translated into French. She has served on the Board of the American Society for Medical Anthropology and numerous editorial boards, including Cultural Anthropology. She is currently working on new projects on dementia, preventive psychiatry, and the medicalisation of the lifecycle.

Professor Junko Kitanaka, Department of Human Sciences, Faculty of Letters, Keio University, 2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8345 Japan. junko.kitanaka@keio.jp

Stefan Ecks co-founded Edinburgh University’s Medical Anthropology programme. He teaches social anthropology and directs postgraduate teaching in the School of Social & Political Sciences. He did ethnographic fieldwork in India, Nepal, and the UK. Recent work explores value in global pharmaceutical markets, changing ideas of mental health in South Asia, poverty and access to health care, as well as multimorbidity. Publications include Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (New York, 2013), Living Worth: Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets (forthcoming), as well as many journal articles on the intersections between health and economics.

Dr Stefan Ecks, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK. secks@ed.ac.uk

[1] See Neitzke 2016 for a critique of the harm of biological reductionism in research on women and depression.

[2] Suicide: one person dies every 40 seconds. World Health Organization. News release. 9 September 2019 (available on-line: https://www.who.int/news/item/09-09-2019-suicide-one-person-dies-every-40-seconds).

Sport

Felix Stein — Tue, 14 May 2019 12:33:54 +0000

Niko Besnier Susan Brownell

University of Amsterdam and University of Missouri-St. Louis

Initially published 14 May 2019

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

Abstract:

Activities that one can retrospectively label as ‘sport’ have probably been part of human beings’ repertoire for millennia, but sports as we know them today are the product of a modernity that arose from the late eighteenth century at the juncture of civil society, industrial capitalism, muscular Christianity, and the colonial expansion of North Atlantic states. Today, it is deeply intertwined with neoliberal capital, media technology, and neocolonial relations between the Global South and the Global North, as well as structures of inequality within nation-states in the Global North. Despite its neglect as an anthropological subject, sport under all its guises, from its effect on individual bodies to its spectacular manifestations in the rituals of mega-events, is a perfect object for an anthropological analysis inspired by ritual theory, exchange theory, feminist anthropology, and ethnographic approaches to globalization.

Sport in anthropology

All humans have probably engaged in sport-like activities since time immemorial, and today’s sports events and massive infrastructures are simply the latest permutation of a relationship amongst sport, spectacle, and political power that harks back to antiquity in the Greek Olympic Games, Roman gladiator games and chariot races, and Mesoamerican ball court games. Throughout the world and across the centuries, humans have engaged in rule-governed activities that exhibit certain features, the relative importance of which varies considerably across societies and contexts. These features include skill, physical exertion, sociality, pleasure, chance, theatricality, and competition. The task of surveying sport cross-culturally is hampered by the problem that the term ‘sport’ describes a category of activities that only coalesced in the West in the nineteenth century and was then carried around the globe by Western colonialism and imperialism and later globalization (Guttmann 1994). Many languages did not have a term with an equivalent semantic value until they borrowed it from a European language (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: 3).

Today, the category is highly contested because being defined as a sport makes an activity eligible for official recognition by powerful international sports organizations; these organizations, in turn, defend the borders of their membership by constantly revising their definition of sport. The two international sports organizations with the broadest multi-sport representation and greatest global influence, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the General Association of International Sport Federations (SportAccord), emphasise that sport should be characterised first and foremost by competition, reflecting contemporary popular understandings in the West. For heuristic purposes, we follow this dominant usage here, while acknowledging that thinking of competition as central to sport may impose a Western view on activities that their local practitioners may understand differently.

Understanding competition as central to sport implies that sport is typically enacted in public events underpinned by complex social organization, with the events being the most visible part of the total phenomenon. Behind the scenes, however, there may be a great deal of sport-like non-competitive physical activity, such as athletes’ daily practice routines. In other contexts, such as the fitness practices that have become widespread throughout the world since the 1980s, competition may not be central to most practitioners, although these practices can potentially be codified into sports such as competitive aerobics. Moreover, even the concept of competition is not straightforward, since in some societies competitions are ‘fixed’ to conform to their social organizations. For example, ritualised footraces, archery, and wrestling reinforced the authority of kings among the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and Hittites (Scanlon 2012). In the 1950s, the Gahuku-Gama of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea played a sport loosely based on rugby to settle disputes, and the game ended in a draw when elders, watching from the sidelines, deemed the dispute solved (Read 1965: 190). In Afghanistan in the 1970s, khans (leaders) hosted buzkashi, a horseback game in which riders compete to seize the carcass of a dead goat and carry it to a goal; the scores were decided by debate, and often the most powerful khan won the debate (Azoy 2011). In games of cricket in the Trobriand Islands in the 1970s, the home team always won (Leach 1976).

Late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeologists had embraced sports as a hallmark feature of ‘Western civilization’ because of the prominent place that Greek games in ancient Olympia and Roman gladiator games in the Coliseum occupied in the archaeological record. But the attempt to arrive at a definition of sport is an anachronism influenced by the fact that the global reach of activities labelled as ‘sport’ today means that what counts or doesn’t count as such is laden with social, cultural, political, and economic repercussions that did not exist in previous epochs. Rather than seeking to establish an all-encompassing definition, anthropological approaches are attentive to the questions of when a particular activity qualifies or not as a sport, for whom, and to what end.

A heated debate amongst historians has centred on whether the keeping of records is found in any other historical or cultural contexts, or whether it defined modern sport (Guttmann 2004). Indeed, the use of the English term ‘sport’ to denote an athletic activity governed by rules of competition first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1860s, almost simultaneously with the concept of the sports record (Mandell 1976). But the definition of ‘record’ has also proven to be problematic: there are multiple examples of individuals being ranked by their number of victories in such diverse cultural contexts as the ancient pan-Hellenic Games and weightlifting in nineteenth-century Edo Japan. In societies without standardised measurements or timekeeping, it was difficult or impossible to measure sports records in ways we take for granted today. Efforts at record-keeping and quantification for purposes of comparison may not be modern, but what is decidedly modern is the keeping of local, national, world, and other such records that reflect the bureaucratic structure of modern society since the nineteenth century.

Until recently, sport was a much more common topic of enquiry in history and sociology than in anthropology. In 1985, Kendall Blanchard and Alyce Cheska made the first attempt to define an anthropological approach to sport in The anthropology of sport: an introduction. They took a multiple subfield approach and ran through a list of archaeological, biological, and cultural theories and concepts that could be applied to sports. The cultural approach was functionalist, i.e. seeking to explain the existence of a feature in terms of the need it is supposed to meet, and did not have the benefit of the feminist, postmodern, and critical cultural studies that were then getting underway in the discipline, so the ideas presented in the book were quickly considered outdated. A pioneer sport ethnographer was Alan Klein, who documented baseball in the Dominican Republic (1991, 2014) and the U.S.–Mexico border (1997) as well as bodybuilding in Los Angeles (1993). By the twenty-first century, the number of ethnographically informed works on sport had increased significantly (for example, Carter 2011; Dyck 2012; Joo 2012; Kelly 2018; Laviolette 2011; Starn 2011; Thangaraj 2015).

One reason for the increase was that, more than ever before, sport plays an important role in people’s everyday lives as well as in economics and politics. Another was that sport operates on multiple scales, from intimate aspects of people’s lives to mega-events that bring together the entire world, such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup. Sport is therefore a particularly attractive field to ask how people’s local lives are intertwined with global processes, a question that stands at the centre of anthropology in the twenty-first century. It is also a productive lens through which anthropologists have studied other important questions about the nature of contemporary society and culture, such as the role of nationalism, changing norms of gender and sexuality, and the growing role that particular forms of capitalism play in our everyday activities.

The emergence of modern sport

In nineteenth-century Europe, many forms of sport-like activities preceded the emergence of modern sport. They had unwritten, locally specific rules and particular versions bore only a loose resemblance to others. In the 1840s, standardised ballgames emerged, primarily in elite British public schools, but for several decades their rules were unstable and they coexisted with the localised games of the working classes (Kitching 2015). By the 1880s, national sport associations had codified the rules of most sports as we know them today and two institutions – clubs and schools – quickly began carrying them around the world along with colonialism and imperialism. School sports became part and parcel of industrial capitalism as schools in Britain and Switzerland used them to attract the sons of the British old rank-based and new money-based elites. Club sports followed as the now-grown sons established them wherever they settled as they expanded their global industrial footprint (Lanfranchi & Taylor 2001).

Local sports were incorporated into local, national, regional, and international systems that imitated the layers of the political structures emerging at the same time. Modern sports took shape alongside the rise of the nation-state, incorporating rites of nationalism such as flag raising, anthem singing, and parades, as is still evident at many sporting events. National athletic unions that oversaw multiple sports appeared in the last third of the nineteenth century. Although the events they organised were new, they were legitimated by grounding them in a romanticised past, a process that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) call the ‘invention of tradition’. This was the case of the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, which was fuelled by the idealization of classical Greece that had accompanied the rise of modern democracy.

Nationalism existed in an uneasy relationship with ethnicity. Folk sports that were standardised and incorporated into the emerging national structures – such as the national school system, the club or professional sport system – held a higher status and were carried abroad along with colonial and imperial projects. Non-Western sports and the sports of ethnic minorities in the West were at a disadvantage. In 1964 judo was the first sport of non-Western origin to enter the Olympic Games (it did not become an official sport until 1972): often hailed as a ‘traditional oriental’ sport, it was actually invented in the 1880s by combining principles of Western physical education with Japanese martial arts (Niehaus 2006). The Chinese martial art of wushu was not accepted onto the program for the Beijing 2008 Olympics despite the heavy pressure that the Chinese government exerted on the IOC (Brownell 2012a). For many ethnic sports, the price of exclusion from the international sport system is a concomitant exclusion from their national sport system, resulting in lack of funding, exclusion from school physical education, and the declining interest of younger generations. A few ethnically marked sports such as judo, wushu and Thai kickboxing (Muay Thai) have managed to thrive and spread internationally; others, such as traditional wrestling in Senegal and India, or kabaddi in India, have maintained a national fan base on account of their intense identification with national and ethnic identities (Hann 2018; Alter 1992, 2000). Generally, however, Western cultural imperialism has replaced local sports with sports of Western origin throughout the world.

The disseminators of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and North American sports were fervent adherents of muscular Christianity, a form of Protestantism that idealised athleticism, virility, and discipline. They also firmly believed in their own superiority as white men, and used sport to justify masculinism, nationalism, and colonialism (Mangan 1981). In the US sphere of influence, particularly East Asia, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), offered sports to young men (and to a lesser extent women) to convert them to Christianity (Gems 2006). Arguably, their more lasting contribution to world history was not the diffusion of Christianity but the diffusion of British and North American sports, particularly rugby, football, and cricket (spread by the British), and baseball and basketball (spread by North Americans).

Well into the twentieth century, sport was deeply entangled with European colonialism and American imperialism. The racist ideology that undergirded colonialism and slavery extended into sport and generated the enduring stereotype of the ‘natural athlete’ who possesses physical prowess adapted to his ‘savage’ existence, although this stereotype had its opponents among those who believed in the physical superiority of the ‘civilized’ white man (Brownell 2008). Anthropologists have long rejected that race is a biological category and demonstrated that race is a subjective interpretation of people’s superficial appearance, and these interpretations shape the reality of individuals being judged. Individuals may be naturally predisposed to certain forms of physical activity, but to say that entire groups are is nonsensical, because sports skills are the product of individual life histories shaped by social opportunities (Marks 2008: 395).

In schools, the military, and the police, colonisers taught sports to the colonised so as to instil in them what they considered civilised values. Later, however, sport became a conduit for decolonization as the colonised appropriated sport toward their own ends. In some cases, the desire of colonised people to beat the coloniser at their own game led to a national passion for a sport. In the Caribbean, cricket games became the stage for anti-colonial resistance against their British masters, as famously documented by Afro-Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James (2013). In other cases, the colonised adapted sports to their own social and cultural contexts. Such was the case with cricket in the Trobriand Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea, made famous in Trobriand Cricket (Leach 1976), a documentary that has delighted many anthropology undergraduates worldwide over the decades with its scenes of several dozen players dancing in military formation to songs loaded with sexual innuendos.

Sport under capitalism and socialism

In the colonial metropoles, sport replicated the class hierarchies on which industrial capitalism was based. In Britain, public-school-educated elites were anxious to distinguish their sporting activities from the rough-and-tumble and morally suspect working-class ballgames. By the 1870s, the government had regulated the punishing industrial work schedules and workers could finally enjoy some free time, and blue-collar boys and men enthusiastically took up the newly codified sports, particularly football, encouraged by factory owners who saw an opportunity to distract them away from social unrest and improve their work ethics (Munting 2003). As football became popular among workers, public schools gradually abandoned it in favour of rugby.

Elites used arguments based on moral imperatives to justify the role of sport in maintaining the social divide: the amateur ideal maintained that athletes should be motivated by fair play and honour and not by material interests and was alleged (incorrectly) to have been inherited from ancient Greece (Young 1984). Amateur rules excluded members of the working classes, whose participation in sport often depended on skipping work. Late nineteenth-century Britain saw the eruption of conflict over ‘broken time’, namely compensation for time away from work to engage in sport. The IOC, which has regulated the Olympic Games from their revival in 1896, forbade Olympic athletes from openly receiving payment for competing until the late 1980s (Llewellyn & Gleaves 2016). Continental European and North American IOC members sometimes chafed at the rigidity of British members on this point.

In the twentieth century, as elite-level sport became increasingly commodified, social classes became polarised in a different way. In many professional sports, athletes now were largely of working-class or ethnic and racial minority (and later migrant) background, while team owners, managers, and other technocrats were overwhelmingly members of the elite classes. The class structure of sport thus reproduced that of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, with athletes selling their labour for wages and capitalists owning the labourers, controlling contracts and setting wages. Only recently have court challenges and collective bargaining granted professional athletes greater control over their labour power. In the United States, most elite-level athletes have benefited from athletic scholarships to universities, where they are unremunerated despite generating huge revenues for the institutions (Gilbert 2016).

Even at the non-professional level, sport is deeply entangled in social-class politics. We owe the most systematic analysis of these dynamics to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984), who observed that members of the same social strata tend to gravitate towards the same kinds of sport and have little enthusiasm for (and sometimes despise) the sporting activities associated with other social classes, a process that he labelled ‘distinction’. Football in Britain and France, for example, appeals largely to the lower-middle and working classes, while elites prefer golf, tennis, and skiing. In some cases, these distinctions can be attributed to the resources required (e.g., for most people, skiing assumes the ability to travel, take time off work, and purchase expensive equipment), but in other cases material explanations are insufficient. Sport ‘choices’ thus have the effect of inscribing persons into a particular position in hierarchies of social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age.

In reaction to the class, gender, and ethnic distinctions that were already so deeply ingrained in ‘bourgeois’ sport in the early twentieth century, the Soviet Union, after its founding in 1917, attempted to develop an alternative socialist model of sport. Sport in the USSR was originally financed by industries and, after the 1950s, increasingly by the state, as the country began seeking sporting victories to demonstrate the superiority of socialism. State-supported athletes were derogatorily called ‘state shamateurs’ in the capitalist West for violating amateur rules, while socialist countries maintained that they were remunerated as soldiers, workers, or students. The West acquiesced in this fiction because international sports fields were one of the few meeting places where citizens of the communist and capitalist worlds could come together.

Socialist nations further demonstrated their commitment to equality in sport by organising sporting events that showcased ethnic minorities. The USSR organised the first Central Asian Games in 1920, which inspired China’s National Games of Minority Nationalities, held quadrennially from 1953 to the present, featuring sports associated with the 55 officially recognised non-Han nationalities. The relationship between sport and ethnic identity was a legacy of the continental European traditions of folklore and ethnology that predominated in Russia and China: traditional sports counted amongst the local customs (along with dances, rituals, and other practices) that scholars used to classify people into ethnic groups. However, these events clearly serve the assimilationist goals of the state (Liebold 2010).

In multicultural capitalist countries, indigenous minorities started using sports events as an identity-affirming political strategy in the 1970s. Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States organised the first Arctic Winter Games in 1970 and the North American Indigenous Games in 1990. These competitions include both indigenous and global sports (Paraschak & Morgan 1997).

The neoliberal restructuring of sport

In the late twentieth century, the expanding global economy wiped out the socialist experiment (except for China, North Korea, and Cuba) and the inexorable increase of commercialization and professionalism compelled international sport organizations to eliminate the amateur rules. In many parts of the world, neoliberal economic policies privatised television channels, which found in the most popular sports a readily available and at-first inexpensive content with which to fill airtime. Corporate advertisers soon flocked to the new media platform, fuelling the escalation of television broadcasting rights fees. With it came an exponential rise in the wealth of elite clubs, sport federations, and top-level athletes and the dramatically uneven distribution of this wealth, as only a few sports are regularly televised and very few athletes earn enormous salaries. Corporate sponsorship of teams and events attracted multinational sources of capital into sports. Meanwhile, satellite television became commercial in 1982, bringing images of sporting glory to viewers in the Global South.

The wealth that today revolves around the most popular sports, such as football, rugby union, and basketball, has mobilised the yearning of ethnically and racially marginalised young men in the destitute urban settings of the Global North. In the inner cities of North America or the underprivileged suburbs of Western Europe, a career in sport was a way out of poverty. Very few actually made it, but ethnic and racial minorities came to numerically dominate some professional sports, such as basketball and American football in the United States, although the corporate structure of the sports continued to be dominated by wealthy white men.

More than a century has passed since racist evolutionary theories were abandoned in anthropology, yet in popular culture the hyper-visibility of non-white athletes continues to provoke searches for biological factors that supposedly explain sports skills in terms of race. Sometimes the biological argument about an innate athletic gift is twisted to argue that people of European descent are still superior in the ways that count. For example, Pacific Island and Māori male rugby players are said to be extremely successful players thanks to their ‘natural’ talent, but they are widely branded as undisciplined, unreliable, and unteachable (Hokowhitu 2004; Besnier 2015). Race-based arguments erase the fact that athletic prowess is the result of extraordinary personal efforts, and that young women and men of colour may be disproportionately represented in sports because other paths to mobility are closed to them.

Since the 1980s, clubs and teams of the most popular sports like football and basketball, now corporate entities, have been embroiled in a cutthroat competition for economic survival. They have recruited increasing numbers of players in the Global South. Concurrently, many economies in the former colonial world have collapsed as a result of the world’s turn to neoliberal economic policies, and entire countries have become emigrating societies. In this context, many young men, who have been particularly affected by shrinking labour markets, dedicate themselves to sport with the dream of signing a contract with the top teams they watch on satellite television (Besnier et al. 2018).

The transnational mobility of athletes has reconfigured the relationship between national identity and citizenship, as increasing numbers of athletes representing cities and nations are immigrants or children of immigrants. Some countries fast-track migrant athletes to citizenship, most blatantly oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf, which have sometimes mounted teams consisting mostly of newly-minted citizens from the Global South while at the same time barring access to citizenship to low-level migrant workers who had toiled there for decades (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: 219-22).

Sports have become a battleground of racial conflicts, in which some athletes have used their hyper-visibility to protest discrimination, as illustrated in the protests in the United States since 2017 by African-American football players who ‘took a knee’ during the national anthem to protest racial oppression. The decision of team owners in the National Football League to ban the practice as ‘unpatriotic’ served as a reminder that the world of professional and international sport is a system that reproduces racial and other hierarchies extant in society. Although athlete protests have stimulated public debate about race in the United States, there is little evidence that longstanding power structures have been reformed in response.

Sport, gender, and sex

In the West, most modern sports were a ‘male preserve’ at their inception and continued to be a last bastion of traditional masculinity (Dunning 1986). In the early modern Olympic Games, women competed in sports that did not challenge Western ideals of femininity, such as figure skating and archery, but it was not until 1928 that a few running events were added for women, and not until 1964 that the first team sport, volleyball, was added. In the United States, gender inequality was not addressed until the US Congress enacted in 1972 sweeping legislation known as ‘Title IX’, whose effect on sport was the requirement that women’s sports in schools and universities be allocated the same funding as men’s sports. In contrast, sport in China after the 1949 Revolution quickly became a path to upward mobility for peasant women and never was a male preserve (Brownell 1995).

Gender segregation is woven into the very fabric of modern sport. The common argument is that it ensures ‘fair’ competition, since men are thought to be stronger than women. However, there are sports in which women compete successfully with men, such as equestrian events, yet women were only allowed in an equestrian event at the 1952 Olympics. Men and women do not have to be separated by gender, as is evident in mixed-sex sports such as doubles in tennis or mixed-sex running relays. Women might also be competitive with men in some sports if they were divided by weight-class divisions rather than gender (Healy et al. 2014).

That the gender line is not just about fairness for female athletes is demonstrated by the fact that the world of sports has been a bastion of heterosexuality, characterised by strong homophobia, from the nineteenth century up to the present. It is ironic, because the Western all-male institutions meant to turn boys into men, such as public schools in Britain and the YMCA in the United States, tacitly encouraged surreptitious same-sex attractions that were forbidden in mainstream society (Gustav-Wrathall 1998). Still today, male professional sports and the international sports system display a homophobia that is in many ways more profound than that of mainstream society. Very few professional athletes have ‘come out’ of their own accord. This has prompted gay, lesbian, and transgender people to form their own associations and events, most prominently the Gay Games held every four years since 1982 (Symons 2010). Moreover, the clampdown on homosexuality has persisted even while rampant sexual abuse of both boys and girls has been endemic in sports and has been covered up by coaches and administrators, a reality that is only now undergoing widespread public examination. The most egregious example is the case of USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar of Michigan State University, who was brought to justice in 2017–8 for assaulting hundreds of young female athletes over many years while the institutions turned a blind eye (Carr 2019). Taken as a whole, the history of sex, gender, and sexuality in modern sports reveals sport’s role in defending the gendered structures underpinning industrial capitalist society of the past century and a half, including a fundamental division between male and female, and compulsory heterosexuality.

The ongoing controversies over sex testing reveal the centrality of the gender paradigm in international sports up to the present. Sex testing dates back to the Cold War, when the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the IOC instituted a visual exam and later a chromosome test for women on account of the suspicion that the communist block was fielding men masquerading as women in order to win medals. Political tensions were expressed in a gender idiom: questioning the sex of socialist women neutralised the political challenge posed by the gender equality in sport under socialism at a time when Western women were oppressed by the postwar cult of domesticity (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: 129-34).

Sex testing has never exposed a man competing as a woman, but it has identified, often in the worst possible way, a small number of athletes who are intersex; that is, who exhibit non-normative combinations of biological markers of sex (e.g., chromosomes, hormones, genitalia). Most are individuals with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which heightens their testosterone level, although this has never been shown to confer an athletic advantage. Those who are targeted are frequently athletes from the Global South, the best-known case being Caster Semenya, a South African runner who had won world and Olympic championships. The historical realignment of suspicion from the Soviet block to the Global South suggests that global geopolitics plays a role in sex testing in sport despite its appearance as neutral science (Jordan-Young & Karkazis 2019).

Sport as cultural performance

Sports take on the role of defending fundamental structures of power by putting those structures on public display in embodied form. Such public events are typically organised by elites, who try to control what is put on display so that their social status remains unchallenged. Contextualised in the classic anthropological theory of the gift, sports events take on another dimension (Brownell & Besnier 2016). It is well-known that humans will go into deep debt to fund rituals and ceremonies. While this doesn’t make sense according to market economy logics, it is unproblematic in the context of a gift economy in which elites increase their prestige and strengthen alliances by organising extravagant events.

For example, buzkashi in Afghanistan was deeply embedded in a gendered world of men and their competition for reputation through extravagant displays of generosity in grand gatherings during which buzkashi was played (Azoy 2011). Because the gatherings required considerable volunteer labour, only a khan with a large network of kin and non-kin who owed him labour could pull off a buzkashi tournament. Similarly, summer Olympic Games would not be possible without the armies of volunteers who provide basic labour. More heads of state, CEOs of major corporations, billionaires, and celebrities attend Olympic Games than any other world event. There they lavishly entertain guests, display their influence, create relationships with new allies and partners, and seal deals with old ones. The dynamics of buzkashi festivals are found in the Olympics, but on a much grander scale, and critiques of the Olympics that only analyze them through market economic principles may be missing the point.

Sports events enthral audiences because they are cultural performances, namely condensed moments when participants consciously represent and evaluate values, roles, and societal institutions (Singer 1959; Turner 1982, 1988). The most widely-read example of such a cultural performance is Clifford Geertz’s (1972) interpretation of cockfighting in Bali in the late 50s, as ‘a story the Balinese tell themselves about themselves’. The metaphors he employed to illuminate the Balinese enthusiasm for cockfights are frequently applied to sports events: they are a mirror for society, an expression of a culture as a whole, and a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Three important theorists of cultural performances, Max and Mary Gluckman and Victor Turner, debated whether a sports event could qualify as a secular ritual, a ritual-like behaviour not clearly associated with religious beliefs. They all concluded that sports do not qualify as rituals because they do not possess mystical or liminal qualities. However, subsequent scholars who conducted more research specifically on sports have found it enlightening to apply ritual theories to sports. In particular, they have emphasised that sports events may induce a sense of communitas, a sentiment of solidarity and shared humanity. Scholars have asserted that the World Cup and Olympics create an ‘upsurge of fellow feeling, an epidemic of communitas’ (Dayan & Katz 1992: 196) and ‘an enhanced consciousness of humankind’ (Giulianotti & Robertson 2004: 558; see also Roche 2000; Rothenbuhler 1988).

However, these scholars were based in sociology and media studies, while anthropologists were not part of this trend because, since the end of the 1980s, many have become critical of communitas as an overly optimistic concept that fails to recognise that not every participant and spectator is equally vested in the event. Who produces the performance and controls the symbols, whose agenda is served, and who is disadvantaged? Are common people being duped by the elites who organise big events? These questions would best be answered through ethnographic research, but to date there has been little ethnographic work on major sports events that has sought to understand the power relations between elite organisers, spectators, and athletes and their networks. Perhaps predictably, such work has tended to show that the on-the-ground reality is not a simple divide between exploiter and exploited, because major events involve a large number of social groups, the relationships between them are complex and under constant negotiation. Disadvantaged groups can benefit from the media spotlight by drawing public attention to their causes in a way that is not possible under normal circumstances (Klausen 1999; Brownell 2012b; Lindsay 2014).

The competition in sports means that the results are unpredictable, and so athletes worldwide deploy a wide range of practices designed to deal with uncertainty and fate, some derived from local cultural contexts, others derived from global flows, blurring the distinction amongst religion, magic, morality, gender, and bodily technique. Their practices include local magical practices (Gmelch 1978), revivalist religions such as Pentecostalism, which is increasingly popular amongst athletes from the Global South (Rial 2012; Guinness 2018; Kovač 2018), as well as sports techniques and training, the ideology of scientific professionalism, and sport psychology. In the national sport of wrestling in Senegal, wrestlers employ the services of marabouts, magico-religious specialists who prescribe potions, amulets, and rituals that merge Islamic and local cosmologies; but they combine the services of the marabouts with the hard training of an individualistic self and commercial sponsorship in the neoliberal mode (Hann 2018). Even when they emigrate to other countries to play professionally, indigenous New Zealand Māori rugby players call upon mana, the supernatural power that draws from their connection to kinship, spirits, and land (Calabrò 2014). Young men from upper-middle and upper-class families in exclusive rugby clubs in Buenos Aires participate in a Christian spiritual movement with the logo of a cross inside a rugby ball. Outside the door of some clubs stands a statuette brought back from the Our Lady of Rugby chapel in southwest France (Fuentes 2018).

Body enhancement and its limits

Sport has increasingly given us a glimpse into bodies of the future. The records for wheelchair athletes competing in track and road races are faster than those for runners on legs, but the clear separation between human and machine has enabled their segregation into their own divisions, such as the Paralympic Games. In 2015, the IAAF banned South African runner Oscar Pistorius, a lower-limb double amputee, from competing with the argument that the properties of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he wears gave him an unfair advantage, but he successfully sued and made it to the 400-metres semi-finals in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. His case opened up entirely new ethical dilemmas, but since no other Paralympian has achieved his level of success, Pistorius must be credited with a great deal of talent, whatever advantage his prostheses might have given him.

However, new technologies may soon allow even average athletes to compete with top natural-limbed athletes. Gene doping, the non-therapeutic use of genetic enhancement to improve sports performance, does not yet exist, but genetic manipulation has produced ‘super-mice’ with superior strength and endurance. So far as we know this has not yet been tried on humans, but it was banned in 2003 as a preemptive strike by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Clearly, the future holds novel technologies that will bring along increasingly complicated ethical dilemmas extending beyond the world of sports. Are we heading toward ‘transhuman athletes’ who have exceeded the bounds of normal human capabilities (Miah 2010)? All elite athletes exceed the bounds of normal capabilities—whether because they are taller or shorter than average, have large lung capacity, or any number of other physical traits. In the future, maybe it will become common practice for average humans to seek genetic and prosthetic enhancement in order to succeed in sports, careers, and life. Should this be prohibited? If defending class and gender lines occupied the greater part of the attention of administrators of international sport in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it may be that defending the line between what is ‘human’ and what is not will occupy them in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion: sport and scale

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the wealth that revolved around sport, particularly the major international sports, had become so huge and its presence in popular culture so powerful that the longstanding tendency amongst academics, journalists, and many politicians to dismiss it as inconsequential began to change. Critics of sport mega-events, particularly the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games, became increasingly vocal, countering rhetoric about the potential of sport to contribute to a better world by publicising violations of human rights common in the context of mega-events, such as mass evictions for construction, the silencing of dissidents, the exploitation of migrant workers, and the corruption by government officials and the leaders of sport organizations. ‘Social responsibility’ in sport became a keyword taken up by sport organizations in response to the critics.

Sport is somewhat unique in the repertoire of human activities in that it connects the intimacy of bodies, emotions, and personal projects to a global system of capital, world politics, and mega-spectacles. These connections operate on multiple fronts. For example, the collapse of economies in the Global South under pressure from neoliberal policies has destroyed labour markets, while the glamour of sport broadcast on satellite television fuel impossible dreams of sporting success among disenfranchised youth in these countries. Anthropologists are concerned to make sense of all the entanglements of the world in which we live, and sport distils them into clearer structures that can help us comprehend the complex whole.

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Scanlon, T. 2012. Contesting authority in ancient myth and sport. In From Athens to Beijing: West meets East in the Olympic Games (ed.) S. Brownell, 87-109. New York: Greekworks.

Starn, O. 2011. The passion of Tiger Woods: an anthropologist reports on golf, race, and celebrity scandal. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Symons, C. 2010. The gay games: a history. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge.

Thangaraj, S. 2015. Desi hoop dreams: pickup basketball and the making of Asian American masculinity. New York: University Press.

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Notes

Some of Niko Besnier’s research discussed in this article received funding from the European Research Council under Grant Agreement 295769 for a project titled ‘Globalization, sport and the precarity of masculinity’ (www.global-sport.eu). Susan Brownell received funding for some of the research discussed here from International Studies and Programs and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Note on contributors

Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His books include On the edge of the global: modern anxieties in a Pacific island nation (2011) and Gossip and the everyday production of politics (2009). He is co-editor of Gender on the edge: transgender, gay, and other Pacific Islanders (2014) and Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy (2014). In 2014–9, he was editor-in-chief of American Ethnologist.

Niko Besnier, Afdeling Antropologie, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Postbus 15509, 1001 NA Amsterdam, The Netherlands. n.besnier@uva.nl.

Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is the author of Training the body for China: sports in the moral order of the People’s Republic (1995) and Beijing’s games: what the Olympics mean to China (2008), and is the editor of The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: sport, race, and American imperialism (2008).

Susan Brownell, Department of Anthropology & Archaeology, 507 Clark Hall, One University Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63121-4400, United States. sbrownell@umsl.edu.

Precarity

Felix Stein — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 14:15:15 +0000

Sharryn Kasmir

Hofstra University

Initially published 13 Mar 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18precarity

Abstract:

Precarity emerged as a central concern in scholarly research and writing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to political mobilizations against unemployment and social exclusion. Together with related concepts—such as precarious, precariousness, precaritization and ‘the precariat’—precarity refers to the fact that much of the world’s population lacks stable work and steady incomes. Informal, temporary, or contingent work is the predominant mode of livelihood in the contemporary world, where garbage picking, performing day labor, selling petty commodities, and sourcing task-based ‘gigs’ through digital platforms exemplify some of precarity’s many forms.

This notion of precarity posits two related claims: first is a pronouncement that precarity is new and that it manifests a distinctive phase of capitalist development associated with neoliberalism. Second is an assertion that precaritization fundamentally alters class relations and therefore it transforms collective identities and politics. In turn, these arguments are criticised for forgetting that precarity has always been a feature of capitalist societies and that precariousness has perpetually characterised working people’s lives, especially in the Global South.

Precariousness is also used to denote a general, pervasive ontological condition of vulnerability, displacement, and insecurity, not explicitly tied to the contemporary form of neoliberal capitalism or class relations, but instead characteristic of transhistorical and existential forces. This philosophical framing inspires close-to-the-skin descriptions of precariousness that highlight experiences and feelings of anxiety, disenfranchisement, and loss of hope for the future.

Precarity

Widespread changes in the world capitalist economy over more than forty years significantly impact the lives of people all over the globe. Wholesale disinvestment from historic industrial centers, investment in newly industrialising zones, financialisation, real estate speculation, and rapid urbanisation produce a new geography of capitalism, as international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as well as the European Union and nation states, press structural adjustment and austerity packages that erode public expenditure, services, and social welfare. This political-economic landscape is often referred to as neoliberalism or neoliberal capitalism. If an earlier post-World War II, Keynesian/Fordist period was characterised by the expansion of the wage labour contract and welfare state policy—in some nation states, for some segments of national working classes—the last decades are characterised by their contraction and the ensuing concentration of wealth. In this environment, work and livelihoods are insecure. Precarity describes and conceptualises this unpredictable cultural and economic terrain and conditions of life.

Precarity is a multi-stranded concept, associated with a set of terms, including precarious, precariousness, precaritisation, and ‘the precariat’, that make an historical argument about capitalism, pronounce a shift in class relations, and predict novel social movements and political struggles. These concepts underscore that temporary and informal work, in its myriad manifestations, is the predominant mode of livelihood in the late-twentieth to early-twenty-first centuries (Bourdieu 1998). A majority of labouring people in the world do not have secure jobs or steady incomes, but instead seek a living through garbage picking, selling petty commodities, or taking short-term ‘gigs’ contracted through the internet. Precariousness is also understood as a general and pervasive human experience, one that extends beyond the current political-cultural moment and affects people of all socio-economic groups. Seen through this lens, precariousness is less the transformation of class relations and more a biopolitics of the self and a structure of feeling and experience, emanating from transhistorical and existential conditions of social life. This existential perspective brings into view people’s feelings of vulnerability, displacement, and hopelessness.

Precarity emerged as a central concern in academic research and writing in the early twenty-first century. It made its way into academic discourse partly as a response to political mobilisations, particularly those that took place in Europe against unemployment and social exclusion. EuroMayDay, an anarchist-influenced anti-precarity movement was inaugurated in 2001 in Milan to protest the lack of stable jobs, affordable housing, and social welfare provisions, especially for young people. By 2005, the event was celebrated in eighteen European cities. The campaigns gave voice to what some considered an emergent political subject, namely those whose social relationships to capital or the state were not determined by wage labour but by their exclusion from steady jobs and from the status of ‘citizen-worker’ (see Neilson & Rossiter 2008). These voices were again audible in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, during the 2011 Arab Spring, and Occupy and anti-austerity uprisings. Hundreds of thousands of people who occupied public squares and demonstrated in the streets during the anti-austerity mobilisations of the 15-M movement in Spain demanded ‘dignity’ to counter the widespread vulnerability provoked by the breakdown of the international banking system, the resulting mortgage crisis, structural readjustment plans imposed by the Troika (EU, European Central Bank, IMF), and state-issued cuts to education, health care, and social welfare.

The ontological condition of precariousness

Philosopher Judith Butler’s writing is a cornerstone for the growing body of literature on precarity. Butler draws a critical distinction between ‘precariousness’ and ‘precarity’. She sees precariousness as a generalised human condition that stems from the fact that all humans are interdependent on each other and therefore all are vulnerable. In her scheme, precarity is different precisely because it is unequally distributed. Precarity is experienced by marginalised, poor, and disenfranchised people who are exposed to economic insecurity, injury, violence, and forced migration. Further, social value is ascribed to some lives and bodies, while it is denied to others, and some are protected, while others are not. Neoliberalism, war, and climate crises render these inequalities especially acute. Butler sees the potential for emancipation in embracing the common circumstance of precariousness, as against the unequal fate of precarity. She renounces politics that aim at achieving stability for select groups and instead favors an egalitarian precariousness for all as a liberating moment (Butler 2004, 2010).

Cultural anthropologists are particularly attuned to the structures of feeling associated with precarious lifeworlds. They focus on emotion and subjectivity, exploring disenfranchisement, displacement, and uncertainty. As Anne Allison writes, ‘in this uncertainty of time, where everyday efforts don’t align with a teleology of progressive betterment, living can be often just that. Not leading particularly anywhere, lives get lived nonetheless’ (Allison 2016). This observation calls into question the notion of ‘everyday’. Ethnographers regularly utilise the term to denote predictable social patterns and the routines of household, community, and work that are at the heart of the concept of culture, but there is little regularity in the context of poverty, political disempowerment, and violence (Sider 2008).

Such disorder is evident in post-U.S.-invasion Iraq. Anthropologist Hayder Al-Mohammad (2012) details a kidnapping in Basra to describe how the victim endured violence and bodily harm. The man’s fragmented recollections of the episode speak to his fragility and the limit of his ability to make sense of events, even after he returned home. The suffering was not his alone; it took in his family and community members and thereby extended insecurity’s reach. Precariousness is also prevalent in Japan, where a long-term, persistent recession since the early 1990s means chronic joblessness and irregular employment, particularly for young people and women. With the decline in stable jobs, there is an increase in loneliness and isolation. Those without fixed employment bear social stigma, are less likely to marry, and feel a loss of ‘home’, both in the sense that they cannot afford to sustain households of their own, and in the sense of being displaced from the structures and supports of family life. They live precarious lives (Allison 2013). In neoliberal Italy, precarity is manifest in acts of workplace harassment perpetrated by supervisors and co-workers; this ‘mobbing’ serves to warn workers that they are neither secure not protected. Precarity therefore creates subjects who are at the mercy of marginality, anxiety, and paranoia (Molé 2010).

These case studies include a wide range of experiences and struggles under the rubric of precarity, from social isolation and depression born of joblessness, to violence and torture suffered in conflict zones. Though powerful for depicting structures of feeling, this ontological perspective is criticised for seeing precariousness everywhere and therefore diminishing its conceptual acuity. Used in this way, precarity becomes ahistorical. It too readily flattens out important differences among social relations, and it does little to explain the forces that shape the contemporary world.

A second broad approach ties precarity, instead, to the historical conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism. Two related arguments are forwarded by this notion of precarity: first, that precarity is new and that it manifests a distinctive phase of capitalist development. Second, that precarity fundamentally alters class relations and that novel collective identities and politics are (or should be) in the making. Each of these assertions provokes debate over concepts, historical presumptions, and theoretical claims.

Precarity as part of neoliberal capitalism

A new historical moment?

Precarity is often used to describe the late-twentieth century transformation of work from stable, full-time jobs toward a flexible labour regime, commonly identified as the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. The Fordist compact points to the compromise between capital, labour unions, and states that was negotiated after workers led mass actions to organise national unions early in the twentieth century. Unionised workers won collective bargaining agreements that pegged increased productivity to job security, wage hikes, and benefit packages. In industrialised regions, largely in the Global North, Fordism was consolidated through Keynesian economic policies and welfare-state programs that managed capital’s national-scale expansion and extended social protections for citizen-workers. The trifold processes of globalisation, deindustrialisation, and financialisation in North America, western Europe, and Japan, followed by parallel political economic developments in post-socialist countries, dismantled this hegemonic arrangement. Neoliberal states passed legislation that wore down labour and social protections, capital sought ever cheaper and more flexible work arrangements, and unions lost members and power and were increasingly unable to protect workers. Precarity thus references the decline of Fordism and the anxiety, insecurity, and feelings of un-belonging in its wake.

The timeline of Fordism/Keynsianism to Post-Fordism/neoliberalism is used to identify precarity as a novel condition, but this narrative can elide as much as it elucidates. The Fordist arrangement was always limited in its scope and partial in its impact. Even within the U.S. (arguably Fordism’s ideal case), whole segments of the population were excluded from the hegemonic deal between capitalist corporations and large-scale unions. Federal labour law in the U.S. did not grant protections or guarantee the right to organise to domestic and farm workers, among others. Since these unprotected labourers were disproportionately women, African Americans, and immigrants, Fordist stability was largely the preserve of white men. African American women domestic workers from the colonial to the contemporary era were not covered by paternalistic codes, state protections, or unions (Mullings 1986).

Security was not the province of everyone during the Fordist epoch. Nor were supposedly stable jobs and lives fully secure, even for protected citizen-workers in leading sectors of the economy. Ethnographic research among U.S. autoworkers, a once powerful and iconic segment of the Fordist working class, demonstrates how precariousness pervades the lives of stable, unionised workers. Even when they are employed in high-paying, full-time jobs, autoworkers are constantly on guard for signs that their plant is in trouble and that layoff is immanent. They scan their factory for evidence of impending layoff, testifying to their anxiety, and they amass overtime during periods of heavy production to safeguard against down times. Moreover, when their plant is in jeopardy or closes, autoworkers relocate to other facilities, sometimes multiple times over the course of their lives and far from their homes, thereby separating them from family and social networks, isolating them, and weakening the union’s power (Kasmir 2014). These observations suggest that precarity is not only a late-twentieth century consequence of the neoliberal state polities that facilitated deregulated, mobile capital. There was insecurity too under Fordism, both for those left out of the Fordist compact and for those within it.

Precarity in historical and global context

Theory from Latin America, South Asia, and Africa likewise challenges the purported newness of precarity resulting from neoliberal capitalism. Anthropologist Keith Hart (1973) named informal work as a fixture of the urban economy in Ghana, and his concept of the ‘informal sector’ gained considerable currency in policy and academic circles. In the late 1960s to 1970s, José Nun (1969) and Aníbal Quijano (1974) debated whether the ‘marginal mass’ or the growing numbers of poor, unemployed, and underemployed people in then-newly industrialised Latin American cities could ever be absorbed into the wage relationship, or if capitalism would always have permanent outsiders. The question turned on reconsidering Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’— workers who are not yet brought into or who are episodically pushed out of the wage relationship, and whose presence depresses wages and functions to discipline restive working classes (1967: 590). Nun and Quijano considered that marginality was distinct from the concept of the industrial reserve army because in Latin America, the marginal mass was considerably larger than a reserve force, and dependent capitalism would never command sufficient investment to absorb these excess workers.

Dependency and underdevelopment theory was a foundation for this debate. Writing in the context of mid-twentieth century anti-colonial movements, Andre Gunder Frank (1966, 1967) and Walter Rodney (1972) authored key texts against the then-prevailing modernisation paradigm, which forwarded that ‘undeveloped’ nations would achieve development with capital investment, free markets, technology transfer, etc. To the contrary, they argued, dependency elites did the bidding of transnational capital, and neocolonialist regimes in the Third World continued the extractive political and economic relations of colonialism, whereby resources and wealth flowed from the poor, ex-colonial (‘satellite’) nations to benefit dominant, capitalist countries (‘metropolis’). Underdevelopment was not therefore a failure of development but the active process whereby colonial and neocolonial powers impoverished and exploited the Third World. Frank’s and Rodney’s interventions situated the problem of informal labour within a debate about capitalist development, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Their political-economic map of the modern world found further expression in Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, which traced the changing, unequal relations between ‘core’, ‘semi-peripheral’, and ‘peripheral’ regions over capitalism’s centuries-long history.

Anthropologists of the 1970s also noted that kin-based economies, tributary, and feudal arrangements continued in many Third World contexts, even as market transactions encroached. A strain of Marxian anthropology centered on the problem of the persistence of non-wage, non-commodity relations. Those working in this paradigm proposed that the ‘articulation’ of different ‘modes of production’ accounted for the coexistence of non-capitalist and capitalist social relations. They recognised that the capitalist mode of production was not totalising, and that pre-capitalist and capitalist relations could co-occur within a given social formation or society. Commodity relations might be grafted onto feudal agrarian arrangements with the expansion of capitalist imperialism in India or onto tributary or lineage modes in Africa, thereby preserving the autonomy of those non-capitalist forms rather than supplanting or ‘modernizing’ them (Wolpe 1980).

Today, forced, bonded, and imprisoned labourers provide services and produce consumer goods, while 1.6 billion people live in multidimensional poverty (health, education, and living standard,)^[1] and worldwide, billions barely sustain their lives. An estimated ninety percent or more of the half-billion Indian work force is in the informal economy (Breman 2011). Mike Davis (2006) characterises these conditions as ‘a planet of slums’ (see also Wacquant 2008). This broader geographic and historical perspective on global capital accumulation shows that Fordist stability is the exception and precariousness the norm, as opposed to the obverse (Baca 2004; van der Linden 2014).

For these reasons, it makes good sense to decenter the wage relation in our understanding of capitalism. Rather than the wage, the condition of ‘wagelessness’ and the imperative to earn a living is the defining moment of dispossession and the general proletarian condition. The wage is only one life outcome and one social relation among many that can follow from wagelessness (Denning 2010). Some researchers propose the notion of ‘livelihoods,’ as opposed to the narrower ‘work’ or ‘job,’ to more effectively account for the myriad ways people make a living. As well, Marxist feminists trace connections between waged and unwaged work and other activities for securing reproduction. Individuals and household members rely on an array of assets beyond the wage, and they strategically access diverse resources, including social and state supports. In deindustrialised northern Spain, retired parents open their homes to their unemployed adult children, and they apportion their state pension benefits, accrued from permanent jobs in extant steel mills, among many dependents. Family members pursue a range of informal opportunities, including non-monetary volunteer or cooperative endeavors, that help provision the household (Narotzky & Besnier 2014, Narotzky 2016). Despite capitalism’s homogenising tendency, and contrary to neoliberal assertions that globalisation flattens the world, unevenness is a perpetual feature of capitalism. As capital accumulation is uneven, so too is labour formation, such that certain workforces are fully proletarianised, for limited periods of time, while others are not, and livelihood takes many forms.

States also promote partial proletarianisation as a development strategy. Policy and legislation encourage contingency and flexibility in segments of the labour market, including in state employment (Lazar 2017). To point out one example, Portugal pursued a development plan in the middle-twentieth century to attract foreign capital by ensuring patterns of extreme labour exploitation. During the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933 – 1974), the corporatist state created a dual society. There were fixed working hours, labour contracts, and minimum wages in core sectors, but most wage earners received less than the cost of social reproduction for themselves and their families. Their household members were consequently pushed into low-paid agricultural and artisanal work, and rural and industrial oligarchs were guaranteed a super-exploited labour force, which was often young and female. The state proffered the myth that Portugal was ‘natural rural country’ to legitimate these social relations (Matos forthcoming).

There is a continual process of differentiation within and among working classes, over time, and across space and social category. Precariousness is but one axis of difference. The concept of precarity currently in circulation may therefore mistake a well-worn feature of capitalism for a novel phenomenon. If precaritisation does not mark a new circumstance in a neoliberal capitalist epoch, it may nonetheless indicate a convergence of working lives in the Global North and South, rendering those geo-economic distinctions increasingly obsolete (Carbonella & Kasmir 2014, Gill & Kasmir 2016, Kasmir & Gill forthcoming).

The ‘Precariat’ and class formation

These observations on the history and spatial reach of insecurity not withstanding, some theorists nevertheless maintain that precarity captures a major structural transformation in economic life, and that it fundamentally upends older political identities and alliances. Italian autonomist Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) advance this argument and provide inspiration for the EuroMayDay movement. Hardt and Negri are notably optimistic about the decline of a stable relationship to work. Automation is central to their proposal, since digital platforms such as Uber or TaskRabbit can decenter the workplace and work itself. In their view, the same automation that pushes many out of formal jobs and out of the Fordist/Keynsian-era social contract also enables a politics of self-determination and the promise of autonomous life worlds. They glimpse liberation in precarity, as new social arrangements and expectations emerge. The subject of their political vision is the ‘multitude,’ whom they understand as a hetereogenous population that does not have a common relation to capital and is thus not a class. They consider the multitude to exist in contradistinction to a purportedly more singular working class. Partha Chaterjee (2004) as well proclaims a novel politics based on the presumption that the majority of the world’s workforce is destined to remain on the permanent outside of the capitalist wage relation. Chaterjee forwards that India’s subaltern populations pursue social movements to make claims on the state based on citizenship, rather than engaging in work-based struggles or confronting class relations as a collective of workers.

Sociologist Guy Standing enthusiastically endorses a new politics of precarity. Standing (2011) regards the ‘global precariat’ as an emergent class, with structural relationships to capital and self-interests that are distinct from and opposed to older workers in stable, long-term, unionised jobs. In Standing’s assessment, the precariat is multi-layered strata of varied part-time workers, the self-employed, and sub-contractors. These people are not members of the working class since, he argues, they do not express work-based identities, collective forms of solidarity, ties to the workplace, or affinities for labour politics. Standing sounds the alarm that progressives should turn away from traditional labour union and parties and support new forms of association and policies, including advocating basic income grants.

A steel plant in Chattisgarh, India would seem to illustrate the point. Built in the 1950s, the facility was a centerpiece of Nehru’s state-led development plan, and the well-paid Bhilai workers were a symbol for the Indian working class. With the rapid neoliberalisation of the Indian economy over the past twenty-five years, the regular, unionised workforce was halved, and informal workers were hired as replacements. Informal labourers are now assigned the hardest and dirtiest manual work, paid a fraction of what formal workers earn, and supervised by formal workers who act in abusive ways toward their worse-off colleagues. Since contract and formal workers come from different ethnic groups, and since women are more often among the numbers of informal workers, this harassment is intensified by communal and gender inequality. In anthropologist Jonathan Parry’s judgement, the schism between these groups of workers is best understood in Standing’s language as an antagonistic class divide between privileged, formal workers and the impoverished, insecure precariat (Parry 2013). No collective subject position or politics will, presumably, overcome this schism.

However, there are important objections to the formulation of the precariat as a collective political actor. Jan Breman (2011), long a student of industry and work in India, disputes Standing’s claim that the precariat is a new global class. He considers Standing’s proposal to be geographically naïve. Standing focuses primarily on changes to labour markets of the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, whereas capital in the Global South has always counted upon insecure, unprotected, and super-exploited workforces. Breman forcefully reminds us that precariousness has historically been the norm in India. Standing additionally mistakes labour regimes for social class. Over the past four decades—the period associated with neoliberal regimes worldwide—the global labour force has tripled with the entry into the world market of India, China, and the post-socialist countries. This has created a huge, varied, and stratified reserve army, in Breman’s estimation: ‘In this context, the drive for informality/precarity in the advanced economies can be seen as a straight forward strategy to cheapen the price of labor’ (2011: 135). According to Berman, ‘Standing downplays the extent to which the crusade for "flexibility" has aimed not just to cheapen the price of labor but drastically weaken its capacity for collective action’ (2011: 138). Breman assails the precariat concept yet further, charging that Standing’s writing serves to entrench artificial divisions between segments of working classes, therein exacerbating rather than helping to reverse working-class disempowerment.

Precariousness has indeed diminished the collective power of working-classes. A historical ethnography of the oil city of Barrancabermeja, Colombia (Gill 2016) testifies to this process. The successful early-twentieth century struggle for working-class control in the city involved bonds of solidarity among peasants, petty commodity producers, and newly proletarianised oil workers. Neoliberalism was launched in the 1980s in Colombia with state and paramilitary force, and workers’ organisations, social networks, alliances, and everyday lives were brutally ruptured and destabilised as a result. Barrancabermeja residents now live in fear, their work is insecure, and they manage individual relationships rather than summon collective power to sustain their daily lives. This wholesale transformation of social life was swift and violent in Barrancabermeja. In many deindustrialised cities in the U.S., the loss of a working-class position was more protracted, and its long duration had the effect of establishing a new common sense that individual and family strategies were better hedges against joblessness than was collective struggle pursued through unions (Kasmir 2014). Precarity fueled disorganization and disempowerment, yet Standing overlooks this fact.

Marxist geographer David Harvey (2012) also offers a take on a politics for the age of precarity that is at odds with Standing’s. Harvey predicts that radical social transformation, should it come, will emerge from cities, where different sorts of labourers—factory, service, informal, precarious, etc.—live and where vast amounts of surplus value are invested, consumed, and fought over. The many, distinct workers do not meet in the factory or any other specific workplaces, but come together in community and political groups in urban centers and in assorted struggles to wrest control over surplus value. Voracious users of capital, cities are logical and necessary sites for revolt. While a coherent oppositional movement that brings together urban struggles—from environmental sustainability, to immigrant rights, to affordable housing—has not presently converged, the task, Harvey urges, is to conceptualise that unity. By advancing the position that secure workers and the precariously employed are antagonistic classes, Standing’s precariat concept may stall rather than facilitate that project.

Recent writing on the public sector in Argentina suggests that unions can respond to precaritisation in new and creative ways, and that alliances between stable and informal workers are in fact possible (Lazar 2017). In the U.S., national industrial and service unions are successfully organising contingent university faculty and part-time fast food employees. Right-wing nationalist responses are also possible outcomes as current political developments attest. Politicians in post-socialist Poland summon dispossessed workers and turn their disillusionment and distrust into support for illiberal nationalism (Kalb 2014). In Mumbai slums, the Hindu nationalist, casteist, and anti-Muslim Shiv Shena party wins adherents among the poor by offering services to unemployed and underemployed workers who were cast out of stable, union jobs (Whitehead 2014). Nativist, racist, and anti-immigrant movements and parties that mobilise precarious people now wield influence in countries across the globe.

Conclusion: the politics of labour

Debates about the existence of a distinct and new global precariat and the politics of such a grouping are not resolved. They nonetheless generate innovative work and raise important questions. Broad areas of inquiry are influenced by ontological perspectives on life under conditions of violence, social isolation, and economic uncertainty, while political-economic and Marxist theories link precariousness to patterns of global capital accumulation.

Framed as an ontological condition, precariousness/precarity focusses attention on social marginality and vulnerable lives. In recessionary Japan, people face growing hopelessness, isolation, and feelings of not belonging. Iraqis attempt daily to keep themselves and their family members safe in the context of terrible violence after the U.S. military invasion. In many other ethnographic settings, lives are made precarious by police tactics that target the marginal or vulnerable, including racialised populations and immigrants. State violence, gangs, and war dislocate people and render their lives unstable. In one political vision, embracing universal precariousness and rejecting selective precarity promises emancipation, while the struggle for security or working-class power does not.

Another political imaginary is inspired when precarity is situated within the history of global capitalism, bringing the heterogeneity of social relations and diversity within class formations clearly into view. Here, labour history proves a useful guide. In seventeenth century Britain, the docks and quays of cities were populated by pirates, urban labourers, prostitutes, soldiers, slaves, sailors; the Irish, English, and West African; men and women. These distinct labourers made a collective, and together crafted forms of resistance in then-new conditions. Classes are always variegated, and they are historical constructs. Thus, the current dismantling of Fordist working classes (in actuality and as an ideal national type) does not portent the end of class itself but the decline of one historically contingent manifestation. Contemporary capitalist societies are inhabited by manifold labourers, who are precarious and stable, waged and unwaged, formal and informal, bonded and free. The aim is not to describe their differences, rehearse familiar typologies, or name new status categories, but to determine how distinctions among labourers are made, unmade, and remade, through ongoing struggles among workers, capital, and the state. Additionally, the goal is to account for the social and political processes that unite or divide differently marked labourers (Kalb 2015, Carbonella & Kasmir 2014, Gill & Kasmir 2016, Kasmir & Gill forthcoming, Smith 2011, 2016).

What working classes might now be in the remaking? With this question in mind, it is important to chart the range of livelihood activities people take up, the identities diverse labourers advance, alliances they pursue, organisational forms they innovate, and to map the scale of these affiliations. Anarchist-inspired social movements against precarity make good ethnographic case studies, as do labour unions that organise contingent workers or the unemployed, and right-wing organisations that mobilise dispossessed and vulnerable workers, all of which can help to illuminate how precariousness may be shaping emerging, future class formations.

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Note on contributor

Sharryn Kasmir is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Hofstra University in New York. Her research focuses on industrial workers, and she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque Region of Spain and at General Motors’ Saturn automobile plant in Tennessee. She is the author of The myth of Mondragon: cooperatives, politics and working-class life in a Basque town (SUNY Press) and co-editor of Blood and fire: toward a global anthropology of labor (Berghahn). She is currently engaged in research on the transformation of class and politics in the deindustrialised U.S. rust-belt city of Reading, Pennsylvania.

Dr Sharryn M. Kasmir, Anthropology Faculty, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11550, United States. Sharryn.M.Kasmir@hofstra.edu.

[1] Alkire, S., J.M. Roche & S. Seth 2013. Multidimensional Poverty Index 2013. Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, ODID (available on-line http://www.ophi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Global-Multidimensional-Poverty-Index-2013-8-pager.pdf?0a8fd7.) Accessed 2 November 2017.

Bureaucracy

Felix Stein — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 15:59:23 +0000

Nayanika Mathur

University of Oxford

Initially published 9 Nov 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17bureaucracy

Abstract:

Bureaucracy quite literally translates into rule by public office (‘bureau’). The anthropology of bureaucracy can be seen as falling under two broad approaches. Firstly, there is an expanding corpus of work that concentrates its attention on explaining how different bureaucracies – from different arms of the state to NGOs to supranational organizations – actually function; what their ‘inner worlds’ are like; and why and how they produce the results they do. The second approach can be described as one that looks at how bureaucracies monitor or audit themselves as well as how they are pushing for self-reform. From a time when bureaucracies were almost entirely neglected by anthropologists due to a (mis)perception of them as disenchanted Weberian iron cages of modernity, there is now a far keener awareness of the operations of bureaucratic structures and demands. Nowhere is this more evident than in the critical awareness of bureaucratic demands and constrictions within Euro-American Universities.

Introduction

The English word bureaucracy is borrowed from the French bureaucratie, which itself was formed by combining bureau (‘desk’) and -cratie (a suffix denoting a kind of government). Literally, it translates into a form of government that is predicated upon a desk – more precisely, an office. It is believed to be coined by the French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759) and moved into the English as ‘bureaucracy’ in the early 19^th century (Harper 2017). As the entry on bureaucracy in the Merriam-Webster dictionary notes, the word has, right from its very start in the early nineteenth century, carried with it pejorative connotations. An 1815 London Times article, for example, declares: ‘. . . it is in this bureaucracy, Gentlemen, that you will find the invisible and mischievous power which thwarts the most noble views, and prevents or weakens the effect of all the salutary reforms which France is incessantly calling for.’ The capacity of bureaucracy to thwart noble or creative views is only further solidified by the utilization of its verb form – bureaucratization – in pathological terms.

Popular readings of Max Weber (1922) are partly to blame for this powerful imaginary of bureaucracy as something that quells creativity, reform, vitality and is only about dull things such as files and rules. In Economy and society, he outlines the main characteristics of bureaucracy, a form of officialdom that reaches its purest form only with modernity: it is ordered by a stable set of rules; operates through a form of graded authority or hierarchy; and the management of the modern office requires expertise, official competence, rule-boundedness, and is based upon files. Bureaucracy features centrally in his ‘rationalisation thesis’, described as ‘a grand meta-historical analysis of the dominance of the west in modern times’ (Kim 2012). In one reading of Weber, the world was increasingly disenchanted due to the rationalization of all spheres of life – partly due to increasing bureaucratization – and the world was being propelled towards a rigid ‘iron-cage’ of modernity (1930). While closer readings of Weber throw up a more complex dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment, his discussion of modern bureaucratic petrification lingers on.

Governance

A primary contribution that the anthropological study of bureaucracy has made is to illuminate how varied institutions of governance actually work; how and why they produce the sorts of results they do; and what their cultures of work are. The state and its several wings – ranging from courts of law to village councils – have received particular attention in this regard. There has also been a focus on non-state organizations of welfare and humanitarianism, from small NGOs to large supranantional organizations like the United Nations.

Most commonly bureaucracy has been studied through a focus on:

1. The everyday and/or extraordinary events

2. Materiality and affect

These approaches to the study of bureaucracy are neither exhaustive nor are they mutually exclusive. Rather, they are a tool to aid us in thinking through how a notoriously difficult-to-anthropologise subject such as bureaucracy has been tackled.

Arguably the anthropology of the state has produced the largest corpus of writing on bureaucracies. Historical work on colonial state formations had already discussed the significance of rules, documents, surveys, and other knowledge-making practices that allowed imperial state formations to know and, thus, govern their colonies (e.g. Cohn 1996). Work on Empire had pointed out the significance of the work of bureaucracy in making and maintaining states, for instance, with Ann Stoler describing the colonial archives and the documents housed within them to be ‘technologies that reproduce’ states (2009: 28). Weber (1922), probably before anyone else, had identified the locus of power in the modern state to reside within the bureau, which in turn was dependent upon files and the management of documents: artifacts that continue to attract a lot of attention.

Placing an emphasis on everyday life allows one to look beyond what are often perfunctorily dismissed as mere routine, mundane, and repetitive practices, more commonly lumped under the disparaging adjective ‘bureaucratic’. Bernstein and Mertz, for instance, make a case for looking at ‘everyday maintenance’ of the state through an investigation of ‘the main occupations of contemporary states: administration, regulation, deregulation’ (2011: 6; also see Gupta 1995).

Different monographs and articles have studied the everyday state with different objectives. For instance, Emma Tarlo studied bureaucracy in India to understand the manner in which the state controlled and managed to repress the memory of one very particular period of Indian history. She is interested in the memory of the gross violation of fundamental rights that occurred during nineteen months (June 1975 to January 1977) of ‘Emergency’ rule when normal democratic operations had been suspended. Veena Das (2005) has studied the Indian state during what appear to be moments of extraordinariness (such as the Emergency or periods of communal violence in India) to powerfully argue that these extraordinary events are not separated out from everyday life.

If Das demonstrates that extraordinary and the everyday are not distinct, other ethnographies have taken the quotidian itself as the object of inquiry. In one iteration of this focus on the quotidian life of bureaucracies, they can assist in making sense of long-term historical trends. For instance, Ilana Feldman directs her gaze onto the everyday writing practices of bureaucracies in Gaza over the period of 1917-1967. Feldman claims that to really comprehend what is seen as the defining date in Palestinian history – the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 – we need to calibrate how this event was managed subsequently, ‘…whether it be the transformation of an ethics of care, the reconfiguration of service bureaucracies, or the development of new forms of documentation’ (2008: 2). Similarly, Chatterji and Mehta (2007) make a case for studying Hindu-Muslim violence in a slum in Mumbai not merely by focusing on the riot or believing that the ‘normal’ life resumes uncomplicatedly once violence ends. They focus, instead, on how the resumption of ‘normalcy’ is crafted through everyday practices such as the setting up of government commissions to investigate the riots, the documentation of the riots in official narratives, the remaking of the space of the slum, the initiation of slum redevelopment programs, and the governmental technologies of rule enacted through extra-governmental bodies such as NGOs.

As even a cursory visit to state bureaucracies in much of the world will immediately make evident, a profound reliance on paper/documents/files is the constitutive feature of bureaucracy. Ethnographies of institutions and organizations (Harper 1997, Riles 2001), states (Stoler 2009, Feldman 2008, Messick 1996), ‘wannabe’-states (Navaro-Yashin 2012), and the increasingly globalised auditing regimes (Hetherington 2011) demonstrate the ubiquity of documentary practices and the manner in which paper underpins action and constitutes legitimised evidence. Matthew Hull (2012) has extended the focus on documents by studying urban governance in Pakistan as a material practice. Within the Pakistani bureaucracy is a great variety of what he terms graphic artefacts: files, office registers, minutes, organizational charts, plans, visiting cards, “chits,” petitions, powers of attorney, memos, letters, revenue records, regulations, reports, policy statements, and office manuals. Through an innovative study of these graphic artefacts and the workings of the urban development authority in Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, Hull demonstrates the forms taken on by the planned, modernist city of Islamabad. His work is able to answer concrete questions on the development of Islamabad as a particular type of city as well as the effects of urban planning and relocation for the city residents.

Another recent monograph (Mathur 2016) based in neighbouring India, also centres bureaucratic things and practices as it seeks to answer questions that are often posed for the developmental Indian state: Why is the Indian state incapable of producing desired change despite its beautiful and complex plans/policies/laws; why and how do well-meaning laws produce absurdity or fail in their entirety? Mathur’s ethnography focuses on quotidian bureaucratic practices – reading, writing, lettering, filing, producing and circulating documents, and meetings – and the daily expending of bureaucratic labour on these banal practices through which an anti-poverty statute was executed. Her ethnography demonstrates that the welfare legislation came to a grinding halt not because of corruption, dysfunctionality, inefficiency or low capacity of the Indian state, but rather due to its historically sedimented material and affective bureaucratic practices.

Marthur’s ethnography shows state functioning does not occur mechanically despite that oft-repeated metaphor of the machine of the state, which, with all its connotations of a unitary system working on automaton, is highly misleading. The metaphor of the machine is often applied to the study of development bureaucracies: De Vries described it as ‘a crazy, expansive machine, driven by its capacity to incorporate, refigure and reinvent all sorts of desires for development’ (2007: 37); Nuijten (2004: 211) terms the Mexican bureaucracy a ‘hope-generating machine’ emphasising its capacity to generate hope over its depoliticization effect as famously explored by Ferguson (1990), probably the most famous descriptor of the development apparatus as a machine that produces an anti-politics. Emergent ethnographies of bureaucracies have done much to move away from such machine metaphors to show their contextualised and specific effects. Some of this new ethnographic work on bureaucracy focuses on materiality that goes beyond paper/documents to include, for instance, roads (Harvey and Knox 2015), genealogical charts (Chelcea 2016), and law (Latour 2009). Furthermore, as state bureaucracies the world over have begun experimenting with new technologies and are shifting from what media historian Lisa Gitelman (2014) describes as ‘paper knowledge’ to forms of e-governance, a host of new ethnographies are emerging that depict these new bureaucratic worlds (e.g. Rao & Greenleaf 2013, Breckenridge 2014)

In tandem with the focus on the material culture of bureaucracies, the turn towards studying the role of affect and emotions in political and social life has, also, assisted with a movement away from studying policies or bureaucracies as ‘legal-rational ways of getting things done’ (Wedel et al. 2005: 30) to instead bring out their affective dimensions and socialities (e.g. Bear 2005, Laszczkowski & Reeves 2015). Navaro-Yashin (2012) centres affect in the study of modern bureaucracy. She studies Turkish-Cypriots as they relate to and transact documents produced by several different administrative structures and practices. The Turkish-Cypriots she discusses are subjects and ‘citizens’, since 1983, of an unrecognised state, the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (TRNC), which is considered illegal under international law. In describing how they interact with and respond to state documents, she shows how these material objects of law and governance have an affective underside: they induce ‘panic and fear, wit and irony, cynicism and familiarity’ (2012: 125).

The anthropology of bureaucracy has not just shed light on the operation of states but also, more recently, of global organizations (Sapignoli & Niezen 2017). Ranging from understanding the politics of monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) (Cowan & Billaud 2015) to how Atlantic bluefin tuna are regulated by a supranational body such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) (Telesca 2015), these emergent ethnographies are opening up new spaces for understanding the effects and functioning of transnational bureaucracies. The anthropology of policy and development is, similarly, beginning to foreground the everyday worlds and labours of development and humanitarian practitioners (e.g. Redfield 2013). This focus on organizational structures and lifeworlds of development bureaucrats in ‘Aidland’ has emerged, Mosse (2013) has cogently argued, due to a dawning recognition that anthropologists need to move away from a mere critical deconstruction of development discourse to a deeper ethnographic exploration of the black box of international development.

Audit and reform

The second broad approach to the anthropology of bureaucracy concentrates its attention not on how bureaucracies function, but rather on how they are monitored, audited, and attempt to transform themselves. One of the earliest collections, Audit cultures, published in 2000 and edited by Marilyn Strathern, focused on the relationship between bureaucracies and neoliberalism, was centred upon practices of auditing and seeking accountability. Strathern wrote,

procedures for assessment have social consequences, locking up time, personnel and resources, as well as locking into the moralities of public management. Yet by themselves audit practices often seem mundane, inevitable parts of a bureaucratic process. It is when one starts putting together a larger picture that they take on the contours of a distinct cultural artifact (2000: 2).

This work, along with the many that followed in its wake (e.g. E. Hull 2012), demonstrates the potency of apparently benign injunctions to ‘reform’ institutions and states on unobjectionable principles – such as making them more accountable to ‘the people’.

Following this line of inquiry, a recent collection of essays has foregrounded the changing form of the public good in its ethnographic study of bureaucracies (Bear & Mathur 2015). A unique characteristic of bureaucracies, after all, is that they exist for the public good. They materialise the redistributive social contract between citizens and the state. A study of public goods acquires particular salience in the contemporary neoliberal period given how they are being pressed into the service of differing organizations the world over. New public goods can be captured in the increasingly strident calls from bureaucrats and citizens for transparency, accountability, fiscal responsibility, austerity, and decentralization. One way to understand bureaucracies, then, is to focus on the discourse and processes of reform and reorganization that is being undertaken in the name of the public good. Ethnographies of transparency reforms in bureaucracies have, for instance, gone far beyond asking how the opaque is made visible to discuss questions of surveillance, effectiveness, knowledge-creation, and even questioning the very desirability of transparency-projects (Ballestero 2012).

It is not just global markets or the everyday worlds of traders and investors that an anthropological approach to bureaucracy can illuminate. In recent years, the neoliberal assault on higher education has produced some interesting studies of the university as a bureaucratic organization situated within and affected by global and national polices. Stefan Collini (2012), for instance, has set forth a particularly compelling critique of the neoliberalising moves of privatising education and the conversion of students into ‘customers’ in the UK. While Collini’s writings relate more broadly to the humanities and to the university as a particular form of a public good that should be cherished and preserved, some important work in anthropology had signalled the dangers of ‘audit cultures’ earlier on. The 2000 collection on audit cultures edited by Strathren as well as The Audit Society (Power 1999) had pointed out that technologies of audit and accountability-generation are not benign practices but tools of neoliberal governmentality, the effects of which are nothing less than coercive for all academics (Shore & Wright 2000, see also Amit 2000 and Fillitz 2000).

Cris Shore & Susan Wright (2000) discussed the rapid and relentless spread of coercive technologies of accountability into higher education in Britain. As they note, audit technologies are not simply innocuously neutral, legal-rational practices: rather, they are instruments for new forms of governance and power. Audit, these anthropologists have argued, must be understood not simply in terms of whether it meets its professed aims and objectives, but in terms of its political functions as a technology of neoliberal governance. A more recent volume of essays pushes this argument further afield to Asia Pacific and Europe to ask if we are now witnessing the death of the public university (Shore & Wright 2017). It focuses on the series of reforms that have been forced upon Universities since the 1980s with particular attention paid to the more recent scramble from higher rankings and utilization of metrics that can measure ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’ in higher education.

In a powerful 2004 address to the American Anthropological Association, Don Brenneis had made the call for anthropologists to study their own bureaucratic institutions as anthropologists and to stop bracketing out important practices, such as the manner in which donor organizations make funding decisions. As he succinctly put it, ‘before one can… “write culture” one must write money for an audience of one’s peers’ (2004: 582). His ethnography of the National Science Foundation (NSF) brings to light a number of important findings, key among them the notion of ‘panel civility’ that disallows panellists from making what could be seen as ‘controversial decisions’ and instead rewards conservative proposals, thus limiting the possibilities of greater anthropological creativity. The call was renewed by the 2017 American Ethnological Society presidential address that, too, laments the absence of enough critical ethnographic ‘homework’ into their own bureaucratic university settings by anthropologists (Gusterson 2017).

In a further turning of a critical anthropological lens onto anthropology departments in Euro-America, the development and strengthening of a flagrantly exploited underclass of academics has been variously described as ‘academic apartheid’ (Unger 1995: 117), ‘the new internal colonialism’ (Giacomo 2010), and ‘a prestige economy’ (Kendizor 2015). These writers, amongst others, have pointed out how higher education is becoming a smaller, more elite club with anthropology departments cutting permanent posts and relying increasingly on and exploiting the labour of never-to-be-tenured adjunct staff. The political-economic changes that have allowed for this state of things are now well documented (see Kendizor 2015). The irony of anthropology as a discipline that prides itself on uncovering structural inequalities in ‘other’ places (the ‘field’) and yet being complicit in perpetuating increasingly exploitative conditions, especially for the younger generation of anthropologists, has not escaped attention. These studies, once again, demonstrate the political possibilities inherent in a deeper analysis of the working of bureaucracies; in this case those very bureaucracies that academics are immersed in.

Banality and boredom

Beyond Weberian (mis)readings, bureaucracy posed a series of more profound problems to anthropology as a discipline with ethnography as its primary method. In the first place, anthropology has been known to be pre-occupied with the remote, exotic, and the Other. Bureaucracy not only is none of these, but it is also something that anthropologists as professional academics are themselves deeply steeped in. Riles (2001) has described as the ‘achingly familiar’ practices of bureaucratic institutions the world over. She notes that when she was writing up her doctoral research she was struck by the similarities between her own practices as an academic and those of the bureaucracies she studied in Fiji. She argued that these similarities directed our attention to a problem of anthropological analysis that does not inhere in our encounter with knowledge practices ‘outside’ our own, but rather is endemic to the ‘inside’ of modern institutional and academic analysis – the production of funding proposals, the collection of data, the drafting of documents, or the attendance of meetings. Given their own immersion in bureaucratic worlds, anthropologists have up until quite recently tended to not consider it ‘Other-enough’ to warrant serious attention.

Secondly, bureaucracy is often dismissed as too boring to be of any value. David Graeber (2006), for instance, has explored the question of why anthropologists study rituals surrounding births, deaths, marriages, and other rites of passages but not the daily rituals of bureaucratic practices. Neglecting these rituals is particularly puzzling, in Graeber’s perspective, given the anthropologists’ traditional concern with socially efficacious ritual gestures ‘where the mere act of saying or doing something makes it socially true. Yet in most existing societies at this point, it is precisely paperwork, not other forms of ritual, that is socially efficacious’ (2006: 3). Graeber provides an ‘obvious answer’ to this question: ‘The obvious answer is that paperwork is boring. There aren’t many interesting things one can say about it’. The clinching argument for the boredom of paperwork and associated bureaucracies is that, with the notable exception of Kafka, they remain largely absent from ‘great literature’, for ‘there’s so little there that once you’ve done it, there’s nothing left for anyone to add’ (Graeber 2006: 3).^[1]

Perhaps it is not boredom or an absence of things to say, as much as the difficulty in the crafting of a language to capture the banality and to express the everyday operations of bureaucracies. Indeed, such representational acts seem to be possible in their putatively fictionalised form. Thus, Kafka’s writings gave birth to an adjective – Kafkaesque – on the basis of his singular capacity to turn ‘bureaucracy into a political grotesque – a grotesquerie that is abysmally comic’ (Corngold 2009: 8). Orwell, another superb observer of bureaucracies, invented a whole new vocabulary to describe its characteristics: newspeak, think police, thoughtcrime, etc. What is required then is the crafting of a new language, one that can ethnographically capture the banality of bureaucracy (Mathur 2016). As this entry has argued, the benefits of such a new ethnographic language and practice are potentially enormous: ranging from understanding the functioning of postcolonial welfare states to a new perspective on contemporary global public goods of transparency and accountability to the very meaning of a university in Britain or the United States.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the anthropology of bureaucracy is capable of shedding new light on urgent matters of global concern – including migration, governance, poverty, austerity, precarity – and serves as a powerful example of the distinctive power of ethnography to explain the world in new ways. It also pushes anthropologists to refine their craft and devise new ways to make even the most ordinary social world accessible to its readers. Taken to its fullest potential, the anthropological study of bureaucracy doesn’t just help us make sense of the Other – the founding object of study of the discipline. Rather, it helps us make sense of those things, like universities and academic professionalism, which are all too familiar.

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Note on contributor

Nayanika Mathur is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paper tiger: law, bureaucracy and the developmental state in Himalayan India (Cambridge, 2016) and the co-editor of Remaking the public good: a new anthropology of bureaucracy (Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2015).

Dr Nayanika Mathur, Schools of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, 12 Bevington Road, Oxford, OX2 6LH, United Kingdom. nm289@cam.ac.uk.

[1] Previously Lévi-Strauss had altogether cut out ‘that-which-is-written’ from the study of anthropology. He considered the primary function of writing to be the facilitation of ‘the enslavement of other human beings’, and had asserted half a century back that ‘Ethnology is especially interested in what is not written. [It deals with what is] different from everything that men usually dream of engraving in stone or committing to paper’ (quoted in Stoler 2009).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Neoliberalism

Sustainability

Introduction

Contextualising sustainability

Plurality

Commensurability

Moralities

Futures

Conclusion

References

Acknowledgements

Note on contributor

Ethnicity

Introduction

Lineages of thought

Ethnic as ‘other’

Ethnicity as a relational field

Deconstructing ethnicity: against groupist ontologies

Ethnicity as affective politics

The geopolitics of ethnicity

Conclusion

References

Notes on contributors

Prefigurative politics

Introduction

Revolutions that dismiss the revolution

An activist and anthropological field of action take shape

Materialising participatory democracy

Rebuilding communication and the media

Beyond occupied squares: communities, lifestyles, and the old left

Coming to a close—but not to conclude

References

Note on contributor

Depression

Introduction

Culture, gender, and situated biologies

Distress, misunderstandings, and the politics of psychiatry

Globalised depression

Global therapeutics: quantified selves, resilience, and anonymous care

Depression and neoliberal selfhood

Conclusion

Note

References

Note on contributors

Sport

Sport in anthropology

The emergence of modern sport

Sport under capitalism and socialism

The neoliberal restructuring of sport

Sport, gender, and sex

Sport as cultural performance

Body enhancement and its limits

Conclusion: sport and scale

Further reading

References

Notes

Note on contributors

Precarity

Precarity

The ontological condition of precariousness

Precarity as part of neoliberal capitalism

The ‘Precariat’ and class formation

Conclusion: the politics of labour

References

Note on contributor

Bureaucracy

Introduction

Governance

Audit and reform

Banality and boredom

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor