Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - State

Populism

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:35:17 +0000

Donald Trump supporters at a political rally in Mesa, Arizona in October, 2018. Picture by Gage Skidmore.

Harvard University

Initially published 21 Mar 2025

Abstract:

Populism is a conception of political representation that views ‘the people’ as the primary political actor and the basis of political sovereignty. As populism does not refer to a specific ideology, ideologically diverse movements can fall under it. Thus, populism is not intrinsically conservative or progressive, left-wing or right-wing. However, populists’ insistence that their movement, leader, and party should represent ‘the people’ puts populist politics at odds with liberal democracy’s insistence on a public sphere characterised by rational deliberation—the model of deliberative democracy and liberal constitutionalism that has been celebrated throughout Western Europe and gained hegemony in the majority of the Northern Hemisphere since the French Revolution. Populism tends to reject consensus politics, even if it believes in democratic elections—as shown by most populist political parties. While the first populist party came about in the United States, populist parties and movements are prominent across all continents.

Anthropologists have studied populism within highly distinct cultural contexts, often foregrounding the very overt role of emotion and feelings of socioeconomic disenfranchisement in populist rhetoric. They have also investigated the relationship between populism and democracy, and the seemingly unique role of the leader in populist movements, which seem to equate a political movement with a singular figure. Ethnographic methods, which allow us to come closer to understanding the lives of others, have challenged hegemonic narratives about populism, questioning its assumed ties to specific ideologies and pushing back against the notion that populism disqualifies itself just because it relies on emotions. Thereby, anthropology provides us with a critical lens on populism that still helps us grasp its seemingly global appeal in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: What is populism?

The twenty-first century has been characterised by an upsurge in the popularity of populist movements across the globe. If it is possible to identify the first formal populist movement in history, we could arguably start with the United States, which, in the 1890s, saw the establishment of the People’s Party, or Populist Party. The American People’s Party never enjoyed significant electoral success, but its platform, which generally sought to improve the lives of labourers and regulate the concentration of capital, remains relevant in American politics. Historian Federico Finchelstein has claimed that Peronism, which came to power in Argentina in 1946, is the first populist regime in global history. Peronism emerged as a workers’ movement in 1945 but has evolved to take on many ideological iterations since then. Beyond Peronism, which within a single populist movement has taken on varying policy positions, in other places, such as the United States, different parties of opposing views may be labelled as ‘populist’, such as the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States. As a result, ‘populism’ is difficult to define; it is a very broad concept—or an ‘overdetermined signifier’ (Stavrakakis et al. 2017, 425)—that stands for a plethora of political movements, which seem quite different from each other.

Because so many different political moments representing diverse and even conflicting views have been called ‘populist’, a question of great scholarly importance, including for anthropologists, is what exactly the term stands for. Many scholars of populism have argued that the term does not refer to a specific political platform, but rather, in the words of Ernesto Laclau, one of the most influential theorists of populism, to a ‘political logic’ or form of political discourse that can be adapted to any ideological program or political platform (2005). Populist movements, parties, and regimes can thus be on the left or right or anywhere in between. For example, the New Left leaders of Latin America that emerged in the 2000s, which included Evo Morales in Bolivia, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula Ignacio da Silva in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, represented a populist turn to progressive politics in South America. In contrast, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States (as well as several other leaders in the Global North) are right-wing populists related to fascism, as they overtly celebrate xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies.

Further inspired by the work of Laclau (2005), anthropologists tend to think of populism as a style of political discourse that employs a polarising logic. This logic positions ‘the people’—the protagonist of populist politics—against an ‘enemy’, often internal to the nation-state or wider populace. In populism, ‘the people must be extracted from within the people’, as political theorist Jan Werner-Müller has stated (2014). This means that popular sovereignty does not extend to everyone, but only to ‘the people’ that populism celebrates, as opposed to others. Thus, for populist parties, which are often nationalist, not all citizens can be said to truly belong to the nation-state. The frontier that populism creates between ‘the people’ and their others is an antagonistic one. Thus, ‘the people’ are said to have ‘enemies’—often fellow citizens who are viewed as betraying a sense of national authenticity (Laclau 2005, 84-5). ‘Enemies’ or ‘anti-people’ may be defined along status, class, ethnic, party, or sectoral lines, and are often viewed as undermining national well-being (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). Thus, a key aspect of populist politics is its divisive rhetoric, which, when repeated often enough, turns into a discourse, i.e. a way of perceiving and thinking about the world.

Another structural continuity of populism is that it frames its central political actor—‘the people’—as a victimised group within broader national or global populations (Samet 2019). Their ‘enemies’ are somehow a source of ‘the people’s’ suffering or exploitation. This may seem surprising, as ‘the people’ and their assumed ‘enemy’, are single names for heterogeneous groups and social sectors, each representing highly disparate sets of social demands. Moreover ‘the people’ can even include powerful groups, such as dominant racial groups within a society. Yet, this sentiment of victimhood or of being a morally upright ‘underdog’ is particularly important, as it unites vague sectors and otherwise heterogeneous factions of a given society (Chatterjee 2011, 15). By relying on antagonistic victimisation, populism is a necessarily polarising political force. As such, it engenders an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy—even if most populist regimes have been democratic. As some scholars have underscored, liberal regimes that present emotional politics as ‘irrational’ may further marginalise the social demands of the most vulnerable populations within society (Ahmed 2004). Populism, on the other hand, allows for the expression of political voices that might otherwise go unarticulated.

A final structural continuity between different forms of populism that draw on ‘the people’ as an underdog, even a downtrodden group, is that its discourse does not rely on traditional notions of class warfare. This can be explored through Trumpism in the United States. In this case, ‘the people’ stands for a highly racialised concept of American identity but is not defined, in membership, by being white. ‘The people’ consists of a broad coalition that feels that their different demands could be satisfied by the same leader and movement. ‘The people’ is also an identity that is inherently exclusive towards many Americans who are considered to be sympathetic to migrants, protesters associated with amorphous leftist forces, as well as various ‘elites’, be they academics and universities, part of a general intelligentsia (including non-aligned media), and even corporate managers who do not adhere to Trumpist politics. Trumpist discourse is thus not restricted to ideas of class warfare but has, instead, allied various sectors of American society against common and often vaguely defined enemies, such as ‘the media’, ‘the Washington elite’, or ‘the Left’.

In sum, populism refers to a discursive logic or manner of constructing the political rather than a specific ideology, and it thinks of politics in polarising, often self-victimising terms. Populism is also usually characterised by charismatic leadership, overtly emotional rhetoric, and positions ‘the people’ as the central actor in politics. While this definition of populism is broad, its structural continuities differentiate its various ideological stripes from the liberal forms of democracy most celebrated in Europe and North America after the French Revolution. As this entry will explore further, the relationship between populism and democracy is not one of diametric opposition, but populist notions of political representation certainly disturb liberal norms of deliberative democracy. More specifically, populism is a political logic that encourages an overtly emotional brand of politics.

The anthropology of populism

While much social science literature has been dedicated to populism, the term does not yet occupy a large amount of literature within anthropology (see Mazzarella 2019). This is surprising, as the discipline is uniquely suited to study the appeal of populist movements. Its ethnographic research methods reveal the emotional, economic, social, and cultural factors that lead to populism’s appeal. Additionally, because anthropologists conduct their research in diverse geographic contexts, their inquiries into populism clarify the historical and social contingencies that give rise to and shape populist movements in specific field sites, while also considering what these sites reveal about the appeal of populism more broadly.

Anthropological investigations of populism have focused on recent and current populist regimes, such as Erdoğan’s Turkey (Tambar 2014), Maduro’s Venezuela (Samet 2019), Modi’s India (Hota 2020), Trump in the United States (Kalb 2023), and Orbán in Hungary (Laszlo 2020), adding distinctively ethnographic insight into what has been described as an illiberal rejection of liberal democratic norms prevalent in the post-WWII era. They have often sought to explain the appeal of the respective populist movements upon which they focus, frequently asking how populist communities are created and sustained. Anthropology links this question to its interest in the structure and reproduction of community as well as to its long-standing interest in the creation of social solidarity. It turns out that rhetoric, ritual, and state fetishism are central to populism’s appeal. For example, in Lauren Derby’s history of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, she understands fetishism to be key to the dictator’s appeal, or ‘seduction’, in her words, diminishing the population’s capacity to resist authoritarianism (2009). Similarly, Fernando Coronil, Michael Taussig, and Rafael Sánchez have all underscored how reifying and even deifying political figures is central to populist politics.

Similarly, work on scapegoating in times of uncertainty has shown that ambiguous social conditions lead to blaming individuals or groups for social ills, often resulting in violence (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976; Geschiere 2013; Siegel 2006). In recent ethnographic work on ethnonationalism in Turkey, for example, we have seen how wounded masculinity among disabled Turkish veterans of the Kurdish conflict contributes to their hatred for their Kurdish foes. Coming home from war disabled, these veterans feel betrayed by the Turkish state, which they criticise for taking too soft of an approach against the Kurds (Aciksoz 2019). Ethnographic work on racialised nationalism elucidates how the demonisation of racialised others becomes the basis for racist political movements. For example, ethnographic work on white nationalists in de-industrialised parts of the United States has reflected this logic of demonisation. Instead of drawing on theories of scapegoating explicitly, some anthropologists have traced this othering logic through a psychoanalytic framework, meditating on the dialectical relationship between self and other to understand how whiteness is constituted through xenophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in deindustrialised North America (Song 2011).

Scholars working on ultranationalist politics have also drawn on the notion of sacrifice to better understand the rhetoric of ethnonationalist populist discourse. In Turkey, disabled military veterans (gazi) are lionised as modern-day martyrs (şehitler). Their sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of their bodies in war, is deeply implicated in notions of citizenship. Disabled veterans are held to be owed debts of honour and gratitude by the state, which entitles them to various privileges, such as high-quality prostheses, jobs, interest-free housing credit and medical care (Aciksoz 2019, 56-7). They do not embody the horrors of war as much as they serve state purposes for further militarisation. The celebration of their sacrifice exists alongside a scapegoating of the Kurdish movement as a threat to Turkish sovereignty (Aciksoz 2019).

Further broadening ethnography’s insights into populism, anthropologists of the post-Soviet Visegrád nations (i.e. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) have looked at how populism can emerge in opposition to liberal discourses of multiculturalism. Here, people attracted to populism consider national culture to be under attack by an urban intelligentsia. In Poland and Slovakia, populist politics underscore local valorisations of cultural authenticity (both fascist and progressive), which appeal to local identities associated with rural origins and agricultural labour (Buzalka 2021). Post-Soviet populism is also marked by a nostalgia for a sense of collectivism and community, which seem at risk in an increasingly globalised world. In Hungary, the interplay of economic transformation and an attachment to national culture and solidarity are equally at play (Kurti 2020). Here, populism is closely tied to racist ethnonationalism and xenophobic political sentiments that translate into anti-immigrant discourse, as is evident elsewhere in the region (Buzalka 2022; Kalb 2009a, 2009b; Malewska-Szalygin 2009). The ethnographic study of Visegrád politics thus helps understand the logics of populism in other regions, notably Brexit and Trump (Kurti 2020).

The following sections will foreground three main tensions in the anthropological study of populism, namely the emotional drivers of populism, its relationship to democracy, and the nature of populist leadership.

Emotion and political economy

Anthropologists have been interested in the emotional and affective drivers of social life since at least the 1990s. They neither condemn nor celebrate emotion as irrational or rational, but consider feelings, sensations, and emotional and affective dispositions as revelatory of political dynamics. This is true for work on the emotions and affect of political memory (Yashin-Navarro 2002, 2012), volunteer work (Muehlebach 2011), or citizenship (Cox 2016; Savell 2015), for example.

Anthropologies of populism share this overarching concern with affect and emotion and have often aimed at understanding the ritualisation and routinisation of emotion in illiberal politics (Sánchez 2016, de Abreu 2021). Take Peronist rallies in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s. These rallies, in which thousands of Peronists gathered to express loyalty to the leaders of the movement, were highly emotionally charged ritualised theatre in which the masses played a mostly passive role. Many women active in Peronist politics have imitated the matriarch of Peronism, Eva ‘Evita’ Perón, in their speech patterns and hairstyles (Auyero 2001). In contrast to spontaneity, these practices ‘modulate affect’ through ritual, inculcating the followers of such movements with a series of habits that some critics qualify as authoritarian (Sanchez 2015) or at least at odds with the freeing affects of revolutionary politics (Beasley-Murray 2010, 25).

The emotional and affective underpinnings of populist mobilisation can be libidinal, even erotic. The election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in India in 2014, for example, catalysed a populist Hindu nationalism that was not just racialised and caste-oriented, but also highly gendered (Hota 2019). Here, Hindu ethnonationalists shored up popular anxieties linked to sex by presenting the ‘national body’ as ascetic, masculine, and pure, whilst conceiving of vilified others (e.g. protesting students, Christians, Muslims) as feminised and polluting. Doing so helped Modi supporters add a sexualised edge to the emotions involved in political othering.

Some scholars have drawn on Western crowd theories to trace a genealogy between the libidinal urges evident in crowds and populist emotions. People in crowds experience a contagious collective effervescence, frequently described as producing sentiments and actions that transcend the individual (Canetti [1960] 1984, Freud 1921, Le Bon [1895] 1995, Tarde [1898] 1989). They may thus act differently than they would on their own. Thus, crowds are sometimes perceived as stripping people of their agency or as intrinsically sinister, as they may elicit irrational and base feelings. Perceived as such, crowds can be thought of as threats to the social order, bypassing institutions and sanctioned normative behaviours. While this can be true—taking the January 6^th, 2021 riots of Trump supporters in the US, who stormed the Capitol because they did not accept that Trump had lost the 2020 election, as an example—ethnographic work also shows that crowds can be a generative political force, capable of transforming social and political norms. The imprisonment of then-Secretary of Labor Juan Perón in 1945 by the Argentine government provoked mass protests that not only led to Perón’s release but solidified Peronism as a formidable political force that would drastically expand workers’ rights in Argentina.

Beyond focusing on affect and emotion, the popularity of nationalist populism, particularly in Europe, is often linked to a general disenchantment with neoliberalism (Gusterson 2017, 210). While populism predates neoliberalism, populism’s increased popularity can be read as a reaction to an economic system in which state intervention favours the market, rather than regulating the market to favour its citizens (Foucault 1979). In Guatemala, this disenchantment takes the form of pessimism in which citizens, even if they may sympathise with drastic political reforms, view social transformation through politics quite cynically. Ethnography has shown how a significant number of citizens from the Indigenous population, which faced genocide at the hands of the military dictatorship led by Ríos Montt in the 1980s, has, since the 1990s, supported his Guatemalan Republican Front in local and national elections. In a context of neoliberalism where revolutionary change seems impossible, this population is drawn to this political party’s local development projects and clientelistic practices, which bring capital to Indigenous communities. In this context, Indigenous Guatemalan subjects are resigned to understanding the limitations of politics and pragmatically engage with a political party that can contribute tangible material gains to their lives (Copeland 2019). Disaffection with neoliberalism and wariness of globalised cosmopolitanism was also evident in the UK’s 2016 withdrawal from the EU through the Brexit referendum (Gusterson 2017).

Notable ethnographies of populism have foregrounded the role of cynicism in the face of neoliberalism. For example, in post-Soviet contexts such as Slovakia (Buzalka 2022) and Poland (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgin 2001a, 2001b), citizens feel left behind by neoliberal policies that render them further marginalised. In these cases, cynicism towards neoliberalism is also accompanied by a celebration of national tradition that takes on, often, ethnonationalist flavours. As shown by work on post-Soviet populisms in anthropology, the reification of traditional and even rural ways of life are part of a rejection of neoliberalism and liberalism.

The study of populist emotions and affect raises the question of who exactly the subject of populist movements is. Ethnographic work on populism has confirmed that ‘the people’ are not explicitly related to socioeconomic class categories. ‘The people’, even when they are primarily thought of as ‘workers’, such as in the case in early Peronist rhetoric in Argentina, is a vague enough moniker to unite various social sectors that are not constricted by class identity. Instead, who ‘the people’ are is often intentionally left vague so as to absorb as many different social forces as possible. This coalitional nature of populist politics cuts across class alliances. In Brazil, for example, right-wing authoritarian politics include supporters that are not limited to one particular socioeconomic class (de Abreu 2021). Similar inter-class alliances have also been observed in right-wing populism in Guatemala (Copeland 2019), and Chavista and anti-Chavista mobilisation in Venezuela (Samet 2019).

At the same time, populist movements celebrate an underdog identity that appeals to notions of being part of a social sector excluded from the elite. Some scholars have been particularly attentive to the ‘double devaluations’ of space and class felt by those attracted to right-wing populism. The double devaluation refers to feelings of disenfranchisement that arise from those who feel both their socioeconomic class and place of origin to be devalued by liberal norms. Neoliberal global flows of capital, people, and ideas have produced a rise in the popularity of right-wing populist movements that imbue their supporters with a sense of dignity (Kalb 2023). In this work, like those working in post-Soviet contexts and in Latin America, we see how disenchantment with neoliberalism produces cynicism, resignation, and, in the case of Poland, resistance in the form of illiberal, right-wing politics (Kalb 2023).

Both populism’s critics and its supporters are attentive to its emotionally charged nature. Critics often find its overtly emotional dimensions to be proof of its irrationality, disqualifying it from being taken seriously or even condemning it as something that has no place in the political sphere (Ostiguy 2009, 2017). Supporters have argued that populism is radically democratic, and that its capacity to express the affective dimensions of political mobilisation is precisely part of its democratic potential (Samet 2019; Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). From this point of view, liberal paradigms of democracy that focus on mediation through institutions are overly restrictive as they repress the emotional nature of political participation.

Ethnography has trodden a middle ground in this debate. While highlighting the importance of emotion and affect, anthropologists refuse to fetishise populism as inherently less rational than other kinds of politics (Hann 2019). Consider the discussion of Peronism mentioned above. While Peronism is marked by dominant emotional features, these do not thereby render it irrational. Instead, its emotional appeal exists in addition to a political field of highly limited practical options. Peronist supporters are motivated by a ‘structure of feeling’ that coexists alongside practicality (Auyero 2000). Rather than pointing at populism as a mostly rational reaction to neoliberalism or as simply a ritualised collective effervescence, ethnographic work shows that practical and emotional drivers co-exist and interact with one another.

Relationship to democracy

As stated above, discussions of populism tend to categorise it as radically democratic or counter to the spirit of democracy. Anthropologists have thus explored the relationship between populist movements and democratic politics. Both privilege the concept of popular sovereignty, which positions ‘the people’ as the foundation of political legitimacy. In populism, ‘the people’ is the political actor par excellence, viewed as having a rather unmediated relationship to power even beyond the sphere of electoral politics. In deliberative democracy, ‘the people’s’ power is mediated, mostly by elections and state bureaucracies, which is meant to protect minorities and temper populist decision-making via a rule of experts.

The classic image of popular sovereignty is the crowd—a group of people that has come together through a common cause or grievance. The Jacobins, who emerged in the late 1700s as part of the French Revolution, represent the crowd’s raw democratic potential and potentially sinister dimensions. Once in power, during the early 1790s, they carried out a wave of political violence known as The Reign of Terror (la terreur), which resulted in thousands of executions of political and ideological enemies. Yet, they also represented a plurality of social forces dedicated to anti-royalist republicanism. The Jacobinian phase of the French Revolution thus positions the crowd as both the embodiment of democratic spirit and the anarchic overturning of an existing order (Mazauric 2014). The mass of the revolution is violent, unpredictable, and destructive—yet it is this mass action that challenges the monarchic notion of the sovereign by demonstrating the bare power of popular sovereignty. And so, within the history of modern democracy and republicanism, we have a reification of ‘the people’ as the political actor par excellence and as the mercurial and temperamental mass that can tear down an existing order through organising around particular demands as well as through brute force. As follows, some political theorists have argued that the crowd embodies true democracy while others consider it true (i.e. deliberative) democracy’s ‘shadow’ or ‘mirror’ (Canovan 1999; Panizza 2005).

Crowds are arguably both celebrated and feared by deliberative democracies, who view popular sovereignty as fundamental yet often insist on its mediation through institutional mechanisms. Within liberal democracy resides a tension between the Jacobinian, evolutionary spirit of popular sovereignty and the requirement for institutionalism, the latter often being viewed as cumbersome to the former (Canovan 2005; Sánchez 2016). In populism, this tension comes to a head as the crowd may potently shirk institutions associated with the status quo. Obvious examples from recent history would include the January 6^th, 2021 riots that sought to overturn the results of the US 2020 presidential election, as well as the January 8^th, 2023 protests in Brazil, which also challenged the outcome of their presidential elections.

As some scholars have argued, the crowd is both necessary for democratic support in the context of republicanism, but also poses a threat to the stability of a republic. Thus, the state must transform the unruly crowd or masses into the disciplined ‘people’ of republicanism. Popular sovereignty makes republican politics possible and constantly challenges its perpetuity. The same is true for populism, which creates ‘the people’ out of a broad coalition of social sectors and political interests. As a result, even in its democratic iterations, populism is ultimately authoritarian because it is so focused on controlling the masses by containing them as ‘the people’. Some have argued that this tension exists in republican democracy as well (Sánchez 2016), but it is more obvious in populism due to its more brazen celebration of popular sovereignty as ‘the people’ (Canovan 1999, 2005; Panizza 2005).

Anthropologists have long been aware of this uneasy relationship between populism and democracy. While some have been critical of populism’s allegedly inherently authoritarian tendencies (Sánchez 2016), several ethnographies argue that populism is the most radically democratic form of political organisation, which is precisely why it seems so threatening to any status quo. Its capacity to unite diverse factions of society makes it a particularly efficacious brand of political mobilisation (Samet 2019).

A major question that these debates raise is what the relationship between populism and fascism may be, as many right-wing populist movements clearly resemble or have components of the latter. Populist movements, in the Global North in particular, represent democratic as well as fascist reactions to liberal paradigms of governance, which favour models of deliberative democracy. In these contexts, popular support for populist movements and parties is, in large part, due to their platforms’ espousal of anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. Scholars studying these cases have shown how neoliberal economic policies, combined with liberal political discourse, have alienated rural and post-industrial contexts (Holmes 2010, 2019; Kalb 2023). These movements, such as the British National Party, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, Brexit, Trumpism, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, as with many Visegrád region nations, articulate national sovereignty and citizenship in ethnonationalist terms (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgyin 2021a, 2021b). This fascistically ethnonationalist and racist populist illiberalism unites those who feel devalued by liberal multiculturalism and the patterns of capital accumulation that have historically accompanied it in the post-WWII era.

The fascist discourse of many populist movements has led some scholars to argue that they are intrinsically interrelated—in other words, that populism is always related to fascism (Finchelstein 2019). While the abovementioned ethnographic work looks at populisms that are blatantly ethnonationalist, xenophobic, and racist, anthropologists have also argued that because populism is a political logic with drastically varying ideological content, it is important to evaluate different populist traditions based on the ideas they promote, rather than stigmatising all political forms that are labelled as ‘populist’ (Samet and Schiller 2017).

Charismatic leadership

One of the most important and controversial themes of inquiries into populism is the relationship between ‘the people’ and the leader. Because of its emphasis on popular sovereignty, some anthropologists have underscored the importance of people’s mobilisation in populism. They consciously move away from attributing the appeal of populist politics to personal charisma, arguing that depictions of charismatic leaders presiding over a passive mass reinforce stereotypes of socioeconomically precarious sectors as lacking in agency or as being intellectually incapacitated (Aciksoz 2019; Cody 2015; Lazar 2017; Samet 2019; Tambar 2014). These thinkers have sought to underscore the bottom-up dimensions of populism, demanding that we not simply credit the charismatic leader for creating the basis of populist organisation and showing that local and grassroots organisation are central to its appeal and success.

Recent studies of modern-day Peronist labour unions in Argentina have shown them to be far less oriented towards personalist political representation than one might assume. Instead, these unions are primarily spaces of negotiation. For Sian Lazar, labour unions allow for decision-making and debate that do not follow a strictly top-down structure by which a leader gives a command that is then carried out without deliberation or debate (2017). Such work stands in tension to a widespread concern that leaders and their charisma may be a chief organising force of populist movements. Anthropologists of populism elsewhere have also emphasised the importance of populism’s supporters by focusing on crowds and grassroots political organising, showing that populist mobilisation is not purely explained by the pull of a charismatic leader (Cody 2015, Tambar 2014).

The work on Eastern European populism emphasises sentiments on the ground as the source of populist cohesion more than shared loyalty to a single figure (Buzalka 2021; Kurti 2020; Malewska-Szyalgin 2021b). These studies underscore how populist discourse speaks to practical concerns of citizens who feel excluded, unmoored, and disenfranchised by economic and social transformation.

Many scholars of populism have focused on the nature of its conceptions of leadership. They contend that populist notions of political representation often fetishise larger-than-life figures (Finchelstein 2017; Wedeen 1995). Such figures can play a generative role in populist movements, as they help absorb the differences between the diverse social sectors that constitute ‘the people’ (Laclau 2005; Müller 2014). This was famously argued by Sigmund Freud in his examination of crowd psychology. For Freud ([1921] 2001), the leader is a love object. While the crowd is turned against others outside of itself—others whom it has come together against—its attention is also lovingly turned toward the leader, who is held to be a surrogate father figure (Derby 2009). Because populism depends on a coalition between diverse social sectors, the charismatic leader functions as an ‘arbiter of contradiction’.

Of course, the personality and even body of the leader are relevant to other political paradigms beyond populism: Monarchical leaders represent a classical notion of sovereignty in which they are above and beyond the laws that constrict their subjects. German historian Ernst Kantrowicz famously examined how divine right monarchs both embody and represent the divine and the human. He studied the genealogy of political leadership in Europe, examining the king’s two bodies as both divine and human, reflecting the doubling of Christ as, at once, both flesh and blood and godly (Kantrowicz [1937] 2016). Fetishism of a political leader—the reification of a human into a deified figure—has been part of political traditions far before the first populist party even emerged. It should thus not be surprising that followers of populist political leaders may consider them both eminently human and inherently not human, even divine (Coronil 1997; Derby 2009).

Scholars of regimes that are cults of personality, but not necessarily populist, also often have leaders that are both intended to be relatable and incomparable—their fetish quality is essential to their capacity to bring together diverse populations (Wedeen 1999). In the anthropological literature, the role of fetishised political leaders is conceived of in symbolic and psychoanalytical terms. Studies of totalitarianism and dictatorships have drawn on structuralist theories of the ‘master-signifier’—a signifier that does not refer to specific content (or ‘signified’) but is the anchor for a whole symbolic system—to understand how certain figures occupy singular symbolic functions. Thus, work on the Soviet Union has shown how certain historical figures like Lenin come to be reified as beyond reproach and critique, serving as master-signifiers that serve as an anchor through which subjects make sense of themselves and the world around them through a shared official discourse (Yurchak 2006). Scholarship on social uncertainty in times of political upheaval has shown how the deposal of brutal dictators, whose larger-than-life presence had previously served as a constant point of reference for their citizens, leads to a state of social ambiguity in which people feel the loss of a referential anchor (Siegel 2006).

Conclusion: A political question of our time

Ethnographic inquiry makes anthropology uniquely suited to give insights into why populist politics are so popular in today’s world. Anthropological work on populism has centred on its highly diverse manifestations. It generally avoids labelling populism as inherently left or right, but, instead, views it as a discursive style that can be adapted to many different ideological programs. The discipline makes sense of populism by focusing on themes including sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, and the nature of group belonging. A major topic of investigation is the nature and importance of emotions at play in populist movements. Another main topic concerns the complicated and dynamic relationship between liberal paradigms of deliberative democracy and populism, which demonstrates that democracy encourages mobilisation in the name of popular sovereignty and yet seeks to contain it. While anthropology considers the importance of charismatic leadership, it errs on the side of highlighting the agency of the subjects who engage in populist politics. What unites much of the anthropology of populism is the nature of political representation. Who should or should not be represented, how emotional or direct this representation should be, and who really defines the nature of representation are pressing questions that we need to keep asking against the rapid rise of populist parties globally.

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Note on contributor

Julia Fierman is currently Lecturer on Anthropology at Harvard University. Starting in 2025, she will take up the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete her monograph on Peronism—the world’s most enduring populist movement. She has previously published articles in various journals on the topics of populism, Peronism, and Argentine political culture.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Jean Price-Mars

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

Photo: Haïti Inter: Quand Price Mars racontait Haïti

Jhon Picard Byron

Initially published 9 May 2023

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Price-Mars dans la pensée anthropologique haïtienne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeunesse et vie d’homme politique

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

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

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

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

L’intellectuel engagé

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L’usage de l’œuvre price-marsienne

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

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

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

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

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

L’anti-essentialisme price-marsien

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Auteur

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infrastructure

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:58:08 +0000

Rehabilitation of the L train tunnel in New York, 2019. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York

Hannah Knox Evelina Gambino

University College London, University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Mar 2023

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

Abstract:

Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they connect, channel, and, at times, halt the movement of humans, commodities, and resources that populate the earth. Infrastructures can also be immaterial: software, flows of data, and capital and the systems that organise them. A most basic definition can be gleaned from the term itself: the prefix ‘infra-’ means ‘below’, which highlights infrastructure’s role as the ‘underlying structure’ that allows a system to function. Infrastructures are not traditional ethnographic sites, yet in recent years a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists have started to analyse them. Ethnographies of infrastructure have shown how these overlooked objects and networks offer exciting insights into the processes that make up social life. These studies have often highlighted the paradoxical quality of infrastructures, showing how they underwrite mundane daily interactions at the same time as being sites where dreams of alternative worlds are played out. Infrastructures remind us of the past and shape ideas of the future. They are both concrete things, and also structures that enable other things to move and be brought into relation with one another. For all of these reasons infrastructures are needed, coveted, and fought for. They channel new forms of power and act as catalysts for political struggle. This entry traces a growing body of work on infrastructures and their social implications. It shows how following infrastructures has allowed ethnographers to extend their analyses across multiple scales, shedding new light on practices of statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities, and conceptions of time and space. Attention to infrastructures helps us analyse past and present societies and push for a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that the future might take.

Introduction

Rarely a day passes without infrastructure being mentioned in the news, with recent crises making their importance ever clearer. Climate change raises questions over the sustainability of fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure; the COVID-19 pandemic showed the fragility of infrastructures of health care, equipment supply chains, and the emergence of new infrastructures of care and surveillance; and the war in Ukraine and its effects on both energy and food has demonstrated the contingency and importance of the networks that enable the systems of production, extraction, and accumulation on which much of contemporary life is dependent. Pipelines, roads, railways, airports, and ports are at once fragile and ubiquitous, mundane and political, extending far beyond any one human society whilst they (re)organise the humans and objects out of which such societies are made.

In spite of the intensity of contemporary concern over infrastructure, until recently, it was not a category or class of objects that anthropologists were particularly known for studying. As a material substrate (‘infra’ meaning ‘below’) for social life proper, infrastructures tended to remain in the background as mundane, unremarkable, and technical objects rather than controversial, vibrant, and cultural forms. However, in recent years all this has changed. What would once have been seen as a niche topic for anthropological study has blossomed into a lively comparative field which brings together political and economic anthropology, material culture studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the anthropology of the state to interrogate, in a huge range of places and contexts, what infrastructures are, how they come to be, and the role that they are playing in contemporary social life. This entry provides an orientation to this developing field, exploring why this turn to infrastructure has taken place, and what the payoff of studying infrastructures might be.

Anthropologies of infrastructure

The anthropological study of infrastructure has emerged in part from a long-running question facing anthropologists about how to study the large-scale systems within which we are all entangled (Larkin 2013, Troillot 2003). Anthropology is a discipline which specialises in understanding local experience and forms of social life that take place in particular communities. However, anthropologists are also aware that any experience in place is shaped by things and processes happening elsewhere. Understanding things like capitalism, globalisation, colonialism, and the state have been long-running concerns within the discipline, leading to the creation of key concepts such as ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1990), ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005), ‘structural violence’ (Farmer 1996), and ‘socio-technical networks’ (Latour 1991).

Anthropologists have found infrastructures promising in this regard for they are both concrete material forms which can be studied ethnographically in particular places, but they also function as infrastructures precisely because they traverse and transgress space and place (Harvey et al. 2017). Whilst the method of ethnography may have been developed in small-scale social settings, it is nowadays invariably conducted in relation to issues like globalisation, economic exchange, global religion, media, and migration which exceed the boundaries of any one research project in any particular place (Eriksson 1995, Anand et al. 2018; Anand 2011; see also Amin and Thrift 2014). By turning their attention to infrastructures, anthropologists have shown how their systemic qualities are created through tangible activities that take place in offices, in laboratories, in communities and neighbourhoods, in debating chambers, on websites, social media platforms, and in images and documents which circulate through social networks online and offline. Many social scientists understand infrastructural systems in terms of technological progress, the pursuit of seamless connectivity, and the materialisation of geopolitical relations (cf Harvey 1989; Therbon 2007; Levinson 2006; Easterling 2014; Cowen 2014). Within the anthropology of infrastructure, the emphasis has been on how these ideas (of technological progress, seamlessness, and geopolitical importance) come to be attached to infrastructure. Paying attention to infrastructures allows us to account for the everyday work that goes into making, breaking, and living with systems of power, control, possibility, and inequality (see also Megoran 2006).

Another reason why anthropologists have been drawn to infrastructure is that more and more state projects that they encounter in their field sites are now classified under this term. Things like roads and energy systems have not always been grouped together as ‘infrastructure’. As Ashley Carse shows, the term has a particular history, emerging initially in English to describe the substrate that underlay railroads, rather than the railroads themselves. Over time, infrastructures have gradually come to be conceptualised as a class of things in their own right—as ‘hard technical artefacts or systems, rather than processes’ (Carse 2014, 11), allowing engineers and anthropologists alike to think about diverse material systems all as forms of ‘infrastructure’. This is not just a matter of terminology. With the term we have seen the emergence of a much broader set of concerns about the appropriate techniques and practice of governmentality that infrastructures demand. This has particularly been the case when it comes to the relationship between infrastructures and the governance of risk.

For Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2020), the identification of infrastructure as a class of object that entails particular kinds of risks and possibilities has shaped the kinds of projects that states invest in. Specifically, Collier and Lakoff link state-led infrastructure projects to processes of securitisation, showing through a historical analysis of twentieth century military organisation how infrastructures emerged as a material response to challenges of international security. In an analysis of the emergence of the concept of ‘critical security infrastructure’, they trace how the problem of infrastructure for the US Army emerged first as a logistical problem of how to move troops and their resources across land, a challenge which stimulated socio-material inventions, from floating pontoon bridges to the very idea of supply chains. Over time the concern with building infrastructures to support military incursions shifted into a concern with how to protect them from attack, thus opening the way to thinking of infrastructures of production and circulation as critical sites of risk. This state preoccupation with infrastructures as subject to and technologies of risk management has stimulated investment in both national and international megaprojects, whose structural complexity and social impacts have come to shape anthropologists’ field sites in profound and unavoidable ways. As a result anthropologists have found themselves exploring such issues as the place of speculation, futures, and markets in the making and reshaping of people’s lives, the exclusionary quality of infrastructure megaprojects that disconnect some people even as they connect others, and the ongoing legacies of power and colonialism that are made evident when new infrastructures appear.

If infrastructures have emerged empirically as sites of contestation, politics, and social change within anthropological field sites, they have also become available as topics for study. This was the result of shifts in theoretical discussions and debates within the social sciences and humanities. Infrastructure studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field which traverses geography, science and technology studies (STS), political sciences, history, sociology, and urban studies. Across these disciplinary boundaries, scholars are held together by a range of shared theoretical approaches that foreground questions about the role of materiality, object agency, process, and form in processes of social and political change. Key influences in this broader interdisciplinary discussion include actor network theory (ANT) (Latour 2005, Law 1999), and in particular the work of Bruno Latour and his early studies of the production of scientific knowledge and the workings of infrastructure, such as the collected essays in Pandora’s hope (1999), and his parable about a speculative rapid transport system, Aramis: or the love of technology (1996). ANT helped draw attention to the active role that seemingly inert objects play in social life, and to the way that knowledge and understanding of the world is the outcome of material practices of ordering, translating, and transforming signs and matter.

One of the most well-known definitions of infrastructure is ‘matter that moves matter’ (Larkin 2013, 238). Infrastructures like roads and railways are tangible material forms that exist in particular places and that people use in their everyday lives. Yet infrastructures are not just material forms that exist in one location, but function precisely because they hold together a range of things—rail tracks, standards, ideas, policies, labour practices. It is this ability to connect that enables things and people to move, and societies to function. Brian Larkin therefore argues that infrastructures are not only things ‘but also the relations between things’ (2013, 239). Those who have sought to understand the more explicitly political implications of these mutable socio-material relations have built on the work of scholars like Langdon Winner, whose pioneering publications in the social studies of technology illustrated how artefacts can come to act violently and reproduce or rework social inequality (Winner 1986). This is most clearly articulated in Winner’s discussion of the bridges built by the planner Robert Moses over the Long Island Expressway. These bridges were too low for public buses to pass under, with the effect that they kept low-income citizens away from the beaches of Long Island. Extending this attention to infrastructural power, scholars have also drawn on the work of scholars such as Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and Paul Edwards who have shown how the standards, classifications, and knowledge systems that frame and shape infrastructures are both informed by, and in turn inform, relations of inclusion and exclusion (Star and Bowker 1999, Lampland and Star 2009, Star and Ruhleder 1996, Edwards 2003).

Pushing this critical attention to the political life of materials further, infrastructure studies have also been deeply influenced by the feminist STS scholars like Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Karen Barad, whose work has sought to recover the political possibilities inherent in the hybrid, categorically transgressive, and messy work of making knowledge and making worlds (Barad 2007, Haraway 1991, Stengers 2005). In the 2010s, much of this conversation about materiality and object-agency coalesced into a field of study known as the ‘new materialisms’, which brought together these materialist approaches with political science to advocate for a more explicit attention to the affective properties of lively matter in shaping political relationships (Coole and Frost 2010, Braun and Whatmore 2011). Proponents of this school argued we should pay attention to the specific chemical properties of materials such as oil, gas, coal to learn about how different forms of political consciousness take shape. For example, Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated that the specific composition of coal, its heaviness, location, and the methods necessary for its extraction have played a crucial role in shaping workers’ ability to make democratic claims. This is because, unlike oil, coal extraction is predicated on the concentration of large groups of workers in one place (2011).

Although there are tensions between these different intellectual threads, what they share is an openness to understanding human worlds as inherently entangled with material processes and properties, and a curiosity as to the implications of this entanglement in domains ranging from science to politics, religion, health, technology, and, of course, infrastructure.

As we can see, there is no single anthropology of infrastructure, nor a unique definition of what infrastructures are. Instead, the way anthropologists have come across infrastructures and sought to incorporate them into their analysis has created practical and conceptual challenges that have in turn reshaped wider debates within the discipline. The sections below outline how an attention to infrastructures have produced new perspectives on: the state, the environment, conceptualisations of space/time, and, finally, how these elusive networks have helped anthropologists to develop new understandings of politics.

Infrastructures and the state

With ethnographic studies of infrastructure frequently taking anthropologists into the offices, field laboratories, and spaces of protest associated with infrastructure projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that their study has often also been the study of the state (Harvey and Knox 2015, Von Schnizler 2010, Collier 2011). As large-scale public works projects, infrastructures are dependent on states to finance or underwrite their investment. They are also tied to states through standards, regulations, legal regimes, planning systems, and political decision-making processes (Collier et al. 2016). Arguably, large-scale infrastructures like roads, electricity networks, and railways would not be possible without the existence of modern nation states, and thereby offer a promising way into studying the everyday life of the state itself (Sharma and Gupta 2006, Gupta 2012).

One of the issues that has faced anthropologists of the state has been the challenge of actually studying the state ethnographically (Mitchell 1999). ‘The state’ is a concept that points to political institutions such as councils, governments, military, and the courts, but it also includes a wider range of people—tax payers, citizens, businesses, charities—objects and processes, such as forms, elections, referendums, consultations, policies, and standards, through which norms of appropriate behaviour and conditions of belonging are worked out (Taussig 1997, Coronil 1999). Anthropologists have found in state infrastructure a promising object through which the subjects and objects which generate ‘state effects’ can be traced and followed in practice (Harvey 2005).

If infrastructures are not possible without the state, then the opposite is also true: namely, that the state is not possible without infrastructure. Infrastructures can thus be thought of as key technologies through which states enact, perform, and reproduce themselves. Ethnographies from South America to Central Asia to Europe have shown how roads, railway borders, and other structures are the crucial threads through which the limits of nation states are stitched and, indeed, unstitched (Harvey and Knox 2015, Mukerji 1997, Reeves 2014). In this sense, infrastructures have been central technologies of colonisation and machines of colonial and racial violence (Zeiderman 2020; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). The recent history of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway exemplifies this infrastructural (un)stitching. In the aftermath of the first Nagorno Karabakh War in 1993, the railway was rerouted away from Armenia, creating a corridor connecting Azerbaijan with Turkey, through Georgia. This effectively and willingly materialised a logistical border to Armenia’s participation in regional and international trade. Furthermore, as Tekla Aslanishvili and Evelina Gambino explore in their ethnographic film, A state in a state (2022), this geopolitical function and the funding structure of the train gave life to a series of borders of different kinds, exacerbating forms of marginalisation along ethnic lines and generating new insecurities amongst the populations affected by this infrastructure (Aslanishvili 2022; Gambino 2022, 2019).

Anthropologists have pointed to the frequently inherent coloniality of infrastructures, showing how rather than being just a means to an end, they have shaped the logic through which colonisation has been enacted (Cupers and Meier 2020, Vaughn 2021). Sarah Vaughn’s research on water infrastructure and climate adaptation in Guyana, for example, has shown how contemporary attempts to manage the watery coastline of Guyana rests on infrastructural histories of dam construction that involved colonisation, slavery, plantation agriculture, and racial politics. Contemporary infrastructure projects demand a reckoning with these embedded histories, even as they seek at times to depart from them. In other contexts, infrastructures have enacted a politics of colonisation by enabling peripheries and frontiers to be tamed and tied into state systems of bureaucratic oversight and governmental control. They have shown how roads and supply chains, for example, link sites of extraction and allow novel forms of circulation, exchange, and profit (Tsing 2005, Scott 1998). Not content with seeing this as just a matter of domination, however, anthropologists have sought to tell more complex stories about these incursions, showing how large-scale projects of domination are domesticated and embodied by those who inhabit these infrastructural worlds. Laura Bear, for example, who studies the Indian railways, has shown how as railways travelled to corners of the subcontinent never connected before, a myriad of new relations emerged that would permanently reconfigure not just the institutional but also the intimate lives of Indian citizens (Bear 2007).

If some infrastructure projects have been a way of inserting state power over territories, people, and the environment, others have been part of a process of state transformation as state forms become obsolete, splinter, or are replaced over time. Stephen Collier’s ethnography (2011) of the attempted neoliberalisation of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union charts how infrastructure becomes a means through which such change is pursued and also thwarted. Collier’s ethnography looks at the attempted privatisation of heating systems across the territories left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union, demonstrating how communal heating systems emerged problematically as material instantiations of the Soviet political system. The author explores what happens to such infrastructures in the face of political change. Focusing on the transition from socialism to neoliberalism, Collier follows pipes and flows of heat to show how the establishment of the free market in a former Soviet town took the shape of a battle against the infrastructures of Socialist urbanism. Here, the pipes heating the USSR operated according to centralised estimates of the city’s needs and could not be controlled by individual households. Similarly, Antina von Schnitzler has shown how water meters became political in the South African context of post-apartheid politics. When these meters were installed in South African townships in the 2000s, this seemingly benign technology operated as a tool of governance that sought to counter an anti-apartheid era of payment boycotts and usher in an era of neoliberal citizenship. Through the implementation of water metering, township residents were asked to become ‘calculating subjects’, whose civic contract with the state entailed an entrepreneurial ethos (von Schnitzler 2008). Here the water meter was a technology that helped bring into being a new form of governmentality.

If the material work of grappling with pipes and meters is one way that states transform their modes of governance, another is through the knowledge infrastructures of paperwork, bureaucracy, standards, regulations, and law. Ethnographers have shown how contracts (Appel 2019, 137–204; Tsing 2005, 69), forms of expertise (Ong 2005; Mitchell 2002, 2011; Harvey and Knox 2015; Gunel 2019) or the calculations that sustain global financial flows (Appel and Kumar 2015; Ho 2009) operate as powerful knowledge infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. Ethnographies show that infrastructures of information—such as documents—operate very similarly to the more obviously material infrastructures we can observe around us. Hannah Appel’s ethnography looks at the place of contracts in establishing petro-capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. Like bridges and roads, contracts work by connecting some entities (i.e. the state and private enterprises), and, like territorial borders, they disconnect others. As juridical tools, contracts come to fix the relationship between corporations and the state, with the latter guaranteeing profits for the former. This fixing has infrastructural qualities. Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey highlight how ‘a finished road makes invisible or seemingly unimportant the conditions of its construction’ (2012, 529). ‘There are several ways in which things can become un-noticed’, says Hannah Appel, ‘there are things that you don’t notice because you rarely come across them, and there are the things you don’t notice because you come across them so frequently’ (2019, 137). In its mundane, modular form, a signed contract provides a legal coat under which the terms, parties, and negotiations brought together by a specific deal can remain unseen and therefore unquestioned (Appel 2019, 137–61; Tsing 2005, 69). As scarcely visible substrates, contracts are shown to have powerful infrastructural effects, enabling legal practices such as offshoring and sanctioning the distribution of underground oil deposits between private corporations. As such, they effectively function as key infrastructures of this particular kind of extractive capitalism, organising its economic and social impacts.

Whether depicting infrastructures as public works, splintered networks, arteries of domination, or invisible substrates, they provide us with a greater understanding of state processes by allowing us to study the state in a concrete manner. In this way, ethnographies of infrastructure propose new ways to understand how state power is formed and maintained, and the shapes states take within different historical moments.

Infrastructures and space/time

Infrastructures also enable social scientists to reconsider the importance of time and temporality in social life. Time is a foundational topic for anthropologists, both in terms of understanding how time is constructed, measured, and valued in different social worlds, and in terms of an on-going reflexive critique of the temporal assumptions embedded in the socio-cultural study of society (Wolf 1982, Fabian 1983, Gell 1992, Pels 2015). Many of the questions that animated these debates about time in anthropology have been reinvigorated in recent years by studies of infrastructures.

Attention to infrastructures has revealed how shared conceptions of time are codified (Bear 2016), opened up questions about the relation between space, place, and time (Gupta 2015, 2018), and allowed an interrogation of how different ideas of time are enlisted into projects of accumulation, exploitation, and, indeed, revolution (Bear 2014, Appel 2015, Pedersen and Nielsen 2015). Crucially, anthropologists have found that infrastructures actively ‘work on time’ (Mitchell 2020). That is, they change and modulate basic assumptions about how societies are temporally ordered and they do so in often unexpected ways. One good example of this is the temporal effects of the introduction of the railways in the nineteenth century. Railroads revolutionised the relation between space and time, shrinking the time that travel took in ways that created not just shorter journeys but also a whole new concept of space. The arrival of trains quite literally informed a new understanding of time and landscape: the necessity to synchronise train schedules across a national territory pushed for the unification of national time under a single time zone; the speed of travel separated people from the land through which they travelled; and new railways into frontier zones materialised a sense of progress into the future (Schivelbusch 1986).

The spectacle of new infrastructures often manifests as a kind of technological sublime (Nye 1996), with infrastructure megaprojects presented as indices of progress and the presence of concrete, steel, and glass symbolising the appearance of modernity (Anand et al. 2018, Barker 2005, Laszczkowski, 2011, Schwenkel 2015). Anthropological studies of infrastructure have long been replete with examples of this, particularly in urban settings (Rabinow 1989, Graham and Marvin 2001, Joyce 2003). Today as in the past, infrastructures continue to have a powerful capacity to enact the future in the present (Mrazek 2002; Mitchell 2020). They do this in various ways. First, infrastructures provide durable structures upon which investors can secure a revenue of capital into the near future. In this sense, they provide a concrete anchor for the promises of development made by states and international institutions alike (Abourhame and Salamanca 2016). Second, in order to attract investment, infrastructures are presented by states and corporations as promissory, enchanting, and at times almost magical tools through which politicians, speculators, and other institutional and non-institutional actors can claim to be able to secure a better future (Anand et al. 2018, Abram and Weszkalnys 2011). Yet ideas of modernity materialised by infrastructures also coexist and are entangled with other very different conceptions of time.

This is the case of the Soviet-era electrification programme in Mongolia described by David Sneath (2009). Electricity was of utmost importance to the Soviet modernising mission; Lenin famously described communism as ‘Soviet power and the electrification of the whole country’ (Lenin [1920] 1965). The establishment of cables and transmission lines and the extraction of hydropower and fossil fuels were key technologies through which the Politiburo (the main policymaking committee of the Communist Party) sought to tame the peripheries of the Soviet Union. A new rational and modern ‘cult of light’ was set to permanently eradicate the unmodern imaginaries that populated the margins of the USSR. However, rather than displacing the imaginative registers of traditional practices, as Sneath describes, electricity became domesticated by local publics and started to coexist next to the very beliefs it was set to displace. As divination remains widely practiced to this day, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, one might visit a diviner famous for using ‘modern technical devices’ such as a pocket calculator to tell fortunes, all the while experiencing ‘Lenin’s light’ as the glow of modernity (Sneath 2009, 88). In this case the infrastructures of electrification in Mongolia did not establish a new modern subject; instead, they contributed to a new mixed world made of imbroglios between the technical and the magical, the scientific and the prophetic.

As well as ushering in modernity, infrastructures also intervene in temporality through their promise of creating speed (Harvey and Knox 2008). The technological ideal of overcoming ever-greater distance in increasingly less time remains at the heart of contemporary ideas of progress (cf Marx [1857] 1993, Virilio 1986). Following Marx, the geographer David Harvey has famously termed this this tension ‘space/time compression’ (1989), which he places at the core of contemporary capitalism. Indeed in our daily lives this compressed space/time seems to be everywhere: commodities we buy arrive on our doorstep in less than 24 hours, the fruits and vegetables we eat have travelled thousands of kilometres before even becoming ripe, and fibre optics cable allows communications in seemingly ‘real time’ (Riles 2004). The most remote corners of our planet are interconnected through seemingly continuous flows, so that when a giant container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal in the spring of 2021, impacts were felt across markets all over the world. The complex logistical choreographies of this constant circulation and compression have been at the heart of lively debates in the social sciences about the relationship between infrastructure and time, in particular in relation to shipping, trade, and commodity flows (Cowen 2014; Khalili 2021; Chua et al. 2018, Mezzadra and Neilson 2019).

Anthropology’s original contribution to these interdisciplinary debates can be found in its unique ability to account for the frictions that populate the world of logistics (Tsing 2004, 2009; Lee and Li Puma 2002; Rofel and Yanagisako 2018; Bear et al. 2015; see also Katz 2001). Paying attention to actually-existing logistics from specific places, anthropologists have criticised the idea of space/time compression as the dominant condition of contemporary capitalism. Nicole Starosielski shows this well in her study of the cables that make possible the real-time communications sustaining financial markets and global trade (Starosielski 2015). She shows that ‘thinking of time-space compression through infrastructure paradoxically draws attention to the slowness of the process of speeding up’ (Anand et al. 2018, 15), the time it takes for cables to arrive in communities and the slow speeds that result once they are there. She describes how our ‘wireless world’ is made possible by a resolutely material undersea network of cables. These cables, made up of resources extracted from a variety of places, are laid by armies of workers and disrupt already existing environments populated by animals and people, and which are sometimes deemed as sacred by local populations. Starosielski’s ethnography sheds light onto the actual temporalities of infrastructure, as well as considering what, and indeed, who, is left out from collective imaginations of the high-speed internet. The space/time compression that we experience when speaking in real time with a distant friend through the internet, thus, exists not separate from but in accretion with a host of other logics of time and space (Anand 2018).

Here, anthropological inquiry works once again ‘against the grain of paradigm setting’ (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 16). Ethnographic attention to the infrastructures of logistics has produced thick descriptions of the time/spaces that populate global flows, allowing anthropologists to develop a ‘polyglot language’ (Tsing 2009) that is capable of showing how diverse times and spaces are made by contemporary forms of circulation.

Infrastructure and the environment

If the anthropology of infrastructure cut its teeth on the study of national and global networks such as canals, fibre-optic cables, or electricity networks, the focus on infrastructure ‘proper’ has expanded since to include things that might not at first glance look very ‘infrastructural’. Indeed, as we saw in the introduction, the field is not defined by studying a particular class of things generally called ‘infrastructure’ but it studies the relationships whereby some things take on the quality of being ‘infrastructural’. For example, for a driver in a car travelling along a highway, we might say that the highway is ‘infrastructure’ in that it enables driving to happen. However, for the road maintenance worker, the road appears less as infrastructure and more as an object of repair. As Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder famously put it, we should not be asking ‘what’ is an infrastructure, but rather ‘when’ is an infrastructure (1996). Understanding infrastructures in this relational way has meant that the term has been opened up by recent scholarship. If ‘infrastructure’ is merely something that enables something else to happen, a ‘system of substrates’ that support other forms of life (Larkin 2013), then it may make just as much sense to say that soil, or air, water, or carbon, are infrastructures as much as bridges, electricity networks, or shipping routes.

In the face of climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss, the infrastructuring qualities of environmental forms have become increasingly evident. This has linked environmental anthropology and the anthropology of infrastructure in a range of insightful studies, seeking to bring into view the role that non-human life forms play in sustaining human lifeworlds. Their broad understanding of infrastructure encompasses insects, forests, sand, and waves. Leading discussions about the entanglement of humans and non-humans in the face of environmental destruction, Anna Tsing, in her monograph Mushroom at the end of the world (2015) and multimedia project Feral atlas (2021), attends to the ways that labour, cultural practice, and the material agency of things swirl together to create world-shaping and world-breaking forms. Tackling the role of natural forms in sustaining infrastructure, a recent study of the Panama Canal draws attention to the way that engineered infrastructures always also entail a reckoning between ‘nature’ and technology (Carse 2014). In this case, Carse describes how the flow of water that feeds the Panama Canal is regulated by forests and their hydrological properties. Deforestation by farmers and loggers in the region not only threatens local ecosystems but also poses a threat to the infrastructure of the canal itself—thus linking local environmental dynamics to a key infrastructure of global trade. Plants, states, and citizens can also become co-implicated in environmental destruction, as a recent study of soya bean farming in Paraguay shows (Hetherington 2013). Here, attempts by monocrop agribusinesses to manage their environmental harms demonstrate the limits of government as a tool to tackle socio-natural destruction. Instead of a simple story of power (of agribusinesses) and resistance (by local people), what we find here is a more complex tale of how swathes of land in Paraguay came to be given over to soya bean farming, and how this form of agriculture persists through the everyday interactions of regulators, growers, peasant activists, migrants, and non-humans such as pesticides and the beans themselves. What these studies show is the complex imbrication of engineered infrastructures with ecological systems which become co-implicated in attempts to bring about social change (see also Knox 2020, Dewan 2022).

All of these studies of infrastructure and the environment tend to build on a tradition of research that has fundamentally dismantled the idea that nature is an inert substrate upon which human affairs are conducted (Latour 1993). Instead, by positing an infrastructural approach to the environment, they demonstrate the inherently political status of ‘nature’ as a space of extraction, enclosure, conservation, labour relations, and state making. Those studying environment/infrastructure have shown how landscape, environment, and matter are being imagined and created as infrastructures of consumerism and capitalism. They also draw attention to the environmental effects of engineered infrastructures from dams to data centres, including the social and material conditions of mineral extraction, pollution, disposal, repair, and contamination (Parikka 2011). In doing so, such studies have brought discussions of infrastructure squarely into debates about the human experience of living in ‘the Anthropocene’, a term that denotes the entanglement of people, technology, and matter in the contemporary era. Indeed, the historical emergence of the Anthropocene epoch, particularly during the twentieth century, coincides with the spread of engineered infrastructures. Whilst the Anthropocene has been a somewhat contested concept within anthropology (Moore 2016), the issues that it raises are well served by the work that has already been conducted under the umbrella of the anthropology of infrastructure.

At the same time as the environment has become understood as inherently infrastructural, so too infrastructures have undergone their own shift to become themselves more ‘environmental’, in the sense that they are becoming active and responsive parts of the milieux in which people live (Gabrys 2018). This has manifested particularly through the digitalisation of infrastructure whereby existing infrastructures have undergone a transformation, with materials becoming augmented or ‘informed’ through the use of continuous monitoring or sensing (Barry 2005, Fortun 2004). We see this with things like urban dashboards (Mattern 2015), networks of sensors in the ocean or on trees (Helmreich 2019, Myers 2018), driverless cars (Tennant and Stilgoe 2021), and anything designated with the adjective ‘smart’ (Halpern et al. 2017). These studies show how, as infrastructures become augmented with sensors, digital communication, and AI, they take on cybernetic qualities. That is to say, infrastructures are no longer simply stable forms, inserted into social worlds, but are now expected to respond to and ‘learn’ from their milieu (think of the ‘smart motorway’, iteratively changing speed limits in relation to road conditions). This has led some to argue that infrastructures are in this sense becoming ‘environmental’ in that they are both substrate and agent, thus dismantling the figure-ground relationship upon which the very concept of infrastructure has until recently rested (Knox 2022, Gabrys 2018).

Counter-political infrastructures

A final area to highlight is the recent ethnographic attention to dynamics of resistance, repurposing, and reappropriation of infrastructures by both local and international communities of citizens and activists. One risk with the anthropology of infrastructure is that it draws too much attention to the capacity of top-down imposed socio-material change. A powerful counter to this is the extensive work that now exists on bottom-up, often counter-political forms of infrastructure development. These have emerged either as alternatives to dominant infrastructural systems, or in the gaps left by failing or crumbling infrastructure (Dalakoglou 2016, Corsín Jiménez 2014, Simone 2004, Barry and Gambino 2019, Gambino 2022). Ethnographies of squatters, activists, programmers, laborers, and migrants have explored how the centralising, exclusionary, and extractive logics of dominant infrastructural forms are being countered by alternative principles of open source, collaborative, and collective design based on principles of sharing, participation, and care (Kelty et al. 2010, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The ethnographic sites for this work are diverse. Chris Kelty and Gabriella Coleman, for example, have taken as their focus the high-tech world of the free and open source software communities, community hacker spaces, and open hardware movements (Kelty 2010). Others have focused on the infrastructural work done by activist groups like the Occupy movement, 15M in Spain, and the solidarity movement in Greece (Postill 2020, Chan 2015, Corsin-Jimenez and Estalella 2017, Juris 2008, Dalokoglou 2016). This has drawn attention to much longer-running forms and methods of bottom-up civic action, bringing into the study of infrastructure an appreciation of the importance of community-based networks of social support. Here people and their social relations of exchange and mutual support are created by groups like migrants, inhabitants of informal settlements, or racially marginalised communities that are either excluded from or subjected to the violence of state-sanctioned infrastructural systems (Holston 2009, Simone 2004).

The key contribution of these studies of alternative, distributed, and bottom-up ways of making and doing infrastructure is to offer a reconfiguration of anthropological understandings of how power and politics work. AbdouMaliq Simone, for example, asks how collective will is enacted. For over three decades, Simone has observed the way in which informal urban networks come to be assembled in cities of the Global South. His work demonstrates how an attention to infrastructures refigures politics as ‘a choreography of experimentation’ (Simone in Bear et al. 2018, 49; Simone 2004) that binds together designs, materials, pipes, places, and relationships between urban dwellers as they seek to intervene in the worlds in which they live. It is from this makeshift (infra)structure that forms of resistance materialise. Anthropological work on these bottom-up infrastructural forms has served to counter techno-determinist analyses of infrastructures and their effects. Instead, they have shown how infrastructures are sites of political struggle, on-going negotiation, and social and cultural creativity. There is often an activist register to these studies. They illustrate how even in the face of seemingly immovable material structures put in place by states and corporations, people find ways of tinkering, reworking, and altering infrastructures to forge not only new material arrangements but also, perhaps even more importantly, alternative anticolonial trajectories of imagining possible futures. These studies deploy ethnographic description to the ends of a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that society might take (Estalella and Criado 2019, Pink et al. 2018).

Conclusion

Infrastructure has emerged as an alluring topic of study for anthropologists, but it has not been without its critics. The 2015 meeting of the UK based Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory discussed the motion: ‘Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political’ (Bear et al. 2018). The discussion pivoted around the tendency of infrastructure scholars to extend the category to a bewildering array of things and topics, including affects, values, languages, ethics, temporalities, exchanges, and culture. Those in opposition to the motion argued that this risks depoliticising and generalising the specific historical and cultural saliency of engineered infrastructures as built forms (Lazar in Bear et al. 2018). They also held that extending the category risks forcing incommensurable ‘ontologies’ or world-views, such as those upheld by the Indigenous communities that are so often affected by infrastructural developments, into a universalising, Western techno-political lens (Rival in Bear et al. 2018). In substance, infrastructure was criticised for being at once too vague and too narrow, risking erasing diverse ways of seeing the world as well as becoming too diluted to have any analytical purchase (Harvey in Bear et al. 2018, 4).

While the motion did not pass, many anthropologists remain committed to exploring human and non-human worlds through an attention to infrastructure. Expanding the definition of infrastructure further, some argue that it is best understood as ‘the movement or patterning of social form […] the living mediation of what organises life: the lifeworld of structure’ (Berlan 2016, 393). Others highlight infrastructures’ character as the ‘enablers’ of different systems and encourage seeing the infrastructural turn in the human sciences as a sign ‘that we are conceptually re-arming ourselves for the struggle against the Anthropocene and the modernity that made it’ (Boyer 2017, 226). However, rather than proliferating an endless list of things to categorise under the heading ‘infrastructure’, ethnographic accounts speak more importantly to the ability to detect when and how the infrastructural quality of things comes to matter, and to map the different kinds systems they underwrite (Star 1999).

Finally, as the study of infrastructure has become consolidated as a subfield of anthropology, it has begun to explore what role scholars might play in making and imagining future infrastructural systems and shaping people’s entanglement with them (Bryant and Knight 2019, Pink 2022). This work involves awkward but necessary collaborations between anthropologists and a range of other scholars and practitioners (Aslanishvili and Gambino 2022; Knox 2022, Khandekar et al. 2021, Bremer et al. 2020, Ogden 2021). These kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations are already underway, with studies such as the Feral atlas (2021) coming into being at the intersection of different forms of knowledge, including history, art, architecture, engineering, and natural science. As the anthropology of infrastructure comes of age, it has thus begun to extend beyond the discipline, seeking out collaborations with local communities, artists, programmers, architects, and infrastructures themselves. Its goal of tracing and creating alternative ways of seeing, being, and organising life is all the more important in the face of challenges to come.

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Note on contributors

Hannah Knox is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her work explores the relationship between technology, environment and the state with a particular interest in communications and data infrastructures. Her books include: Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise (2015, Cornell University Press); Ethnography for data saturated world (2018, Manchester University Press); Digital anthropology (2012, Berg) and her most recent monograph, Thinking like a climate: Governing a city in times of environmental change (2020, Duke University Press).

Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL, Room 241, 14 Taviton Street

London, WC1H 0BW. h.knox@ucl.ac.uk

Evelina Gambino is the Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research applies a feminist-materialist lens to the study of large infrastructural projects and developmental horizons in the South Caucasus. She is one of the editors of the volume Gendering logistics: Feminist approaches for the analysis of supply chain capitalism (2021, Bologna University Press), co-author of the experimental film A state in a state (2022), directed by Tekla Aslanishvili, and is currently completing a monograph on infrastructural failure and practices of future-making.

Evelina Gambino, Girton College, University of Cambridge Huntingdon Rd, Girton, Cambridge CB3 0JG. eg666@cam.ac.uk

Silence

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:22:35 +0000

Photo: VidaXL

Ana Dragojlovic Annemarie Samuels

University of Melbourne, Leiden University

Initially published 27 Feb 2023

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

Abstract:

Silence is a common occurrence in everyday social interactions, yet anthropological research, like most research in the social sciences and humanities, has mostly focused on what people say and do. Over the last couple of decades, however, there has been an increased attention to how the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the invisible shape social, political, and subjective worlds. In particular, anthropologists have theorised silence as more than just the opposite of speech. They have started to think of silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Anthropological rethinking of silence and voice has been particularly prominent in feminist traditions, in the study of care, and in decolonial scholarship that often studies silence as refusal and resistance. Attending to histories of silence and silencing has a potential to provide insights into different forms of structural oppression under which individual and collective strategies of survival might be falsely interpreted as mere compliance. Silence has also been important in research on ritual activity, where it is a prerequisite for communicating with ancestors, spirits, ghosts, and other apparitions. Here, silence can co-create a sense of hauntings as a response to repressed past and present forms of violence and harm. By attending closely to the unspoken and unspeakable aspects of language and art, anthropologists increasingly find new ways to include silences in their research and modes of representation. In these and other ways, the study of silence can greatly enrich our understanding of the social world.

Introduction

Like most research in the social sciences and humanities, anthropological research often focuses on what people say and do. Much less obvious are the unsaid, unspeakable, or invisible, and how these silences shape social, political, and subjective worlds. Nonetheless, explicit ethnographic attention to and theorisation of silence has been growing over the last decades, strongly influenced by feminist and decolonial scholarship and advances in narrative analysis—i.e. in the study of how stories, storytelling, and their silences and absences shape everyday life. Attention to silence has moreover been incited by anthropology’s reflexive turn, which since the 1980s has caused scholars to increasingly reflect on their own role in the production of knowledge and their decisions about what to write about and what to leave unspoken. Ruth Behar was one of the authors who developed experimental, self-reflective, and collaborative forms of writing that criticised prevalent silences about gendered and racialised dynamics in mainstream anthropology (Behar 1996, Behar and Gordon 1995).

A key tenet of anthropological work on silence is that it is often a presence in social life, rather than a mere absence of sound and voice. It can be a culturally specific form of experience (Basso 1970; Hastrup 1990). As a social, affective, and sensorial presence, silence can even become a moral and an active relational force. It enables or limits people’s ability to relate to each other in particular ways. When, for example, marginalisation and stigma loom, silence can be a vital strategy to create liveable lifeworlds. The non-disclosure of information can be crucial for people living with HIV, for instance, as in the face of severe discrimination their secrecy may allow them to keep leading their lives as much as possible as they did prior to their diagnosis (Black 2015; Moyer 2012; Samuels 2021). Similarly, sex workers may resolutely decide to not speak at all when state and non-state surveillance bodies question them about their past in interviews that, due to anti-trafficking measures, might foreclose their only possible source of income (Dasgupta 2014). People with a cancer diagnosis also sometimes use subtle, yet vital forms of concealment as they navigate imposing social and psychological demands. They may live ‘as if’ there were no diagnosis in order to continue to endure the already precarious conditions of everyday life for as long as possible (Banerjee 2020). Alternatively, silence may protect those who want to ‘elude’ a biomedical diagnosis, as may be the case for some people with symptoms of eating disorders (Shohet 2018).

Silence can also be shelter for those who want to avoid being absorbed into discourses of the state. Israeli youth who evade military service, for example, may not just do so by public refusal. Instead, they may resort to a ‘calculated passivity’ that allows them to altogether stay away from the public discussion on normative Israeli citizenship (Weiss 2016). Silence can also be suffocating, violent, and painful (Aretxaga 1997; Dragojlovic 2011; Warren 1993). At the same time, the silences that enable rhythm and ritual can be crucial ways of dealing with traumatic loss, as they entangle and evoke the entirely unspeakable or unspoken stories of longing that underlie such loss (Weller 2021). What all of these examples show is that silence is not a mere residue or background to supposedly real social action. Instead, it is an affective and relational activity (or the result thereof) that fundamentally shapes social worlds. Studying silence thus offers tremendous potential for critical engagement with people’s histories, the social structures that shape their lives, and with their personal experiences of inequality and exclusion (Dragojlovic 2021).

Within the burgeoning literature on silence, three themes are highlighted in this entry: the opposition of silence and voice; the haunting nature and effect of silence; and the importance of silence for narrative and representation. These topics stand out for their inspiring legacies and promising potential of contemporary anthropology of silence. Other themes in the anthropology of silence are equally important, yet not considered in depth in this entry due to limited space. Noteworthy, for example, is the extensive literature in the anthropology of music and sound studies on the relationship between silence and sound (or noise) (see, for example, Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Robinson 2020; Voegelin 2010). Similarly, modern art has been assessed as having become a pursuit of the ‘aesthetics of silence’, driven to focus on negation, emptiness, and undoing yet continuously finding that the production of such silence itself entails a form of speech (Sontag [1967] 1969).

Silence and voice

Silence has long been theorised in relation to ‘voice’. The two terms are frequently opposed by arguing that voice actively ‘fills’ silence, while silence is a mere absence of voice. Anthropology has problematised this opposition by rethinking silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants, for example, have shown that silent embodied practices can make the Holocaust present in everyday life so as to sustain its memory. This questions a simplistic opposition of silence and voice (see, for example, Kidron 2021). Three domains in which this rethinking of silence and voice is particularly prominent are Western feminist traditions, anthropologies of care, and decolonial approaches to silence as refusal and resistance.

Feminist traditions

The contention between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ has a long and complex history in feminist traditions. Feminist academics, public intellectuals, and activists have continually argued that speech is the foremost means of achieving equality and empowerment (Ahmed 2017). Particularly significant for feminist discussions about ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ has been intersectional feminism, which understands individual identities as combinations of different modes of discrimination and privilege. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), an American civil rights advocate and critical race theorist who developed the term in the context of unjust legal treatment of African American women. US antidiscrimination laws tended to look at gender and race separately, meaning that a person could only be discriminated against based on either gender or race. Consequently, the law did not capture overlapping forms of discrimination that African-American women and other women of colour experienced. Given that these women were left with no adequate justice, Crenshaw developed a theory of intersectionality to show that different axes of inequality, discrimination, and privilege inform individual identities. These axes might be, but are not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, ability, and nationality.

This notion of intersectionality fundamentally influenced feminist discussions on silence. For example, scholars who speak of the ‘racialization of silence’ (Ferrari 2020) challenge the assumption that ‘silence’ is associated with patriarchal domination. This assumption reflects the common experience of white middle class women, who led the second wave feminist movement in Euro-American contexts. However, it also falsely normalises their experience as that of all women. Against it, African American feminists have argued that African American women do in fact have a prominent voice in communal spaces such as church and the home (Lorde 1978; hooks 1989). They thereby highlight that the notions of ‘having a voice’, of ‘breaking the silence’, or of ‘speaking up’ may be insufficient as instruments of liberation. This leads them to call for a more nuanced analysis of multiplicity of silences (Ferrari 2020). We need to be aware that more often than not ‘the “voice,” “speech,” or “languages” of the colonized do not conform to Eurocentered, capitalist, colonial modern criteria’ in which ‘speaking up’ is associated with liberatory movements (Ferrari 2020, 134). Most people are simply not heard or recognised as being able to have a voice in the first place. Their forms of expression are reduced to the modes or voice of the colonised, and their ways of communicating ideas are misrecognised as nonsense. This misrecognition of voice is part of stripping racialised people of their humanity and dignity, to what Frantz Fanon has called ‘a zone of non-being’ ([1952] 2012, xii).

Other feminist scholars have similarly drawn attention to multiplicities, paradoxes, and possibilities of silence. The demand to speak up against oppression tends to place the burden of action on those least empowered. African-American women, or First Nations or gender diverse people are asked to make major interventions into their conditions of oppression. Here the liberatory idea of ‘speaking up’ obscures the labour needed for social change, placing expectations on those that historically have been marginalised (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013). Furthermore, the idea of ‘voice’ as the only way of liberation might in fact overly ‘abstract from the concrete situations and lived experiences of those who inhabit silences’ (Ferrari 2020, 124). Take as an example the memoir of writer and academic Ernesto Martínez, in which he speaks of the childhood sexual assault committed against him by his cousin. Martínez’s immediate response to this act of violence was silence and stillness. Under these circumstances, feminist philosopher Martina Ferrari (2020) argues that his response cannot and should not be understood as compliance to oppression. Martínez remembers his silence not as plain passivity, but rather as an expression of what he calls ‘joto passivity’, that is, ‘the seeming nonresponsiveness of queer Chicanos in the face of violence, which contra (colonial) common sense, was also felt as resistant behaviour’ (124). This silence may have been an act of ‘radical meaning making from which Martínez could envision and bring about radically different gendered practices of resistance’ (Ferrari 2020, 125). For Martínez, ‘speaking up’ as a liberatory solution was not an option under the circumstances in which he lived. Instead, adopting ‘joto passivity’ as an embodied negotiation of appropriate modes of resistance allowed him to navigate his circumstances.

Thus, rather than insisting on a sharp division between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’, feminist scholars have been investigating conditions under which movement between speech and silences occur. They broaden our possibilities for a reconfiguring of the ‘silence’ versus ‘voice’ binary, arguing that both ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ can be part of complex strategies of engaging with structures of power (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013; Ferrari 2020; Dragojlovic 2021). In this vein, contributors to the recent edited volume Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edges of sound (2013) argue that silence may constitute a deeper form of communication than sound: ‘Silence allows us space to breathe. It allows us the freedom of not having to exist constantly in reaction to what is said…’ (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013, 2). Thereby they stress the liberatory possibilities of inhabiting silence—resisting, in Western discourse, ‘speaking up’ as a go-to form of liberatory practice.

Care

Anthropologists studying care have similarly theorised the complexity of silence, moving away from any clear dichotomy between silence and voice. This work often reveals how silence is a response to the moral and social demands of everyday life. For example, in her family-centred ethnography of social relations in post-war and post-socialist Vietnam, Merav Shohet (2021) points out how everyday sacrifices, such as foregoing one’s own wishes and aspirations in order to take care of family members, are socially valued. Yet in order to be valued, those who sacrifice—often women—should not draw attention to their predicaments, bearing their suffering in silence, even though this may be challenging and painful. In these everyday family contexts, muted forms of sacrifice for one another often count as moral care.

In the face of suffering, the effortful work of silence may also help sustain precarious social relations. For some, silence may be the most virtuous—yet incredibly effortful—way of enduring pain and loss (see, for example, Buch Segal 2016; Livingston 2012; Smørholm 2016). Even where narrative utterances like ‘you endure’ help to constitute enduring pain as virtuous, people may remain silent about some experiences simply because they are impossible to put into words (Throop 2010). Silence may also be a respectful response to suffering, as it may honour the privacy of suffering and thereby enable rather than obstruct healing after extreme violence (Jackson 2004). It can be part of muted practices of everyday support, for example when neighbours who know about one another’s economic hardship bring food without commenting on their reasons for doing so (Han 2012). Or, silence may constitute a deliberate effort to steer away from negative thoughts and emotions, as when people in Thailand make an effort to not discuss terminal illness and rather raise more cheerful topics to lighten up the mood of their interlocutors (Aulino 2019; see also Stonington 2020).

These moral and social dimensions of silence need not be seen apart from the sensorial experience of stillness. Indeed, silences can powerfully index the present absence of both voice and sound. People living with dementia in the Netherlands have described that while they could break the unsettling silence of their homes by ‘making some noise’ in the sense of making actual sounds, it is only going out for a walk that really helps them to overcome the vicissitudes of ‘still’ moments that negatively affect their lives (Vermeulen 2020, 200). For them, the sensorial silence that might be broken by making noise is not independent from the silence of solitude, the absence of sociality and care. Or take the ethnographic description of people living and dying in the misery and abandonment of Vita, an asylum for homeless, mentally ill, and dying persons in Porto Alegre, Brazil:

These individuals wandered around in their dusty lots, rolled on the ground, crouched over or under their beds – when there were beds. Each one was alone; most were silent. There was a stillness, a kind of relinquishment that comes with waiting, waiting for the nothingness, a nothingness that is stronger than death. (Biehl 2005, 35)

João Biehl describes this asylum as a ‘zone of social abandonment’, a place where ‘voice can no longer become action’ (2005, 11). Here, the silencing of people’s social and political voice can be sensed in stillness. While sensorial aspects of silence are here part and parcel of adjusting to an unchangeable and dehumanising status quo, it can fulfil other functions. Care as well as socio-political change may come from such experiences of silence. The stillness of Thai meditation practices, for example, shows how the practice of silence as the deliberate absence of speech enables a shift of sensory focus toward non-verbal expression, and thereby changes one’s embodied experience of the world (Cassaniti forthcoming). As Julia Cassaniti argues, by effecting a new embodied attunement to the world and opening up new interpersonal spaces, silence may have powerful personal and intersubjective effects, leading people to change social relations with the world and others.

Refusal and resistance

Feminist and decolonial anthropologists have for a long time been studying multiple forms of silence and secrecy as a kind of refusal and resistance (Visweswaran 1994). Anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran charts multiple and contradictory uses of silence and secrecy as forms of resistance among activist women in Southern India. In her encounter with a woman she calls ‘M’, Visweswaran charts M’s frequent detours into silence, highlighting the importance of anthropological writing about silence, and how anthropologists give meaning to silences they encounter. Visweswaran also makes a reflexive point about ethnographic writing, as she stresses that, ‘the story I give you is not exactly about this woman … it is rather more about how I negotiate and understand the construction of a silence, how I seek to be accountable to it’ (1994, 60). Visweswaran does not only focus on comprehending multiple levels of silence in the contexts she is writing about. Instead, she as an anthropologist takes responsibility and accountability for how her own writing might be implicated in silences of those she is writing about. Anthropological knowledge produced through such careful attention to silences can be considered ‘situational knowledge’ (Visweswaran 1994, 49). This term emphasises the conviction that all knowledge comes from specific positional perspectives (Haraway 1988). In this case, these perspectives are not just shaped by what is said, but also by what people are silent about.

Understanding the origins, nature, and effects of silence is also crucial to make sense of histories of anthropological representations of Indigenous people. For a long time, ‘anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonized’ (Simpson 2007, 67; also 2014). "This framework had characterised much of earlier anthropological work ‘on’ Indigenous people (2007, 67-8), and it accorded with Europe’s imperialist and colonialist projects. Anthropologist Audra Simpson, a citizen of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation, therefore set to study the Mohawks of Kahnawake in Canada and the United States by developing a critical new take on this tradition. Her goal was to pay attention to what mattered to her interlocutors, rather than focusing on how they were ‘different’ to anthropologists. What emerged was an ‘ethnography of refusal’, which focused on the ways in which Kahnawakero:non (i.e. the people of Kahnawake) had refused the authority of the state ‘at almost every turn’ of their history (2007, 73). Simpson’s work demonstrates the methodological and the theoretical productivity of focusing on collaborators’ refusals, in order to acknowledge and embrace what has been marginalised, excluded, and silenced previously. When she tries to address histories of subjugation and dispossession with one interviewee, for example, the person tells her repeatedly that they do not know the answers to her questions. She interprets their silence as a desire not to make a difficult past verbally explicit, given that both she and the interlocutor know what happened and know that each other knows. Silence as refusal of ‘speaking outwardly’ should therefore not be seen as the absence of agency, but as an act of sabotage or ‘an overlooked component of ethico-political thought’ (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017).

Various forms of silence and refusal can be part of reinventing our ways of living and relating (i.e. ‘commoning’) in times of the Anthropocene, as suspending assertions on how the world is, or how it should be, can have productive potential (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017, 364). If we approach the Anthropocene as the outcome of centuries of colonial and neo-colonial capitalist dispossession, silence can constitute an attractive or necessary refusal to participate in the forms of governance that got us into our current situation (including speech-based activism of the contemporary Left).

Haunting silences

Silence and silencing are often associated with experiences of personal or interpersonal violence, and collective experiences of violence and various forms of structural oppression (Dragojlovic 2020). This has been shown by various disciplines, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, including psychoanalysis (Abraham and Torok 1994), philosophy (Derrida 1986; 1993), sociology (Gordon 1997; Cho 2008), gender studies (Rwe and Malhora 2013; Dragojlovic 2018; Ferrari 2020), history (Trouillot 1995), and anthropology (Good 2019; Kwon 2006; Kidron 2009; Argenti and Schramm 2009). For example, the historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has explored the complex relationship between historical violence and silence in the history of Haiti. He argues that the interrelated nature between social memory and official historical narratives always produce a ‘bundle of silences’ (1995: 27). Trouillot’s pioneering work demonstrated that the recording of historical events is not a mere collection of details about events, but a process through which some events are completely or partially silenced, either deliberately or unconsciously. This is particularly important when it comes to silencing resistance to oppression, such as with the Haitian Revolution, which Trouillot demonstrates was one of the most successful and historically relevant slave revolts in history. The importance of silence in the aftermath of historical violence has been studied across different socio-cultural settings. Silence has been transmitted across generations from Holocaust survivors and survivors of Cambodian genocide, to memories of slavery, and the transmission of traumatic loss in Taiwan (Argenti and Schramm 2009). Following the Vietnam War, domestic life in Southern Vietnamese villages was marked by silence in the aftermath of massacres of unarmed civilians. At the same time, villagers kept engaging in intimate—but muted—ritual actions (Kwon 2006). Ghosts, spirits, apparitions, and hauntings have often been associated with silence and silencing as a response to violence (Dragojlovic 2018, 2020).

Work with the children of Holocaust survivors has led scholars to develop a psychoanalytic theory of intergenerational phantoms (Abraham and Torok 1994). Such phantoms are produced by the ignorance of family secrets, falsifications of the truth, and sheer disregard for the past that create conditions for producing hauntings across generations (1994, 169). Building on a Freudian approach to the unconscious, which treats the unconscious as a repository of unacceptable ideas, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argued that family secrets can be wrapped in silences and buried in a metaphorical, psychological ‘crypt’. Such secrets are not only stored within those that directly experienced trauma, but also transmitted across subsequent generations: ‘What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others … the burial of an unspeakable fact … like a stranger within’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 3). Crucially, they argued that such traumatic intergenerational transmissions can be healed once secrets and silences are unpacked and revealed. French philosopher Jacques Derrida brought these psychoanalytic insights to the attention of a wider audience (Davis 2013, 54) and subsequently developed his own theory of ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1993). He coined the influential term ‘spectrality’ to speak of a persistent return of a range of ideas from the cultural and social past in the manner of a ghost. As he put it,

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us (cited in Davis 2013, 53-4).

Influenced by Derrida’s idea that the past is incomplete, sociologist Avery Gordon (2008) argues that hauntings are important sociological phenomena that deserve substantive scholarly attention. Making a direct link between various forms of historical injustice—from slavery to the disappeared in Argentina, and from the recent ‘war on terror’ to torture and deportation—Gordon argues that those who were seemingly forgotten can illuminate the injustices they suffered through the act of haunting. For Gordon (2008, xvi), haunting is an animated state through which unresolved and repressed social violence makes itself known in often unexpected ways, such as through ghostly appearances. In her take on hauntings as social phenomenon, a ghost is not just a person who is missing or dead, but a social figure who is deeply implicated in the social life of the living and is crucial for the continued production of subjectivities and histories (Gordon 2008, x). Gordon’s sociological approach to hauntology has been immensely influential across the humanities and social sciences, in particular for scholars working on histories of epistemic injustice and enforced forgetting. Particularly significant has been a study of the systemic erasure of memory about the yanggongju, Korean women who acted as sex workers for US servicemen during the Korean War, many of whom subsequently became war brides and eventually pioneered Korean migration to the United States (Cho 2008). Grace Cho’s careful analysis reveals how the enforced forgetting of the yanggongju permeates the consciousness of Koreans. They are now ghostly figures that are at the same time present and absent, who ‘[move] in and out of visibility’ (Cho 2008, 14).

Intergenerational experiences of silence under ongoing conditions of structural inequalities can manifest as acts of ‘haunted speakability’ (Dragojlovic 2021). For example, in a performing arts event in the Netherlands that engages families’ complex intergenerational, interracial genealogies, aspirations to make visible past injustices are challenged by the artists’ family’s embeddedness in long histories of structural violence. These histories do not only inform what can be made visible through speech, but also often reproduce the structures of the very inequalities they aspire to dismantle (Dragojlovic 2021). Haunted speakability, then, reflects people’s feeling of urgency to instigate social justice and points to the limitations of speech as a means of achieving equality (Dragojlovic 2021). The idea of haunted speakability urges further questions about recovery and care, not only for those who themselves directly experience violence, but also for those for whom the affective afterlives of violence might resonate intergenerationally, under ongoing conditions of inequality (Dragojlovic 2021). The scholarship on haunting silences further contributes to rethinking and theorising silence as a complex relationship between narrative articulation and unspoken, embodied ways of inhabiting the world.

Narrative and representation

Much like as an awareness of haunting requires attunement to the social world rather than a turn away from it, attending to the unspoken in narrative and discourse warrants a close examination of language. It relies on a careful listening to the stories people do and do not tell; the slightly longer pauses, hesitating beginnings, whispers, rumours, gossip, and embodied narration (see Shohet and Samuels forthcoming). Who tells stories to whom, and whose stories are heard, and by whom? The analysis of women’s testimonies for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has shown that on the surface, women’s narratives speak mostly of violence against men (Ross 2001). Yet, the anthropologist Fiona Ross (2001) contends, if we listen differently, we hear how by telling these stories, women actually also speak about their own experiences. Women tell about physical violence experienced by men from their own vantage point, in passing referring to police harassment of their families, the shattering of kin over geographical distances, the absence of men, and the silence and secrecy in their politically active families. They hint at even more silent experiences of women’s suffering. Similarly, women’s stories of the violence of the Partition of India in 1947 are enveloped in a ‘zone of silence’ (Das 2007). This does not mean that nothing was said about this period, but rather ‘that the words had a frozen-slide quality to them, which showed their burned and numbed relation to life’ (Das 2007, 11). These narratives suffused by silences destabilise the certainty that language may seem to bring. Silence, then, is only at the far end of a continuum of uninterpretability of which speech and narrative are similarly part (Weller 2017).

Close attention to those stories at or beyond the edges of public recognition, moreover, reveals how silences undergird dominant discourses. Experiences hitherto unspoken may still transpire in whispers, gossip, rumour, song, spirit possession, images, a raised eyebrow, or an offhand remark. What is silenced in public discourse may be invoked in what Merav Shohet (2021) calls ‘sideshadowing narratives’: nonlinear and often ambiguous stories told through gossip and in other more private, sometimes whispered, conversations. Unlike the theological unilinearity and normativity of ‘backshadowing’ and ‘foreshadowing’, these narratives embrace indeterminacy and contradiction, invoking possibilities without providing resolution. In her account of a Vietnamese family caring for their comatose grandmother, Shohet shows how all family members take part in the caregiving, keeping up the image of a harmonious family. Yet, on a private occasion, two relatives tell in ‘sideshadowing’ whispers about their grudges against the near-dying matriarch and her husband, resulting from—in their eyes—moral missteps from the past that may now have caused her pitiful condition as a form of karmic retribution (Shohet 2021, 140-56).

Often, it is not only the story told, but also the context, the unspoken range of experiences and structures that surround narratives, that shape the (im)possibilities of articulation. A striking example can be found in the ethnographic study of children living with HIV in Brazil, whose narratives about their illness include the experiences of non-illness. Their silence, nonverbal communication, and multivocal narratives of social worlds shape the children’s stories at least as much as verbal articulation does (Abadía-Barrero 2011). The subjunctive mode of narrative is particularly important here. It allows people to think in multiple ‘what if’ scenarios of the future and the past. It helps them think through multiple possible trajectories of what might happen or might have happened, which they do particularly often at troublesome moments in their lives, such as when struggling with illness (Good and Good 1994). At such moments, the subjunctive mode may similarly allow for not fully thinking through all of these possibilities, sustaining the silent futures or pasts that are barely thinkable, for example because they might include scenarios of death or social exclusion (Samuels 2018, see also Mattingly 2014).

Aesthetic forms and visual practices may also articulate that which resists articulation in language. Images, performances, and works of art can affect people in a way that exceeds discourse. To understand how visual expressions communicate the unspeakable affectively, we need to stop contrasting silence to voice or speech. Voice, speech, silence, and visual expression intersect in different modes of articulation and non-articulation in that visual expressions may speak in ways that words cannot; for example, in the ways people living with HIV invest in healthy appearances and even makeup to distract from gossip (Samuels 2021). Art can tell stories without words. The discursive framing of art, meanwhile, may amount to new forms of silencing, as in the case of Syrian refugee artists who stop with their artistic work to escape from humanitarian projects of ‘refugee art’ that seek to aestheticise experiences of loss and displacement (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy 2021). Such humanitarian projects commission ‘refugee art’ as a commercially attractive genre, while artists feel their placement in a particular category with limited room for selecting their own topic is silencing their artistic creativity. The silence of those refugee artists who decide to withdraw from art for this reason may be seen as a ‘tactic of agentive creativity’ (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy 2021, 15).

The potential violence of verbal representation that Audra Simpson (2007) highlights in her work on refusal always raises dilemmas in anthropological writing, and perhaps particularly in writing about silences. For example, a poignant dilemma for ethnographers analysing life stories concerns the ethics of analysing what people may have chosen to leave unsaid. Addressing this question, Kirin Narayan (2004) proposes the juxtaposition of multiple life stories, as listening to one story may help to recognise the meaningful silences in others. Thereby, ethnographers may find patterns of meaningful silence without necessarily having to interpret all silences of one individual’s narrative. At the same time, Narayan cautions that life stories, including silences, are produced in interpersonal processes of which the anthropologist is a part and that as writers we may also want to leave uninterpreted. Struggling with a similar dilemma, Merav Shohet (forthcoming) argues for combining person-centred ethnography with historical contextualisation, striking a delicate balance between respecting a person’s self-chosen silences and avoiding reiterating historical injustice through continuous omissions. As both Narayan and Shohet show, navigating the tension between respecting silence and critically analysing its socio-historical conditions is an integral part of ethnographic engagement with silence.

Anthropological representations take greater liberties than most social sciences. In trying to reflect the concepts and concerns of the people they study, anthropologists may embrace unknowability and present stories from multiple perspectives, without resolution, realising that it may be impossible to construct a univocal narrative. A powerful example is Sarah Pinto’s writing and rewriting of the narratives about Lata, a young woman treated in the psychiatric unit of a government hospital in northern India (2012, 2014). In her narration of the many stories told by and about Lata, Pinto includes silences, gaps, and contradictions, concluding that there may simply not be one comprehensive and linear narrative of Lata’s illness. Proposing a ‘hermeneutic of missing it’, she argues for ethnographic writing with the multiple unresolved contradictions in layers of stories, creating an understanding that is ‘less illuminating in the strength of its coherence than revealing in the gaps between incompatible ways of telling’ (Pinto 2014, 224).

Like visual art, poetry can communicate the unspoken without discursively putting it in place. Several powerful poems by anthropologists have directly addressed the topic of silence, including Nandini Gunawardena’s ‘Silenced’ (2004), which describes the violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, and Renato Rosaldo’s ‘Silence’ (2014), in which he invokes the moment he receives the news of his wife Michelle Rosaldo’s death, a moment when suddenly all the ordinary sounds of the Philippine village he stays in seem to abruptly come to an end. Many anthropologists illuminate the unspoken affectively by using poetry in representation and articulation, especially where prose falls short of making space for silence. Anthropological engagement with silence therefore encourages the expansion of our ethnographic tool kit, for example by using ‘poetry, disordered speech, embodiment, lamentation, dreams and other elliptical communication’ (Varma 2020, 31). At the same time, it means embracing the limits of knowability and our collaborators’ refusals to be known. Writing with silences, then, may entail multiple ways of staying with gaps, contradictions, and unintelligibility.

Conclusion

Silence is a ubiquitous presence in our social world. Sometimes barely noticeable, sometimes strongly sensed, what silence means and does in subjective and social life is not always easy to discern or interpret. An anthropological approach to silence leaves room for uncertainty, unknowability, and multivocality. At the same time, if offers ways to attend to what silence does, as a form of oppression, a refuge, an act of care or refusal, a haunting ghost or an untold story in the shadow of public discourse. A careful look at silence shows that silence and voice are not necessarily clear opposites, and neither is voice—or sound—necessarily ‘filling’ silence. Practices of ‘giving’ voice may result in other silences. Questioning who and what we see and don’t see, who and what is heard and who and what is unheard, unspoken, or unspeakable is vital to critical work on structural and historical inequalities, and rethinking anthropological practices of research and representation. Even if often opaque, silences demand our attention and analysis as much as speech and sound do. What has been silenced, by whom, and for what reason has much to tell us about social relationships, moral orders, relations of care, and the complex ways through which people navigate structural forms of oppression, endeavouring to make their lives liveable under multiple forms of social inequalities.

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Note on contributors

Ana Dragojlovic is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theory and is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern citizens and post-colonial intimacy (2016, Amsterdam University Press), co-author of Bodies and suffering: Emotions and relations of care (2018, Routledge, with Alex Broom), co-editor of Gender, violence and power in Indonesia across time and space (2020, Routledge, with Kate McGregor and Hannah Loney) and co-editor of a special issue, Tracing silences, in History and Anthropology with Annemarie Samuels.

Ana Dragojlovic, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. ana.dragojlovic@unimelb.edu.au.

Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her current research focuses on narratives and silences of end-of-life care. Her published work focuses on care, disaster, narrative, silence, and HIV/AIDS in Indonesia, and includes the monograph After the tsunami: Disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh (2019, University of Hawaii Press) and a special issue in History and Anthropology called Tracing Silences, co-edited with Ana Dragojlovic.

Annemarie Samuels, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333AK Leiden, The Netherlands. a.samuels@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Postsocialism

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

Dominic Martin

University of Oxford

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

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

Abstract:

The collapse of the socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union drastically changed the lives of millions of people and offered a new and exciting field of research possibilities. ‘Postsocialism’ emerged as an interim term to describe the lives of people who had formerly lived under socialism. Some scholars of postsocialism assumed a quick transition for these societies to neoliberal forms of government and economy. However, postsocialism did not simply follow on from socialism, and socialism did not simply go away. Key postsocialist works indicate that postsocialist forms of being were established well before socialism’s political demise. Similarly, some of socialism’s material forms and social norms continued and have proved to have a resilient afterlife. The confident assertion that socialism’s fall signals the ‘end of history’ has been challenged by philosophy and by events. This entry surveys the roots of postsocialism as an anthropological concept, and interrogates the concerns as to its long-term viability as an organising category for the study of societies becoming more diverse as they distance themselves from their socialist pasts. However, the former socialist societies have provided a range of rich anthropological research opportunities for scholars and continue to afford unique insights into key areas of ethnographic and theoretical interest. One possible future for what is still called postsocialism might be its amalgamation with postcolonialism, as a new hybrid area of scholarship, focused upon societies whose histories and ideologies challenge the hegemonic narrative of neoliberal modernity.

Introduction

The crisis and collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the last decades of the twentieth century unraveled the political, economic and social structure that governed the lives of more than a quarter of a billion people. A whole civilization and ideology was laid prostrate for dissection and enquiry (Benjamin 2003: 391). For Western scholars, this offered a cornucopia of new fieldwork openings and access to hitherto unavailable, sometimes unimaginable, sources, as well as the chance to collaborate with institutions and scholars from behind what had been termed the ‘Iron Curtain’. For social anthropology, the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe signalled a potential period of ethnographic innovation and theoretical renewal through tapping a relatively unexplored geographic area, comparable to the Amazonian and Melanesian heyday of the previous two decades and of Africanist anthropology before that. In the absence of any more apposite consensual designation, postsocialism emerged as the default descriptor that gathered together what has come to comprise an extensive and significant body of writing and research. Postsocialism reflected the unmaking of a whole world system and the refashioning of ordinary life in the teeth of global modernity, across a geographic and sociological landscape stretching from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan, from the Arctic Circle to the border of Afghanistan, and encompassing a diversity of social identities from nuclear engineers to nomadic hunters.

Anthropologists working in this field seized the rare, perhaps unique, opportunity, exploring the then-current and developing theories and fields of anthropological interest: ontology and time (Buck-Morss 2000, Bernstein 2019); personhood and identity (Yurchak 2006, Kharkhordin 1999); environmental precarity (Brown 2013, Petryna 2013); economy, exchange, and property (Humphrey 2002, Verdery 2003, Hann 2002, Morris 2016); ethics, power, and sovereignty (Hemment 2015, Ledeneva 2006, Glaeser 2011, Dunn 2004, Zigon 2010); modernity and globalisation (Pomerantsev 2014, Collier 2011, Shevchenko 2009); religion and spirituality (Rodgers 2009, Lindquist 2005, Luehrmann 2011, Caldwell 2004, Wanner 2007, Pedersen 2011); borders and migration (Reeves 2014, Pelkmans 2017, Bloch 2017); race and gender (Dzenovska 2018, Ghodsee 2018); and emotion and affect (Oushakine 2009, Pesmen 2000, Lemon 2018); that is, most of the topics and theoretical ‘turns’ that have exercised the discipline since the 1990s.

However, from its very inception, postsocialism was regarded as a flawed, albeit necessary, yet always temporary resort for scholars. It provided a category home for a range of scholarship across a very wide field of research that was dynamic and, although united by some degree of common ideological and political history, ephemeral and fissile almost by definition from the moment of socialism’s collapse. Thirty years on from that commencement, the assumptions and aporias that attended postsocialism’s conceptual initiation have long been overtaken by time and history. A generation has passed, and the rising generation has no experience, and little memory, of actually existing socialism. The binary oppositions of the Cold War have been replaced by a polymorphous, fragmented relationship between the West and the former socialist societies and polities, whose postsocialist complexions range from the actually or aspirationally neoliberal (Latvia, Croatia) to so called ‘illiberal democratic’ (Poland, Hungary) to the still resolutely Brezhnevite; that is, tied to ossified late Communist political forms (Belarus, Turkmenistan).

‘The end of history’ (see below) has come and gone. Socialism still persists in various incarnations as a powerful political and economic challenge to late capitalism and liberalism. The span of this entry does not encompass the vigorous or moribund socialisms that remain: China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the strident Neo-Leninism of North Korea, the various hybrids that flourish or fail in what used to be called the ‘Third World’: Vietnam, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba. Despite its deficiencies, postsocialism as a concept continues to have purchase and meaning for anthropology, albeit as an increasingly retrospective, historical category, which refers to an interim period that is passing—and may indeed have passed—but which has borne witness to and analysed momentous changes. Postsocialism provides a context that increasingly interdigitates with other ‘post’ epistemologies, including post-industrialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, and, perhaps particularly, post-colonialism. From wars in the Balkans, in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, in South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh in the Southern Caucasus, to the emergence of revived Russian nationalism under Putin, the anticipated transition from ‘stagnant’ (Bacon & Sandle 2002: 2) collectivism to a neoliberal dawn has yet to come to fruition for many in the former Soviet space. Premised theoretically on an assumption of a quick and easy transition to the freedom and prosperity of the market economy, postsocialist transformations in actuality happen within ongoing conflicts, both collective and individual. They often set the advocates of economic and political neoliberalism against a reluctant population whose security (both economic and social), imaginaries, and very identities remained inextricably linked to the previously existing socialist order. Postsocialist anthropological work has, over the past thirty years, provided ethnographical and theoretical substance to the argument that the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in the Western modernising tradition that its supposed defeat at the same time calls into question the whole Western narrative of triumphant liberal capitalism (Fukuyama 1992: 48). In order to analyse or even simply to characterise postsocialism within the restrictions of an encyclopaedia entry, this entry focuses primarily upon subjectivity within the former Soviet space, for two reasons. First, subjectivity can be considered the paramount concern of socialism. Karl Marx, at the very outset, emphasised the priority of social being over consciousness (1978: 4). Boris Groys dismisses the suggestion that economics or politics were the essence of socialism (2009: xx); rather, he asserts that ‘The Soviet Union understood itself literally as a state governed by philosophy alone’ (33). Hence, second: the focus on the Soviet Union and its successors. The Soviet Union was the source and origin of the socialist project, and as it moved through its Cold War high point towards its decline, after perestroika (the Soviet political and economic restructuring of the 1980s), it is arguable that it had taken the project of making socialism further than any other society before or since (Groys 2009: xviii).

Surveying postsocialist anthropological thought as it has developed, this entry will first discuss the emergence of particular forms of postsocialist subjecthood within an epoch often periodised as ‘late socialism’, and the spectres that persisted beyond communism’s widely proclaimed demise. Next, this emergent postsocialism will be analysed by considering some of the issues and ideologies that were contested in the ‘end of history’ debate. Finally, details of four case studies of the postsocialist self will be examined. In summary, this entry will claim that although socialism as a hegemonic political system may have ceased in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the socialist project continues and the socialist present remains. In this sense, the countries of the former Soviet Union remain postsocialist until today; the socialist project remains as a palimpsest upon which is scripted contemporary political and social orders (Martin 2008). Socialism persists as the penumbra under which particular subjectivities and forms of being-in-the-world continue to emerge and develop. The anthropology of postsocialism has excavated this landscape, which is simultaneously a site of mourning, haunted by the spectres of communism, and a vibrant post-hybrid engendering new perspectives, challenges, and solutions within the narrative(s) of modernity. Derrida’s neologistic concept of ‘hauntology’ is useful to deploy as a tool to frame and analyse these phenomena (1994: 63). Hauntology means that ghostly presence by means of which the past returns or persists. Hauntology captures how the time(s) of postsocialism are a heterogeneous multiplicity, a ‘heterochrony’ that cannot be adequately described with reference to dualisms like presence/absence or before/after (see Ssorin-Chaikov 2006 & 2017).

Spectres of the (post)socialist subject

The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union happened, to some degree, like Ernest Hemingway once famously described the process of going bankrupt: ‘Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly’ (1954: 136). There is an uncanny echo of this sense in the title of Alexei Yurchak’s ethnography of the sensibilities of Leningrad’s young communist activists (so-called komsomoltsy) and of its avant-garde on the threshold of the collapse. In Everything was forever, until it was no more (2005), Yurchak describes a rolling crisis of language and knowledge that came about in the last days of the Soviet Union which indicated that the epistemic conditions of socialism were progressively running aground. He argued that the ossified, hyper-normalised, and highly citational nature of late Soviet culture caused its participants to focus, following J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, on the performative dimension of language rather than on its constative dimension. Life under late Soviet communism was marked by a decoupling of language and reality. Yurchak calls this, in Austin’s terms, a ‘performative shift’ which applies to the years that followed the death of Stalin, the time of Khrushchev’s so-called ‘Thaw’ (ottepel’), and the ‘Stagnation’ (zastoi) of the Brezhnev period, when the teleological imperative of the development of socialism was undermined, and effectively sidelined, by a focus upon the achievements of the present and the struggle against its binary capitalist nemesis. From then on, it was more important ideologically to match the consumer economies of the West than to pursue the ultimate goal of true communism. Here begins the ironic self-referential and essentially postsocialist posture adopted by the intelligentsia which Yurchak identifies as vnye (simultaneously inside and outside of the epistemic regime of state socialism). He also highlights the habitus of obshchenie, a self-reflexive group solidarity, a determined coming-together that produced a common inter-subjective sociality. This narcissistic condition is even more explicitly demonstrated and excavated in the case of East Germany by Andreas Glaeser (2011) who argues that as the 1980s went on, socialism’s claims to superior insight lost their credibility at an accelerating pace. The unfulfilled promise to know better than its Cold War adversary played a significant role in socialism's demise.

Although there had been a small but significant body of Western ethnographic research undertaken in actual socialist societies prior to 1989 (Caroline Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective [1983] and Katherine Verdery's National ideology under socialism [1991] are two notable examples), in the first wave of postsocialist scholarship, the construction of a specific socialist subjectivity became an early important, indeed necessary, theme that was taken up principally by historians. Stephen Kotkin (1995) Yuri Slezkine (2000), Igal Halfin (2007), Katerina Clark (2011), and Vladislav Zubok (2009), all reflect on aspects of the creation of a particular form of subjectivity and social consciousness. Kotkin in particular, in Magnetic mountain, his magisterial micro-history of the crucible of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan—the trans-Ural steel city of Magnitogorsk—emphasises the emergence of the Komsomol, a consciousness-creating Soviet youth movement, custodian of the ideals of Leninism, within whose ranks zealots would learn to think and to ‘speak Bolshevik’ (1996: 236). Sheila Fitzpatrick designates this new social identity as ‘Homo Sovieticus’ (2000: 32).

This exemplary personage, whilst indicating the ethical task of [self-]creating a heroic class-conscious subject fit to forge and inhabit the communist utopia, also later acquired a parodic dimension that it gained in the Brezhnev era from Soviet satirist Alexander Zinoviev (1986). Zinoviev uses the epithet from the perspective of the metropolitan intelligentsia to poke fun at the so-called sovok, the once idealistic but by then somewhat lumpen, somewhat credulous, former ‘shock worker’ who had constituted the vanguard of the proletariat and peasantry in the period of High Stalinism. Sovok becomes during late socialism a slang term for a slavish kind of Soviet philistinism, emblematic of the low-brow, plebeian values of the ‘working class’, often used alongside a term for rude and uncultured collective bydlo, a herd of cattle. This stereotype was forever immortalised by another satirist, George Orwell (1951) in the character of Boxer, the honest, honourable, but stolid and gullible shire horse that labours for no reward in Animal farm. Like the debasement over time of the revolutionary ideal in Orwell’s parable, so by the time of the so-called ‘stagnation’ under Brezhnev — which according to Yurchak is when the ‘performative shift’ begins to hollow out the discourse of socialism — the symbolism of the Soviet New Man has become ironic while sovok has become the self-deprecating signifier for these stereotypically pejorative traits of Soviet personhood and already threadbare, discredited Soviet values (it is a play on words: sovok also means ‘dustpan’).

A powerful ethnographically informed perspective on the Stalinist ideal of Homo Sovieticus is presented by Jochen Hellbeck (2006) who reads the diary of a zealous young Komsomol activist, labouring under the guilty secret of his bourgeois origins in late 1930’s Moscow, to illustrate the self-transformative and self-awakening power of Soviet revolutionary ideology. The rigour with which the young zealot approaches the task of fashioning a Stalinist self reflects the ‘dream’ of socialism:

…a Soviet dream, the contours of which the party ideologist Nikolai Bukharin delineated in implicit rivalry with the individualist American dream. In [this] Soviet dream, socialism turned soulless workers, oppressed by capitalist exploitation, “into collective creators and organizers, into people who work on themselves, into conscious producers of their own fate”, into real architects of their own future. (Hellbeck 2006: 6)

This maximalist Soviet prometheanism gives rise to a fundamental anthropological problem, as a result of which anthropologists of postsocialism have been necessarily as interested in the histories of high Stalinist ideology as they have in the ethnographic details of everyday existence in Siberia or Silesia. Until Soviet socialism, humans had arguably never engaged in such a self-reflexive, self-conscious, and theoretically informed attempt to make themselves anew on such a scale. Scholars of postsocialism have thereby been constantly haunted by the question: to what extent did such an experiment in all-embracing collective self-making succeed, and what were its unintended consequences and legacies? Andreas Glaeser has provided an acute analysis of this process of subject formation as it applied under the East German experience of socialism:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the party’s understanding boiled down to the hope that if only everyone would internalize the teaching of Marxism-Leninism, while sincerely acting in accordance with them, socialism would realize itself in an ever more perfect way (2011: 61).

Given the headlong quality of the momentous events of 1989 and the period immediately after, it is unsurprising that the earliest phase of wider postsocialist scholarship reflected an element of what has come to be called ‘transitology’ (Hann 2002, Sachs 1990) – an assumption that former socialist societies would progress towards forms of liberal capitalism without exception or regard for the social cost. This approach and indeed this phase of scholarship has been criticised by later scholars for projecting its Western-oriented assumptions, its Manichean perspective upon the shortcomings of a ‘defeated’ ideology, and its supposed deviations from ‘human nature’. Transitology has been justifiably accused of suffering from the same kinds of teleological assumptions which it levelled at socialism (Hann 2002, Dunlop 1993, Derrida 1994). By contrast, the first wave of postsocialist anthropological writing (Hann 2002, Humphrey 2002, Verdery 2003) held a focus on what late socialism was, and how individuals, communities, and institutions reacted and evolved in the khaos (chaos) of its deconstruction and refashioning. Indeed it is with some justification that Chris Hann (2002) claimed that ‘…anthropology provide[s] the necessary corrective to the deficits of ‘transitology’. (Hann 2002: 1) This critical integrity has continued as postsocialist scholarship in its more mature phase has excavated the mundane building blocks with which the total anthropological project of forging a new human type in Soviet modernity was assembled.

Stephen Collier, in one of the most important works of postsocialist anthropology, Post-Soviet social (2011), has shown how the continuities and ruptures in the (post)socialist subject, including its various incarnations mentioned here (Homo Sovieticus/sovok/vnye), are imbricated within the infrastructures that were built to realise the socialist utopia. He details the policy of structural adjustment (‘shock therapy’), which had profound implications for postsocialist countries’ economies, including the effective abolition of the mechanisms of planned production, controlled prices, and collective property, all of which seemed easily dismantled—at least to some Western observers (Verdery 2003). But Collier’s analysis focuses on the different schools of neoliberalism and shows how the shock therapists’ initial attempt to deconstruct socialist institutions of industrial coordination, social welfare, and urban planning was thwarted in part by the obdurate material legacies of socialism. Leading architect of the shock approach, American economist Jeffrey Sachs, argued for the ‘reallocation….of resources in the economy’ (Collier 2011: xii). These so-called ‘resources’ effectively comprised the communities, social institutions, industrial and financial processes, factories, and human networks that made up the fabric of collective life across nascent postsocialist society. Collier’s focus upon the Soviet-era communal heating system that sustains the industrial city of Belaya Kalitva, which stubbornly resisted desocialisation, provides an example of a postsocialist assemblage that persists from the socialist past and impels socialist values and material structures into the period of assumed transition and beyond. Collier asserts that the ‘surprising’ (2011: 22) persistence of the systems and the material infrastructure of socialism require them to be questioned or analysed, in order to parse the ‘social’ that inhabits the heart of postsocialism. He concludes that later neoliberal reforms in the 2000s (inspired by the work of another US economist, James Buchanan) did not reject the basic value-orientations of Soviet social modernity. Rather, they aimed to find a new balance between economic efficiency and social welfare, between the mechanisms of enterprise and choice and the substantive constraints imposed by socialism’s continuing legacy of social norms and material forms.

We see how the legacies of the sovok/Homo Sovieticus and Soviet social modernity converge (often to tragic effect) in the collapse of the highly structured collectivism of socialism that is the direct fall-out from ‘shock therapy’. This crisis has been documented in a rich seam of ethnographies that examine homelessness and destitution (Höjdestrand 2009); despair and loss among veterans of the Afghan War and their families (Oushakine 2009); premature mortality and the crisis of masculinity (Parsons 2014). The crisis of masculinity exposes a gendered postsocialist afterlife of the Soviet ideal: the Stakhanovite masculine toilers, glorying in their physicality and embodying the ideals of collective solidarity, found themselves without a role in the fast-moving, fluid 1990’s, other than as so-called sportsmeny, providing hired muscle for the burgeoning mafia (Humphrey 2002). Premature mortality amongst men of working age reached epidemic proportions: much of the attrition was down to abuse of alcohol. What had been valued in the sovok foundered in an atmosphere where anything goes (bespredel). This Russian word is generally linked with the climate of khaos in the early 1990s. It literally means ‘without boundaries’, and designates the spirit of abandon and lawlessness that prevailed in those days.

As Michelle Parsons describes in her ethnography Dying unneeded, men’s risk-taking was not sufficiently counterbalanced by any order. When the Soviet state fell, men turned to drink to experience a lost sense of social belonging, as well as a sense of power to push against what bound them. Unfortunately, not much bound them. Responsibilities that ordinarily served to limit excessive drinking were diminished. Men pushed further and further before finding limits. Working class men suddenly rendered unneeded by the state were most at risk, especially if they were also unneeded at home. Women fared better, according to Parsons, since their sense of neededness was more diffuse and included, importantly, being able to hold their families together in times of hardship. This very quality of resilience re-emerges in Alexia Bloch’s (2017) later postsocialist ethnography of female migrant entrepreneurs discussed below. More broadly, Jeremy Morris (2016) has documented the ways in which working class individuals of both sexes, their families, and communities, through a process of bricolage and a continuing memory of the social ‘dowry’ of collectivism—what Morris memorably describes as ‘…their own social resources held in common and emerging from a shared (and proud) past’ (2016: 11)—confronted this unpredictability and insecurity of daily life. They found ways to make postsocialist existence if not ‘comfortable’, then ‘habitable’. Similarly, Elizabeth Dunn (2004) has chronicled how factory workers in postsocialist Poland, manufacturing baby food for a US-based global conglomerate, found strategies to resist being ‘privatised’ in their subjectivities as well as economically. These Polish workers were denied coeval status by their new neoliberal colonisers much in the same way that previous anthropological hegemons imposed the ‘ethnographic present’ (Fabian 1984: 81) on assumed ‘others’.

The end of which history?

In the late summer of 1989, in the tumultuous months leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published his celebrated article ‘The end of history?’, later expanded into the volume The end of history and the last man (1992). He argued that a consensus across the world now agreed upon the supremacy of liberal democracy as a system of government. It had overcome rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently and pointedly, communism. In addition, Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy embodied the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government, and as such constituted the ‘end of history’. That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was free from such fundamental internal contradictions. Notwithstanding current injustices or social problems present in Western democracies like the United States, these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. Underpinning his argument, Fukuyama drew extensively upon the emigré Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s exegesis of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of history, in particular his ‘dialectic of the master and the slave’ set out in the Phenomenology of spirit (1977). Fukuyama further invoked Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘last man’, the inheritor of the world beyond the end of history who embodies but cannot realise Hegel’s master’s urge to dominate and achieve recognition and renown. Again reflecting his reading of Kojève, Fukuyama asserts that this ‘last man’ is none other than the neoliberal subject, living in the boring but prosperous liberal democratic societies that have seen off Marxist tyranny, whose epigones will occasionally lapse into religious and nationalist retrogressions and fundamentalisms, only to find out again that, indeed, ‘there is no alternative’ to liberal democracy.

In Specters of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida delivered a spirited rebuttal of Fukuyama’s ‘neo-evangelistic’ theorising, and the ‘obscene euphoria’ with which it was lionised by neoliberal capitalist politicians, media, and academia (74). Derrida critiques Fukuyama’s sleight-of-hand wherein he conflates the empirical actuality of history with the ideal assumptions that construct the telos of economic and political neoliberalism, granting to himself, as it were, the dialectical best of both worlds. Derrida continues that the whole problem with the Fukuyama/Kojève ‘simplified – and highly Christianized’ (1994: 77) version of the ‘end of history’ is the way it thinks of time/history, namely in a positivist sense as a succession of present moments, counted one after the other on the rosary of ‘homogenous empty time’ (Benjamin 2003: 397). This made for bad metaphysics as it leaves no room for ‘the event’, for those unsettling intimations of the future that are woven into the present.

The liberal democratic triumph of the ‘end of history’, which, according to Derrida, dismisses the possibility of the ‘event’, already has had its effective comeuppance since Fukuyama delivered his ‘secretly worried’ polemic, both from outside shocks (9/11, the ‘War on Terror’, global climate crisis, COVID-19), and from internal earthquakes (the financial crash of 2008, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter); a ‘triumph that has never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic, and in sum bereaved’ (Derrida 1993: 85). An equally suitable or even better candidate for Kojève’s ‘last man’ might rather be the postsocialist subject himself, whose overlapping incarnations were outlined in the first section; he who is heir to the ‘dowry’ of socialism, who, depending on perspective, could be both sovok (a self-satisfied philistine consumer) and live vnye (an intellectual creating niches of freedom in a eternally fixed system).

Alexei Yurchak observed (along with others, such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia) the emergence of an aberrant postsocialist subjectivity in the last Soviet generation, a postsocialist subject who took form within and lived under the socialist regime, the postsocialism within socialism, so to speak:

During late socialism, especially in the 1970's and early 1980's, it became increasingly common among some groups of the last Soviet generation, especially children from intelligentsia families, but also some from working class backgrounds, to give up more sophisticated professional careers for occupations that offered more free time. The more extreme and telling examples of such jobs included boiler room technician (kochegar), warehouse watchman (storozh), freight train loader (gruzchik), and street sweeper (dvornik). These jobs kept them busy for only two or three night shifts a week, leaving them plenty of free time for obshchenie and for pursuing other interests. One's obligations were minimised because the work was undemanding, because it was organised in long shifts with breaks in between, and because one was spared the need to attend meetings, parades, and other public events (since only people with stronger institutional affiliations were, required to attend such events through their jobs). (2005: 151-153)

Yurchak’s postsocialist subject, for whom ‘Everything was forever’ and who could express individuality whilst having sloughed off economic necessity, seems more faithfully to resemble the posthistorical figure foreseen by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kojève than Fukuyama’s impostor. It is this antiheroic figure that is given the task of forging the postsocialist future, always already secretly preparing and prepared for the event ‘Until it was no more’. That future is not simply a future that is a version of the here and now, but rather a future that develops the forces active in the here and now to conclusion; not a mere future present, but rather a future modality of the living present. It is for this reason that it is impossible to dissociate socialism from postsocialism: they cannot be conceptualised simply as ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Four exemplars of the postsocialist subject

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fieldwork in the former socialist societies remains a vibrant and popular option for a new generation of anthropologists, and a more authentically future-oriented form of postsocialist ethnography is beginning to emerge. Rather than rehearsing the triumphalist teleological vision of defeated, subaltern societies expected to ape and aim at catching up with Western neoliberal capitalism, these works provide views into the rear-view mirror of subjects and societies either confidently accelerating away from their experience of socialism, or, more likely, shifting in the direction of a distinctive version of modernity. In the first wave of postsocialist anthropological excitement, all of the themes and interests listed at the start of this entry have been addressed in ethnographic monographs. All of this work reflects a particular perspective, which is filtered through the prism of socialist experience, identity, and history. This final section will focus on four recent anthropological works that continue to accrete meaning into and give flesh to the concept of postsocialism as history goes forward. These texts highlight social phenomena that have distinctively postsocialist contours; either absent in other social contexts or more visible or more progressed in postsocialist societies. The key index of this postsocialist substance in each case is that the solution paving the road forward to modernity is stalked by the ghostly presence of an ideology that refuses to die.

Several anthropologists of postsocialism have undertaken work in areas related to the ethical formation of postsocialist subjectivity. Working under the broad influence of Michel Foucault’s theorising of neoliberal governmentality, they have pursued the basic thesis that with the collapse of socialism and the retreat of its welfare state, individuals have been forced, incited, and invited to govern themselves in new ways. Often, these biopolitical technologies or discourses come from the West, but not always. One example of this approach is Tomas Matza’s (2018) exploration of the rise of psychotherapeutic practices in Russia in contradistinction to the previously established psychological and ethical framing of Soviet upbringing. This development straddles the collapse of socialism. It dates back to the time of perestroika when economic stagnation prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to call for educators and institutions to attend to the ‘human factor of production’ (Matza 2018: 78). In response, reformers promoted a shift from ‘averaged’ to ‘personality-oriented’ education, and a ‘more democratic and child-centred approach’. Emotions became a relevant area of educational concern, initiating the psychologisation of upbringing, which had previously been conceived of in moral terms under the tutelage of Anton Makarenko, the father of Stalinist pedagogy who developed the disciplinary techniques that promoted the formation of Homo Sovieticus (Kharkhordin 1998). This change was not essentially about individual children achieving success or wellbeing; the late-socialist reformers had in mind a form of success that was ultimately to be measured in collective terms. The acknowledgement of an individual interior life that ought to be nurtured for its own sake had always been contested under socialism, just as had the notion of ‘private’ life. A generation later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Matza found during his fieldwork in Putin-era St. Petersburg that a distinction had emerged between two different psychotherapeutic approaches: one oriented towards adolescent dysfunction and pathology, another much more targeted upon wellbeing. He established that depathologising forms of care that focused on well-being were generally much more available to the better-off. Rather than pathology, these forms of psychotherapy promoted highly market-oriented and gendered concepts of personal success and advancement. Matza observes that biopolitics (techniques used to govern populations as living beings) often relies on moralising and draws subjects into state aims by constituting them as caring subjects. This observation reinforces the notion that ethical projects are not antithetical to neoliberalism; on the contrary, they are central to it.

The physical environment that socialism created and inhabited played a significant role in the formation of subjecthood on both sides of the fracture and collapse of socialist societies. This was particularly pertinent in Hungary, long regarded as the most Western-oriented and prosperous of the so-called ‘satellites’ of the Soviet Union in the period of late socialism. Here, as elsewhere across that social landscape, planners understood that materiality and political ideologies were linked, and that transformative powers might inhere in material forms. The aesthetics of domestic environments, the shape, texture, and ambience of their materiality, provide the locus for Krisztina Fehéreváry’s (2013) exploration of the reciprocal relationships between ideology (of the state, market, or particular groups), things (residential housing, furnishings, and aesthetic styles), and people (especially people’s embodied experience). She elucidates how radical changes to people’s lived environments and their experience of those environments transforms or challenges the sociopolitical ideologies with which they are aligned. She particularly highlights how, in the sphere of interior design and domestic aesthetics in Hungary but also more widely across both the East and West, the trend towards using ‘natural’ materials—of, effectively, bringing ’nature’ inside—gained powerful affective appeal with the end of the Cold War and its corollary, the demise of the socialist welfare state. She observes that the superiority ascribed to ‘natural’ materials—granite countertops, rich hardwoods, stone-like tile backsplashes, and leather furnishings—aids in discrediting modernist projects and generates the cosmologies that have replaced them. These cosmologies valorise the moral project of being in harmony with the natural world and at the same time allow for the naturalisation of the free market as arbiter of human value. The search for ‘quality’ in material goods that are more healthy and durable, i.e., more ‘natural’, is inextricably linked to the production of inequality. Drawing upon the Peircean concept of ‘qualisigns’, she traces the decline of the Cold War style of ‘socialist modern’, characterised by angular, modernist design, lightweight furnishings, light colours, and man-made materials, once emblematic of the triumphantly modernist communist future and defined by qualisigns of ‘lightness’ and ‘cleanness’, into a debased parody she defines as ‘socialist generic’. In Hungary, this style’s defining products—shoddy, factory-made, and mass-produced apartments and furnishings—became aligned with and reinforced the affective experience of alienation from an impersonal and oppressive bureaucratic state, whose physical identifiers echoed the same tropes of stagnation that permeated the socialist space. Man-made materials that had once exemplified the promise of abundance for all came to exemplify the regime’s hubristic attempts to dominate nature. Egalitarianism became discredited in part because it had become conflated in everyday practice with standardisation and uniformity. Likewise, rational and efficient became synonymous with cheap and austere. People sensed that the contempt for nature reflected in the communist domestic aesthetic presaged some deeper malaise. According to Fehéreváry, the cataclysm of Chernobyl is affectively anticipated in this domestic parable (Fehéreváry 2012: 627).

Dace Dzenovska’s ethnography (2018) of postsocialist Latvia lights up the dark underside of what neoliberal acceptance might mean for former socialist populations. The country at the edge of the European Union remained haunted by the afterlife of the Soviet Union’s internal borders and nationalities policies, yet it reluctantly ingested public tolerance and liberal political values. Learning to navigate the paradox of Europeanness imposes the imperative to profess and institutionalise the values of inclusion and openness while at the same time practicing—and also institutionalising—exclusion and closure. Having become a European Union frontier state, Latvia is required to reorient its border vision from protecting its national territory to protecting all of Europe. This responsibility includes being concerned not only with border control and geopolitics, but also with migration control, which had barely registered on Latvian public and political agendas prior to Europeanisation. Latvia’s history as a former Soviet state with a sizeable and contested ethnic Russian population, migrants from Soviet times, easily outranks in popular affective and institutional priority the imperative to police the posthistorical perimeter of the longed-for European homeland. Latvians experienced the condition of being ‘not quite European’. In order to meet the normative attitudinal standards that will permit them to take their place among the liberal subjects of the European project, Latvians need to purge their racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic inclinations, supported and scrutinised by ‘tolerance’ workers, employed by the state.

So far, so liberal. Yet the migration officials and border guards who are Dzenovska’s interlocutors are better at learning the repressive elements of Europe’s migration regime; that is, securing the border, and keeping ‘barbarians’ (Dzenovska 2018: 206) at the gate, rather than embracing the redemptive elements like tolerance and compassion. History hasn’t ended in Latvia. Caught between its Soviet past and its European future, the tension between openness and closure is not to be simply mapped onto a discursive juxtaposition between liberalism and illiberalism and, subsequently, spatially onto Western and Eastern Europe. Latvians experience a deferred, disappointed, and elusive present: aspiring to be Europeans, longing to shed their hated socialist past, as they see it, as vassals of their gigantic next door neighbour to the East, yet haunted by postsocialist instincts and reflexes.

Alexia Bloch’s account (2017) of the entrepreneurial, familial, and intimate lives of migrant women who navigate the physical, emotional, and financial routes running from the former Soviet borderlands of Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and Southern Russia into Turkey, illustrates the formation of a powerfully gendered but specifically postsocialist prototype of neoliberal subjecthood. These women, often the primary breadwinners of their extended families, support remittance economic relations with their home communities, often leaving children to be cared for by older family members in ‘other mother’ arrangements, reminiscent of similar economic migrant women in Third World settings. Their relations with husbands at home are often characterised by role-reversal, with women in the active, dominant role, with dependent stay-at-home husbands whose absence of status and sometimes of any significant role provides a ghostly echo of the marginalised men, washed up on the shores of the socialist ideal in the time of khaos, described by Parsons and others. Bloch analyses practices and postures that complicate liberal narratives that assume a trajectory from an ‘oppressive’ state socialism to the ‘opportunities’ offered by global capitalism. Socialist paradigms and forms of governance are not immediately or evenly displaced, and people who lived under state socialism continue to reflect on a sense of a derailed socialist modernity. Some of Bloch’s older interlocutors lament being inserted into a global service economy where ideals of socialist labour have no meaning, and they no longer have any social protections in the form of pensions, overtime, sick leave, or mechanisms for gender equity. Often, whilst successful, even thriving, businesswomen, they harbour a residual shame at their involvement in tainted ‘bourgeois’ buying and selling, frowned upon in socialist morality. One such troubled respondent confessed that to be a trader was to be a fallen socialist of sorts (Bloch 2017: 71). In contrast, some younger women consider their work and life in Turkey as exciting, urbane, and an escape from the confining socialist structures and gender ideals of the past. This latter group exemplify ideals of glamour, romance, and sexuality made available through the freedom offered by mobility. This freedom affords new structures of feeling, including new forms of romance, courtship, and ‘companionate’ marriage. These structures include so-called ‘modern’ forms of intimacy, including concubinage and the online sex industry. These women speak of having more power from the position of an illicit relationship than they would in a ‘real marriage’. Bloch ruefully reflects back on the prevalence in the early postsocialist years of women turning to international marriage services to look for husbands because they had struggled in their home communities of Belarus and Russia to find husbands who would be financially stable, sober, and not abusive, but also to find husbands who would provide for them both materially and emotionally. The practices and new structures of feeling observed by Bloch run counter to the commonly held view of the traffic of women as victims across borders. They confound the growing concern for ‘security’ at borders and afford more nuanced understandings of the links between global capitalism and women's (and men's) migration.

Conclusion

Postsocialism did not simply follow on from socialism, and socialism did not simply go away. Key postsocialist works indicate that postsocialist forms of being were established well before socialism’s political demise. Similarly, some of socialism’s material forms and social norms continued and have proved to have a resilient afterlife. The span of recent postsocialist anthropological scholarship described above does not indicate a concept in decline or even in retreat as yet. To shoehorn postsocialism into the narrow rubric of area studies would test the category’s limits on simple geographic grounds alone. The ethnographic fields detailed here have been located in Europe, but might easily have included Central Asia (Pelkmans 2017, Reeves 2014) or Mongolia (Empson 2011, Pedersen 2011). In any event, notwithstanding their physical locus, all of these sites are traversed by global forces, for example, the European Union funding that stipulates Latvian ‘tolerance’; the self-improvement therapies and wellbeing philosophy imported from the US to the adolescent psychology clinics of St. Petersburg; the global assemblages of Dunn’s Polish baby food standards; Buchanan’s public fiscal theory that restructures Belaya Kalitva’s social infrastructure; Bloch’s young women’s ideals of ‘plastic sexuality without complexes’. It is clear that diverse theoretical concerns, gathered under the postsocialist moniker, such as ontology, knowledge formation, personhood, materiality, sovereignty, borders, migration, gender, globalism and modernity, are not exclusive to former socialist societies. Connections, not simply legitimising but also enriching, could and should be made to other organising ‘post-’ categories in anthropology. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery (2009) have proposed the conflation of postsocialism with postcolonial studies to create a single overarching category: the post-Cold War (see also Kwon 2010). They suggest that just as postcoloniality has become a critical perspective on the colonial present, so postsocialism could become a similarly critical standpoint on the continuing social and spatial effects of Cold War power and knowledge (such as in the remaking of markets, property rights, democratic institutions, workplaces, consumption, families, gender/sexual relations, or communities).

Yet if there is one defining comparative ethnographic feature of postsocialism that this entry has highlighted, it is the looping temporality of the postsocialist subject. If the postcolonial/Third World societies were once placed in the evolutionary chronotropes of backwardness, in stereotyped stages of society and the teleologies of modernisation theory which in turn interpolated postcolonial subjects as without history and without agency (Chakrabarty 2000), then it can be argued that the postsocialist subject demonstrates something different but parallel vis-a-vis the times of modernity. When Yurchak describes the disaffected youth of Leningrad as ‘being vnye’ (outside-inside) he is showing them to be postsocialist subjects, not late-socialist subjects. They are postsocialist but live in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e., in positivist political science terms, they lived in ‘developed socialism’). They were already being postsocialist but still during ‘socialism’. How is that possible? It isn’t, if you understand postsocialism and socialism as related to each other as ‘after’ relates to ‘before’. The nested temporality of postsocialism within socialism, which hatched when the socialist state eventually withered away, exemplifies concretely how people orient towards and, over decades if not centuries, silently prepare the groundwork for futures beyond immediate conceptual comprehension. Familiarity with this phenomenon has left scholars of postsocialism well placed to spot analogies between these events and the possible signs of the emergence of postliberal societies and subjectivities (see Boyer & Yurchak 2010, Dzenovska & Kurtović 2018)

What was unique about socialist societies was that they were founded upon ideology that took human nature and anthropology itself as a problem. That reflexive ideology proposed an answer to this problem, which percolated down through Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin from Hegel, to insist that human behaviour and subjectivity were and are plastic and mutable, albeit framed within a historical dialectic. Beyond socialism’s demise, real or simply alleged, the tension created by that dialectic persists within the current neoliberal world order. Notwithstanding its questionable adequacy as an organising trope, innovative anthropology focussed upon lives led under the shrinking shadow of socialist organisation, ideology, and experience, and societies still haunted by communism’s ghosts, continues to be written under the name of postsocialism.

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Note on contributor

Dominic Martin is an anthropologist of Russia and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford. His work concerns the relationship between postsocialist life and the transformations of economy, society, and sovereignty that followed the end of the Cold War in Russia’s Asia-Pacific borderlands.

Dominic Martin, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography 51/53 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE Dominic.martin@compas.ox.ac.uk

Care

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 19:34:23 +0000

Patrick McKearney Megha Amrith

Initially published 14 Sep 2021

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

Abstract:

There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in particular, how it is organised by contemporary states and global markets. Second, the entry provides an overview of how, in everyday relationships of support, the political, economic, and moral dimensions of care become entangled in one another. This demonstrates how ethnography offers a different way to approach ethical and practical questions about what makes care good or effective in different cultural contexts and in different settings—such as in medical institutions or in the relationships between carers and those for whom they care. Finally, the entry shows how the different ways that care works in families and in communities challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about what care ought to look like and where it should take place. Overall, the entry illustrates that care varies greatly across social contexts. Anthropology distinctively illuminates how deeply these variations change the experience and consequences of care in ways that require our detailed attention.

Introduction

Humans sustain each other’s lives through giving and receiving care. We often think of acts of care—such as a primary caregiver looking after a child—as central to what it means to be human. Such relationships of dependence, support, and sustenance are, indeed, universal—something we necessarily find in all societies. But precisely because care is a relationship, rather than a biological quality of individuals, this universal varies along with other forms of social variation. Societies imagine, structure, and practise caring relationships so differently as to create significant differences at the level of who has responsibility to provide care, who is seen to need and to deserve it, and what care aspires to do and be.

Policies, philosophies, and practices are often founded on universal assumptions about what care is and ought to be. States may cut welfare on the basis that it can and ought to be provided by families. Clinicians can care for patients with the idea that the best, even only, thing they can do for them is to cure them. Families may give women the responsibility to care on the basis that they are supposedly ‘naturally’ inclined to do so. Paying for care can be regarded suspiciously when people hold that care ought to emanate from personal and sentimental concerns, rather than instrumental ones. Informal care might be judged as inadequate on the basis that it lacks the expertise and rigour of professional forms of it. We have a panoply of ideas about what, where, how, and by whom care is to be provided—ideas that we often take to be natural, universal, and immovable.

This entry explores care in its different guises, in order to see more expansively what care means around the world, to illuminate its diversity and to question our assumptions. Anthropological work on care demonstrates how many dominant assumptions about care arise from specific ways that care is structured in contemporary Euro-American capitalist states. It shows that such assumptions do not help us understand how care appears in other societies, and risk blinding us to the complexity of caring relationships within Euro-American societies themselves. Anthropological studies of care thus illustrate that to understand the actual role of care in human life, we must expand our imagination about what, where, and how it is given.

Structures of care

Nation states and economic markets play a central role in distributing and regulating care in contemporary societies. They function to define who is worthy of care, who should be responsible for giving it, and the contexts in which it is given. Attending to these diverse ways of structuring care reveals how different they are from one another—and thus the significant effect they can have on the kind of care people receive and, in some cases, on the possibility of receiving care at all.

Capitalist economies typically connect care work and dependence with the private sphere as opposed to the public sphere of the market and politics. Relatedly, care is often held in these contexts to be a natural feminine activity while the independent ‘breadwinner’ is regarded as traditionally male (Ferguson 2015; Fineman 2005; Held 2006). A large amount of care work is thus performed by female kin within households and receives no fiscal compensation or legal recognition (Fraser & Gordon 2003). When care work is performed by non-kin in exchange for money, it is typically poorly compensated in contrast to jobs more closely associated with the centres of economic and political power (Folbre & Nelson 2000; Constable 2009; Zelizer 2009). Professional care receives little of the social status of other professions and those who perform informal care often occupy even lower statuses – their work receiving stigma and moral scrutiny for its conflation of the sentimental realm of care with economic modes of exchange (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004; Glenn 2012).

The structuring of societies according to the values of rationality, independence, individualism, and productive work thus shapes caring relationships in distinctive ways. It often obscures the time, expertise, effort, and costs of ‘women’s work’ and of ‘emotional labour’ in the home and beyond (Hochschild 1983; Abel & Nelson 1990). It also creates the impression that care work is only necessary for specific classes of ‘dependents’ and that it can be confined to specific social contexts (Ferguson 2015; Siebers 2007; Kittay 1999; Fineman 2005; Rivas 2004). Anthropological approaches to care challenge these assumptions by examining how it is actually practised and distributed in people’s daily lives. They also demonstrate that such socio-cultural and gendered assumptions about care nevertheless continue to determine how care is distributed in different societies (Zelizer 2009).

States and markets

No nation state has ever fully taken on the responsibility and fiscally compensated for all forms of care. Kinship, charity, community-based and privately financed care continue to play a vital role. Contemporary European welfare states, especially those in Scandinavia, have taken on probably the most responsibility for care within human history in their provision of expansive welfare payments for parental leave, child support, disability care, and elderly care as well as free healthcare. In such countries, kin are less often expected to provide care without state compensation, while the state also offers extensive alternatives for people to be professionally cared for by non-kin (Altermark 2018). This kind of expansive welfare government is accompanied by active intervention into the care of citizens through medical, psychiatric, and public health institutions (Foucault 2009b; 2009a; 1975). Such state intervention in turn generates classifications of certain classes of citizens as more ‘vulnerable’ than others.

Among developed capitalist countries, the US offers a stark contrast to Scandinavian states. The American state takes on far less responsibility for the care of its citizens, most notably in relation to healthcare and long-term nursing care. Organisations that provide long-term care for the elderly are typically owned and run privately, and are thus often beholden to logics of profit-making (Diamond 1995). Meanwhile, healthcare is largely funded through payments to private health insurance companies, who have ample legal room to evade the responsibility to actually provide care to many of those who would seem to need it. For example, when clinicians and potential patients claim to need support for eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia, insurance companies can justify their refusal by reclassifying the very diagnostic symptoms such people initially use to make their claim to dependence as, instead, a wilful refusal of self-care (Lester 2019). Clinicians, operating within this mode of financing healthcare, can only obtain care for their patients by framing their conditions in the categories that insurance companies recognise as legitimate. Their clinical evaluations of patients thus become infused with insurance logics (Lester 2009; Brodwin 2013; see also Davis 2012; Biehl 2005).

In spite of this largely market-based approach to care, the American state is no less involved in its citizens’ lives. It makes ‘caring’ interventions through other institutions such as the military, justice, and carceral systems. War veterans, for instance, are entitled to kinds of healthcare assistance comparable to a comprehensive European welfare state (Wool 2015; Zogas 2021). Once someone with a mental-health disorder has committed a criminal offence, US courts can authorise otherwise-prohibited interventions in their lives to wean people off addiction or provide them with access to housing (Brodwin 2013; see also Cooper 2018). Prisons play a similarly unexpected role in providing healthcare to incarcerated pregnant mothers, making medical and emotional care simultaneously more available to some lower-income women of colour at the same time as entangling it with logics of incarceration (Sufrin 2017; see also Foucault 1995).

The opposite of this situation can also occur. States may attempt to maintain the idea that they are intervening to protect their citizens while, in reality, unburdening themselves of any responsibility to do so—often by bureaucratically distinguishing between supposedly legitimate and illegitimate forms of dependence (Foucault 2008). As Ukraine reeled from the Chernobyl explosion, the socialist and then post-socialist government was faced with unprecedented claims upon state assistance. It used biomedical institutions in order to reclassify people’s radiation damage as the result of an alternative condition that entitled citizens to nothing (Petryna 2013; see also Phillips 2011). When China introduced expansive new legislation to provide economic support to those with disabilities, the bureaucratic means for becoming certified as disabled turned out to be so complicated that few were able to claim it (Kohrman 2005).

A neoliberal logic, where governments redistribute responsibility to citizens by actively encouraging them to care for themselves (Foucault 2008), is present across many kinds of state intervention. This logic can make it easier for state institutions, and even families, to classify those who depend extensively on others, such as chronically ill or ‘unwanted’ populations, as ‘abnormal’—with the consequence that they may end up neglected in ‘zones of social abandonment’ (Biehl 2005; see also Marrow & Luhrmann 2012). Even the most well-meaning and charitable attempts to help those abandoned to these settings can unwittingly replicate the demands of neoliberal forms of government for citizens to take on more responsibility for their own care—rather than criticising the state for not providing it (Zigon 2010).

Humanitarianism and migrant care labour

Care is not confined to the borders of nation states, as humanitarian aid distributes it across regions in light of sharp global economic inequalities. States, together with non-profit organisations, make decisions about which populations in other parts of the world need, or are deserving of, humanitarian care. Much state-sponsored humanitarianism is shaped by ideals of a shared universal humanity that requires intervention to rescue and care for suffering victims. This logic can depoliticise the inequalities that produce such suffering in the first place (Beckett 2019; Feldman & Ticktin 2013; Ferguson 1994), creating unintended similarities between contemporary efforts and ideologies of benevolence underpinning colonial ‘civilising missions’ to reform those deemed vulnerable, deficient, suffering, or sick (Englund 2006). Lisa Malkki (1996) highlights how the category of ‘the refugee’ in programmes of humanitarian care for Hutus in East Africa reduces the complex identities and political subjectivities of those being ‘helped’ into a static, homogenous category of de-historicised victimhood. Similarly, children in conflict settings may come to be represented as fundamentally innocent and ‘needy’ through infantilising and at times futile ‘gifts of care’, such as hand-knitted toys (Malkki 2015).

A similar logic plays out when it comes to migrants and refugees at European state borders. The contemporary French state’s rhetoric of humanitarian care plays a role in categorising only certain undocumented migrants (sans-papiers) as vulnerable and ‘morally legitimate’ care-recipients—for instance, those who are sick or victims of sexual violence. This distinguishes them from migrants who might have been disenfranchised in other ways (Ticktin 2011). Such selective compassion by the state to care for specific bodies is a distinct political logic, one that may render issues of care apolitical and forecloses the possibility of contestation (see also Fassin 2011).

Global inequalities also shape, and are reinforced by, the international distribution of migrant care labour. Such labour is disproportionately performed by immigrant women from lower-income countries who move to engage in low-wage employment in the domestic and care work sectors of higher-income economies (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004; Glenn 2012; R. S. Parreñas 2015), such as from the Philippines to Hong Kong, Mexico and Central American countries to the US, and South Asia to the Gulf states. Precarious livelihoods in migrants’ countries of origin and aspirations to care for family futures often motivate these journeys abroad, while households in wealthier countries outsource care work to migrant women as sources of cheap labour.

Migrants may lack the legal rights of citizens in ways that are entangled with the marginalisation of care workers and care labour more widely. When migrant women enter into these already precarious and vulnerable forms of labour, their experience of this gendered devaluation of care intersects with their discrimination along the lines of class, race, and citizenship (Constable 1997; Rosenbaum 2017; Muehlebach 2012). This ‘global care chain’ has knock-on effects on women’s families in their country of origin, requiring them to find other kin or paid carers to take over caring responsibilities in their absence (Hochschild 2001).

The ethics of care

Political and economic logics distribute responsibility for care in such a way as to produce its presence or absence in different settings. How do people relate to one another within caring relationships themselves? What does care look like and involve in practice?

Ethics of care in professional settings

Many forms of health and social care now place a high value on autonomy, consent, and patient choice as they move away from paternalistic models. This ‘logic of choice’ (Mol 2008) limits many forms of caring intervention based on the authority of professional expertise. Social workers in the US bound by these values of autonomy cannot intervene in the lives of those with drug addictions and mental health problems, even when they find people sleeping in the snow without a blanket (Brodwin 2013). The logic of choice creates particular problems for those who need care when their mental capacity to choose is affected by conditions such as dementia, intellectual disability, or mental health problems (Driessen 2018b; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017). Many forms of care exist precisely because people are judged to be incapable of choosing for themselves—but strict adherence to a logic of choice leaves no room for this kind of intervention (Pols, Althoff & Bransen 2017).

Actual caring relationships tend to work in far more complex ways than the logic of choice, and its binary division of paternalism from autonomy, allows. In practice, many caring relationships work through constant intervention in the life of the care-recipient—some of which are paternalistic, and some of which can less easily be classified in this way (Mol, Moser & Pols 2010; see also Kittay 2007, 2019). Chinese parents, for instance, ‘tinker’ (Mol 2008) behind the scenes to create conditions that will be conducive to their children succeeding in a highly competitive economy, in order to avoid directly commanding their already stressed children (Kuan 2015). And many contemporary Euro-American forms of care try to combine intervention with freedom through different forms of pedagogy or persuasion (Pols 2006; Ochs & Izquierdo 2009; Driessen, van der Klift & Krause 2017; McKearney 2021).

Logics of care contrast, also, with another important standard within medical institutions: the goal-oriented focus of curing (Kleinman 2015; 2013). The role of such care comes into focus in settings where curing is not possible—such as in end-of life care (Kaufman 2014; Pols, Pasveer & Willems 2018; Shield 1988). Julie Livingston shows how, when doctors in resource-deprived hospitals in Botswana have little hope of curing their patients, they carefully attend to dressing wounds, managing pain, and providing emotional support (see also Kleinman 2009; Street 2014). They practise medicine as a form of solidarity with the sick—a care that exceeds standard biomedical forms of evaluation (Chambliss 1995). Medicine’s funding and regulation with the ideal of curing leads many in medical professions to miss the centrality of care to their own work, and to other people’s moral projects—as, for instance, when clinicians in the US misrecognise how parents pursue meaningful lives for their critically-ill children despite the improbability of curing them (Mattingly 2010; 2014).

The relational and hard-to-measure qualities of care often make it hard to justify in quantitative or economic terms. Interventions that work through the solidary logic of caring– such as long-term psychotherapy—often receive less funding (Lester 2019; Luhrmann 2001; Davis 2012). The impossibility of economically justifying long-term support for those with those mental disorders that incline them to reject care can lead clinicians to identify such patients as ‘incurable’—even when there is no strictly clinical reason to do so (Davis 2012; Lester 2009). A focus on such impersonal quantitative outcomes in the Canadian government’s response to a crisis of Inuit suicides ignored the sources of and the solutions to the crisis among the Inuit themselves, who see life as inherently bound up with relations of care with ancestors and relatives (Stevenson 2014).

Relations of care produce outcomes that the logics of choice and cure miss. A focus on autonomy can have the effect of wearing our relations thin, to the point that changes in cognitive capacity end up spelling social death (Biehl 2005; Cohen 2000; Marrow & Luhrmann 2012). Instead, a focus on relations of care can build sustaining ties between us as social beings (Taylor 2010). Athena McClean (2015) demonstrates the concrete effects of taking such hard-to-measure logics of care seriously by contrasting two long-term dementia care homes in the US: one which primarily treats care as an instrumental task, and the other as a relational form of solidarity. She demonstrates that the latter maintains not only the dignity but also the cognitive capacities of those in receipt of care—producing also far fewer incidents of conflict or distress.

It is for this reason that feminist scholars writing about the ‘ethics of care’ have long advocated for placing concerns about care at the centre of our moral imaginations and as integral to public and political life. They take care to be a relational practice that refers to all that people do to maintain, continue, and repair the world in which they live (Tronto & Fisher 1990; Tronto 2009).

Challenging moralities

Caring relationships that operate outside of the logics of cure, choice, and the market do not all look the same. Around the world, care takes many forms that challenge our moral intuitions about what it should look like—disrupting, in particular, the dichotomies we hold between good care and its opposites (Duclos & Criado 2020; McKearney 2020).

Professionalism, instrumentalism, and commodification are often set against the moral and emotional qualities we typically associate with care—of sentiment, connection, and warmth (see H. Brown 2010: 129). But, in practice, contractual relationships of care are frequently sites for human intimacy, connection, and flourishing. In the context of paid eldercare work in the US, precariously employed immigrant women who perform this work develop meaningful, if ambivalent, relationships with the older people they care for. Care is thus generative both of inequalities and of new forms of personhood, interdependence, and relatedness (Buch 2018) and thereby of moral engagement. Rather than telling a story about love or intimacy versus money, anthropologists have demonstrated how different ways of relating emerge in and through their very intersection. This has led them to question the assumption that a capitalist world is necessarily marked by a ‘lack’ of care (Constable 2009; Gutierrez Garza 2019; Zelizer 2009).

Some professional logics of care try to restrict these possibilities of intimacy. But other organisations deliberately use these possibilities to enable closer forms of personal connection for those whose dependence can deprive them of it (McKearney 2017; 2018; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017; Nakamura 2013; Kulick & Rydström 2015; Haeusermann 2018). These possibilities for human connection can also be important to care-givers, especially when their work is stigmatised and reproduces their social exclusion more widely (Muehlebach 2012; Rivas 2004). In Singapore, Filipino migrant nurses who might initially be rejected by their Chinese patients for being of ‘different skin’ can later find ways to connect with these patients through personal connections such as a shared religious orientations (Amrith 2017). Such everyday affective, intimate, and material exchanges within care work can constitute a form of political belonging for migrant carers, especially in the absence of formal citizenship rights (Coe 2019; see also T. M. Brown 2011).

The idea that care must take a particularly involved form of empathetic engagement does not hold everywhere (Otto & Keller 2018; Mezzenzana 2020). The warm and sentimental relationality we often associate with caring for another may be taken to get in the way of ‘good’ care. In Thailand, care is a matter of practical work, bodily ritual, and karmic morality. Here, care as the concrete, habituated, and mundane act of providing for others decentres more abstract, sentimentalised and morally loaded notions of care that have long dominated in Europe and America (Aulino 2016). Don Kulick and Jens Rydstrom (2015) demonstrate this in their study of carers in Denmark who support people with disabilities to have sexual encounters. These carers do not try, themselves, to be visible and involved. Instead, they aim to turn themselves into mere background influences—as do many carers supporting those who rely on extensive care throughout their daily lives (Rivas 2004; Stacey 2016; Buch 2018). At the other end of the spectrum, ‘warmth’ can arise in elderly care even when it is mediated by ‘cold’ objects like robots, as is the case in the Netherlands (Pols & Moser 2009; Mol, Moser & Pols 2010). Intimacy may similarly arise even in the apparent absence of human care relationships. Against the grain of popular discourses in Japan, which presume that elderly people living alone are socially abandoned, older adults can find their own ethical practices for living meaningfully in later life through daily rituals making offerings to departed ancestors (Danely 2015).

Control, confinement, and aggression are often imagined to stand in direct contrast to care. Anthropologists, by contrast, show how they can be central to the form that care takes in reality (Foucault 2009a; Johnson and Lindquist 2020; Mulla 2016). In many contexts, violence and deception do not compromise the purity of a more sentimental care but are instead central to how people imagine and practise good care (Brown 2010; Garcia 2015; Livingston 2012). In India, clinicians care for those with schizophrenia by hiding information about the diagnosis from these individuals, and enlisting the support of the family to regulate and control the care-recipient (Marrow & Luhrmann 2017; see also Luhrmann 2007). These paternalistic dynamics within and beyond the family may well be a key of part of the explanation as to why schizophrenia takes a far less severe form in this context. The line between abusive and affirming forms of care is thus much less clear, in practice, than our ideals of care may suggest (Garcia 2010; 2014). In these studies of alternative forms of professional care, hierarchy, paternalism, control, or detachment are not such grave dangers to the person as we often imagine. Rather, they are part of different ways of understanding what it means to be a person, to be cared for, and to be respected. These alternative caring ethics can have remarkably positive outcomes for conditions that mainstream Euro-American care struggles to handle, such as mental illness, dementia, intellectual disability, and addiction.

Care, kinship and communities

The majority of care around the world is still provided outside the direct purview and funding of the state and its institutions, within families and in communities. During the latter part of the twentieth century, many states closed long-stay institutions and shifted away from centralised hospitals on the idea that care is best provided in the ‘community’ (Horden Smith 2013). But this modernising narrative glosses over the fact that families and ‘communities’ rarely fit the imaginations of policy-makers and vary considerably in the way they distribute care.

Families are a primary site through which caring obligations are distributed—kinship roles themselves often being defined, in part, through one’s obligations to or entitlements to care at different life-stages (Goody 1971). But there are profound differences in normative cultural patterns about what families should look like, how care should be distributed within and beyond them, and what ought to constitute proper care. Children, in some contexts, may not have a single dedicated caregiver, nor any dedicated caregiver at all (Otto & Keller 2018), nor are they always regarded as the responsibility of parents in a concrete way, in no small part because they may not be defined as vulnerable to begin with (Lancy 2014). Children as young as five among the Runa of the Pastuza region in the Ecuadorian Amazon are left to look after themselves in very practical ways through building shelter and acquiring food on their own (Mezzenzana 2020). The Runa consider leaving children to their own devices as the best way to let them learn self-reliance, concern for others, and a capacity to manage themselves. This is connected to the self-reliant ‘obstinate individualism’ of the region, in which each person is their own responsibility and no one else’s (Mezzenzana 2020). Such alternative forms of childcare do not just challenge how childhood can be imagined; they also affect the extent to which adults are required to provide care and to which children can care for themselves (Ochs & Izquierdo 2009).

Kinship-care goes far beyond the nuclear family. There are many configurations of kinship that involve a different set of characters in providing care: grandparents, changing romantic partners (Zelizer 2009), or non-genetic close connections who may be described as kin (Edwards & Strathern 2000; Pande 2015). Domestic work by non-kin, more or less assumed into a family structure, has a long and continuous history (Delap 2011; Ray & Qayum 2009) as does the adoption of non-kin. In some societies, the very definition of a partner, parent, or child may not be a permanent genetic or legal bond (Sahlins 2013; Conklin & Morgan 1996). Kinship can also be created through acts of care; for instance, the day-to-day sharing of cooked meals in Langkawi in Malaysia (Carsten 1997; see also Parkes 2005). In these cases, kinship is often not defined at birth but rather is built between people through repeated transfers of care and exchanges of substances such as food or bodily fluids (Carsten 1989; 2000; Stasch 2009).

Kinship roles can also follow a more prescribed and structured set of normative expectations that concretely shape caring responsibilities. In rural Uganda, patrilineal family structures shape the different kinds of grandparental care that sons and daughters’ children receive (Whyte & Whyte 2004). In many South Asian families, one’s status as a child of one’s parents continues to define the care one receives and gives throughout the life course. Parents frequently refer to their adult children who have not yet married as bacche, ‘children’ in Hindi (Mody 2020a). Parental intervention in the sphere of marriage may also be seen as legitimate well into adulthood. The forms of pressure that it may take to make children conform to a parent’s decisions on suitable marriage partners are often expressed and justified through a language of care. Marriage-decisions gain part of their importance from the role that daughters-in-law play in providing care to their parents-in-law (Lamb 2000; Marrow & Luhrmann 2017).

These forms of kinship can give a stability, givenness, and intimacy to the kinship bond that makes the transfer of care obligatory and uncalculated. But that does not mean that care’s role in kinship is stable even in these contexts. One’s role shifts across the course of the lifetime with gendered transitions through childhood, adulthood, and elderhood (Goody 1971; Faubion 2001). The expectations of care that such transitions bring are negotiated and contested extensively. When kinship takes the burden of care, it is typically a weighty, complex, and fraught affair (Mody 2020b; Pinto 2014; Trawick 1990; Reece 2020).

Social and political changes brought about through processes of urbanisation and globalisation can also re-configure the role of kinship in caring relationships. Popular narratives in India lament the demise of the ‘Indian joint family’ to stress the importance of what they see as the legitimate way to look after elders: by caring for them within that familial context (Cohen 1992). But international migration from India has led to the growth of novel care arrangements: privatised eldercare homes and local care services as an alternative, or complement, to kinship care for elders who stay in India while their kin live abroad. A closer look at the lives of people living in these communities demonstrates that care homes are not merely impositions of Euro-American models but are culturally legitimate spaces for middle-class diasporic Indian families (Lamb 2009). In low-income settings in Sub-Saharan Africa, while the care of children, elders, and those with chronic health problems is often undertaken by family members, migration, urbanisation, and increasing inequalities constrain the capacities of households to care. Family care then becomes a dynamic space within which people do not only act according to emotional or moral obligations, but according to the resources available (Reece 2020; Read & van der Geest 2019; see also Han 2012 for an example from Chile). In Ghana, when family care becomes less viable on its own, other spaces such as church become important to providing health and social care, as well as acting as a form of ‘fictive’ family (Coe 2019b). Meanwhile, those living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, may find new ‘(quasi) relatives’ among health workers, volunteers, and strangers who are seen to be more trustworthy than family members (van der Geest, Dapaah & Kwansa 2019).

Among families rendered transnational through global care chains, creative care arrangements challenge normative understandings of what a family should look like. Care amidst family separation can be mobilised as an intergenerational resource and form of solidarity. Nicaraguan transnational family life draws extensively on extended kinship networks, while grandmothers and grandchildren who care for each other in these contexts challenge constructions of those ‘left behind’ by migrants as passive care recipients (Yarris 2017). Care at a distance is increasingly mediated by digital technologies and expressed through remittances, gifts, and goods, while the ‘family’ itself may involve multiple actors, including paid care workers, distant relatives, and neighbours (Hromadžić & Palmberger 2018; Ahlin 2020; Baldassar and Wilding 2020). Transnational care challenges the distinctions between family, paid, informal, professional, communal, and state-based care, demonstrating the interconnection between all these categories.

The expectations within policy about where care is to be performed, and by whom, are influenced by and reproduce the legal recognition of only certain types of relatedness as legitimate. But care often exceeds these classifications. The narrow confines of kinship categories deployed by the state and the law are frequently rooted in biological or heteronormative assumptions and thus often exclude other forms of partnership, intimacy, and mutual care (Weston 1997; Dave 2012; see also Strathern 2005). Gay and lesbian relationships, for example, may not fit into many legal definitions of kinship precisely because they are founded upon the very idea of ‘caring and being cared for’ (Borneman 1997).

In other contexts, kinship’s importance can be exaggerated. Migrant care workers’ absences from their families are often framed by state and public discourses as having damaging impacts on heterosexual family structures (Manalansan 2008). However, this narrative overlooks the novel caring relationships based on love, intimacy, and friendship that migrants develop in communities abroad that go beyond kinship categories yet remain deeply significant to their experiences and identities (Johnson & Werbner 2010; Liebelt 2011).

Religious, political, and ethical movements also decentre kinship by structuring distributions of care beyond the family. Religious groups can create relationships of care and compassion between previously unrelated social groups and social concerns (Copeman 2009; Evans 2016; Kertzer 1980; Mair & Evans 2015). Christianity, for instance, created new forms of spiritual kinship within the church—most strikingly in monastic communities where people renounced existing relations and future marital prospects to form new kinds of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ (Brown 1988; Banner 2014). These alternative moral imaginations created new categories of dependents worthy of care (such as children and the ‘poor’) as well as social practices and institutions to distribute care to them—many of which have decisively influenced the shape of contemporary forms of charity, healthcare, and education (Bakke 2005; Brown 1980, 2002; Scherz 2014).

Contemporary small-scale intentional communities can distribute responsibility for care within more limited and controlled environments—whether that be for those with dementia, intellectual disabilities, or the environment (Haeusermann 2018; McKearney 2017; Schiffer 2018). There is also increasing interest in how caring communities extend beyond the boundaries of humanity, both historically and in this age of climate change. One example is the relationship between orangutans, their local human caretakers, and the wider environment in rehabilitation centres in Sarawak (J. Parreñas 2018). Contrary to (post)colonial practices of conservation that are based on establishing control over other species and the environment, orangutans and their caretakers are embedded in a relationship of interdependence and shared vulnerability (through, for instance, land dispossession).

Volunteering can also be an important space for providing care and creating communities. In Greece, as people struggle to access national healthcare in times of economic crisis, networks of community-based clinics/pharmacies have emerged to redistribute donated medicines and provide care through networks of volunteers. These forms of care as social solidarity reanimate Greek citizenship, since it becomes a key location for caring relationships, instead of the family or the state (Cabot 2016). Similar kinds of solidarity can be found in Northern Italy in the context of austerity and diminishing state support. Here it is pensioners who take on the voluntary work of caring for each other, helping those more vulnerable in their neighbourhoods with their shopping, medical appointments and providing them with companionship. This unexpectedly correlates with a denigration of other forms of care, so that when migrant domestic workers in these regions provide similar kinds of care for little pay, their labours are ignored or stigmatised as profit-seeking (Muehlebach 2012). Such community-based caring solidarities are then bound up with questions around what kind of care is visible, and who or what is excluded from the moral framings of these movements.

Conclusion

Social relationships offer the possibility of sustaining another’s life, and of being sustained beyond what one is capable of. If these relationships are necessary for individuals and societies to survive, they are also as variable and open-ended as human life itself. When we attend to the vast diversity of meanings and practices of care around the world, many of our assumptions about it crumble. When care manifests as connection, asymmetric dependence, coercion, refusal, belonging, affirmation, desire, and neglect, all at the same time, we are forced to question what constitutes good care, and how clearly we can separate it from what we assume bad care to be. When we explore how care is structured by different social mechanisms, from kinship to the welfare state, we must take a much wider view about who provides care and in what settings. Within a globalised world of different economic regimes, we see how care is unequally distributed within and across societies, producing ambivalent and uncertain forms of intimacy and relatedness. In its everyday expressions, what care looks like in practice does not always fit in with the rigid pre-established normative ideals about how it ought to be. A detailed look at how care takes place outside of state and market overturns any easy or simple ideas about what care in the ‘community’ looks like and about how caring roles are taken on and negotiated. Care is a human universal. But humans universally structure, practise, and imagine it differently, creating vital differences to people’s lives.

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Note on contributors

Patrick McKearney is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He is editor of two special issues on cognitive disability in Medical Anthropology (2021) and The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2018), and writes, researches, and teaches on care, ethics, religion, disability, psychology, and personhood.

Dr. Patrick McKearney, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB23RF. pm419@cam.ac.uk

Megha Amrith leads the ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is the author of Caring for strangers: Filipino medical workers in Asia (2017, NIAS Press) and has research interests in migration and care work.

Dr. Megha Amrith, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. amrith@mmg.mpg.de

Medical pluralism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 18:37:25 +0000

Venera Khalikova

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Initially published 17 Jun 2021

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

Abstract:

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different medical approaches, treatments, and institutions that people can use while pursuing health: for example, combining biomedicine with so-called traditional medicine or alternative medicine. If we look closely at how people deal with illness, navigating between home remedies, evidence-based medicines, religious healing, and other alternatives, we can notice that some degree of medical pluralism is present in every contemporary society. As a concept, medical pluralism lies at the heart of the discipline of medical anthropology, which owes its birth to the study of non-Western medical traditions and their encounters with biomedicine. This entry describes the history of debates in the scholarship on medical pluralism, the search for an appropriate terminology, and current theoretical and methodological developments. In the 1960–1980s, many studies were focused on patients and their strategies of choosing a ‘medical system’ from a plurality of options. In the 1980–1990s, the notions of medical systems and medical traditions came under severe criticism for their inability to describe how medical thought and practice change over time, often being too eclectic to fit single systems or traditions. As a result, anthropologists began investigating patient-doctor negotiations of treatment, their diverse health ideologies, as well as the role of political-economic factors in shaping the hierarchies of medical practice. Additionally, scholars began examining the processes of state regulation and institutionalisation of medical traditions (for example, as ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ [CAM] in Europe and North America). This opened the field of medical anthropology to new debates, terminology, and geographical horizons that are trying to account for the pluralist nature of medicine in the twenty-first century. Transnational migration, the Internet, the rise of alternative medical industries, and the global flow of medical goods and knowledge all serve as catalysts for ever-more pluralistic health-seeking practices and ideologies.

Introduction

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different approaches, treatments, and institutions that people use to maintain health or treat illness. Most commonly, medical pluralism entails the use of Western medicine (or ‘biomedicine’) and what is variously termed as ‘traditional medicine’ and ‘alternative medicine’. For example, cancer patients might complement chemotherapy with acupuncture and religious healing; or women who want to get pregnant might combine hormonal treatment with home remedies and Yoga. Scholars of medical pluralism have used different terms such as traditional, indigenous, folk, local, or alternative medicine, but since they all imply distinction from biomedicine, this entry will refer to them as ‘nonbiomedical’ practices.

As a theoretical framework, medical pluralism was developed in the second half of the twentieth century to examine local medical traditions in their diversity, co-existence, and competition, especially with biomedicine. These studies were central to the establishing of the field of medical anthropology. In the context of today’s globalisation, medical pluralism retains its analytical importance, especially in the examination of people’s search for alternative cures locally and transnationally, the growing consumer market of ‘holistic’, ‘traditional’, and ‘natural’ treatments, and the attempts of many countries to incorporate alternative treatments into national healthcare.

While early anthropologists used to focus on local medical traditions in non-Western societies, contemporary scholars examine the place of plural medicine in all societies, including Europe and North America. This shift expanded the scope and terminology with which we describe medical pluralism, for example, by including ‘integrative medicine’ or ‘alternative and complementary medicine’ (or, ‘CAM’). Although there are differences in the usage of these terms, broadly speaking, integrative medicine means that one medical provider offers both biomedicine and nonbiomedical elements as part of a holistic treatment course, while CAM refers to procedures outside biomedicine.

Anthropological studies examine nonbiomedical practices from multiple perspectives, illuminating the role of patients, doctors, markets, and governments in shaping them. As this entry will show, medical pluralism as a concept enables analyses of medicine beyond the dualism of Western/non-Western, modern/traditional, or local/global, by showing how all medical knowledge and practice, be that biomedicine or some regional tradition, is inherently plural, ever-changing, and culturally porous. Such realisation was a result of scholarly debates that problematised the concepts of a medical ‘system’, ‘tradition’, and ‘pluralism’ themselves, as explained in the first section of this entry. The entry then describes the studies of how medical pluralism is influenced and regulated by the state, followed by the studies of medical pluralism in relation to the discourses on modernity, science, and efficacy; gender; and globalisation.^[1]

Medical ‘system,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘pluralism’

Anthropological interest in non-Western medicine dates to the early twentieth century when W.H.R. Rivers (1924) proposed that medicine should be treated as a separate system of knowledge. However, it was only in the 1950s that medical systems began emerging as a focus of anthropological studies. Although the term ‘medical pluralism’ had not yet been introduced, scholars like George Foster (1953) showed the importance of accounting for the impact of colonial and global processes on local medicine, which can result in the eclecticism of medical concepts and therapies as practiced in people’s everyday lives.

The studies of medical pluralism proper began in the late 1970s–early 1980s, when anthropologists launched a comparative study of Asian medicine, exemplified by an influential volume, Asian medical systems (1976), edited by Charles Leslie. The title and content of this volume, as well as the definition of medical pluralism as ‘differentially designed and conceived medical systems’ in a single society (Janzen 1978: xviii), show that a central concept in these studies was ‘system’ (see also Kleinman 1978; Leslie 1978, 1980; Press 1980). In line with how anthropologists studied kinship systems or religious systems, medical anthropologists sought to understand and classify heterogeneous medical knowledge and practice as holistic ‘systems’. This often entailed the assumption that each medical system is characterised by unique epistemology, disease etiology (origins and causes of diseases), and corresponding diagnostic and healing methods. For example, Unani medicine, which is a Greco-Arabic tradition practised in contemporary South and Central Asia, is a medical system because it has an elaborate understanding of body and bodily processes as affected by four humors (elements) which need to be maintained in certain balance to avoid sickness. If a person falls sick, a trained Unani specialist can employ a variety of techniques to identify the type of abnormality in the balance of humors and prescribe a treatment to restore a healthy humoral state.

In attempts to classify medical systems, scholars used various criteria. Some took a geographical scale to make a distinction between local systems (folk medicine), regional systems (like Unani medicine or traditional Chinese medicine), and cosmopolitan medicine (Dunn 1976). Others used disease etiology, proposing that all medical systems are either ‘personalistic’, when a disease is explained as a result of a purposeful action of a human, god, or other actors, and ‘naturalistic’, when a disease is thought to be caused by non-personal forces such as weather or humors (Foster 1976). Other scholars chose writing as a criterion to distinguish ‘little-tradition medicine’ that did not have written accounts from the ‘great-tradition medicine’ that was based on medical texts (Leslie 1976; Obeyesekere 1976, borrowing from Redfield 1956).

However, the attempt to present medical knowledge as consisting of independent, ‘differentially designed and conceived’ systems was quickly recognised as problematic because it downplayed important mutual developments and influences: for example, so-called folk medicine can borrow ideas and methods from regional medicine like Ayurveda, which itself can be influenced by other regional medicines and cosmopolitan biomedicine. Similar problems arise when medical pluralism is defined through the notion of ‘tradition’, for example, as ‘the coexistence in a single society of divergent medical traditions’ (Durkin-Longley 1984: 867). Without critical reflection, the term ‘tradition’ can inadvertently present medical knowledge and practices as something continuous and unchanged since ancient times. In reality, medical ‘traditions’ are ever-changing and quickly respond to socioeconomic processes, which makes them just as modern as biomedicine. Moreover, the idea of ‘divergent traditions’ can be overly reductionist because it presents medical knowledge and practices as belonging to distinct, separable entities uniform throughout large culture areas, while in fact they are often intertwined, heterogeneous, and varied.

It is therefore not surprising that medical anthropologists have struggled to define medical pluralism itself. How can we write about a plurality of traditions, if traditions are themselves plural? To address this problem, scholars have emphasised that medical ‘systems’ and ‘traditions’ are to be understood as analytical constructs, not as real separable areas of medical knowledge with apparent internal homogeneity and rigid boundaries (Nordstrom 1988; Waxler-Morrison 1988). It has also been argued that the idea of distinct ‘systems’ or ‘traditions’ is divorced from how patients and even doctors themselves understand and use various medicines (Khalikova 2020; Naraindas, Quack & Sax 2014; Mukharji 2016). For example, Marc Nichter documented how healers in South India provided a unique blend of therapies and medicines tailored to patients’ pockets and preferences (Nichter 1980). This phenomenon of mixing and blending different medical approaches is sometimes termed ‘medical syncretism’ (see Baer 2011: 419).

Beside medical syncretism, scholars have experimented with other analytical conceptualisations such as eclecticism and hybridity (Brooks, Cerulli & Sheldon 2020) to highlight how seemingly distinct medical traditions can be practiced in eclectic and entangled ways, where every doctor-patient encounter entails a negotiation of diverse medical ideas and treatments resulting in a unique outcome to the extent of unrecognisable amalgamation. Other scholars prefer the notion of the ‘therapeutic itineraries’, i.e., ‘precise pathways taken by patients’, as well as their reasons for choosing and staying with chosen treatment courses (Orr 2012). Yet other anthropologists use the term ‘medical diversity’ to describe mixtures, borrowings, and intersections of various therapeutic ideas, methods, and attitudes (Krause, Alex & Parkin 2012).

All these examples highlight that the studies of medical pluralism quickly pushed anthropologists to examine how medicine is practiced. Even before postmodern critiques of the notion of culture as a bounded entity, and before the emergence of theoretical frameworks that emphasised practice and agency, some medical anthropologists had already began examining medicine as it unfolds in practice: in doctor-patient relations and patient’s health-seeking strategies. Studies of the ‘hierarchy of medical resort’ (Romanucci-Ross 1969), for example, questioned when and why people choose one therapeutic option over another: Do people ‘shop around’, seeking multiple therapies for a single disease, or do they use different therapies for different kinds of illness? Do patients use various treatments simultaneously or sequentially? As a result of studying such questions, scholars demonstrated the importance of cultural, medical, and socioeconomic factors that lead to various scenarios. People’s choices can depend on a disease type, its folk interpretations, patients’ social status, their worldview, available information, as well as the cost and accessibility of treatment (Gould 1965; Beals 1976).

Another line of studies utilised decision-making models—a term borrowed from cognitive anthropology. These models embody a concern with how people choose a treatment, rather than what they choose and in which order (Garro 1998; Janzen 1978; Young 1981). The emphasis is on cognitive aspects of health-seeking behaviour, conversations about medical options, and the pragmatic aspects of decision-making. For example, people often make medical decisions by consulting their relatives or accepting what is given to them by senior family members: parents choose treatments for children, husbands for wives, and adults for elderly parents. This centrality of kinship in medical pluralism was an important finding of the studies of therapeutic decision-making (Janzen 1978; 1987).

Another milestone in the theorisation of medical pluralism was the recognition that it is present in Western societies too. While traditional medicine was initially mostly studied in non-Western and postcolonial societies in contrast to a single ‘cosmopolitan medicine’, scholars soon demonstrated that even in seemingly homogenous or developed societies like the US, medicine is pluralistic by nature (Leslie & Young 1992; Kleinman 1980). If we look closely at how people deal with illness, alternating between biomedical drugs or home remedies, psychotherapy or religious healing, osteopathy or chiropractic, and other alternatives (Naraindas 2006; Zhang 2007), we can see that medical pluralism is present in every contemporary society. Moreover, biomedicine itself is pluralistic: its practitioners ascribe to various conceptions of health and illness, healthcare services differ significantly, including across the private and public sectors, and established and experimental biomedical treatments co-exist and compete with one another.

Thus, rather than juxtaposing Western and non-Western therapies (as was done by Rivers in the early twentieth century), medical anthropologists since the 1970–1980s have been interested in both differences as well as similarities between biomedicine and other medical approaches. Medical pluralism thus provided an important framework that broke away from a reductionist dichotomy of biomedicine versus ethnomedicine, or the West versus the rest. From this perspective, biomedicine could be studied as yet another tradition, one of many options that patients around the world use.

However, biomedicine is not a neutral option at par with other medicines. Scholars of medical pluralism have highlighted its hierarchical nature: nonbiomedical traditions often occupy a subordinate position to hegemonic biomedicine in terms of social prestige, education, employment opportunities, and funding (Baer 1989, 2011). For example, biomedical doctors often secure higher salaries and social respect than alternative medical providers (but not always, see Kim 2009). Critical medical anthropologists have argued that the spread of biomedicine across the world is premised on coercive factors, including the colonial past and biomedicine’s alignment with the state power, rather than on ‘natural development’ or medical superiority of biomedicine (Lock & Nguyen 2010; Young 1981).

Nevertheless, contrary to the logic of modernisers who argue for biomedicine’s technological advantage, local therapies did not die out. Why not? Some scholars suggested that this had to do with people’s dissatisfaction with biomedicine and perceptions that traditional medicine is better suited for local illnesses, safer and does not produce side-effects (Farquhar 1994: 19; Lock 1980: 259). Other scholars emphasised the doctors’ perspectives: alternative and biomedical practitioners occupy different medical niches and catered to distinct clientele (Waxler-Morrison 1988; Leslie 1992).

The above-mentioned questions and answers were shaped by the fact that most theoretical work on medical pluralism was based in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Colonialism had a colossal impact on scholars’ interpretations of local medical knowledge and practice. Both in public health policies and writings of early medical anthropologists, a frequently idealised Western medicine was conceived of as a yardstick against which other healing practices should be evaluated. Today, scholars are increasingly critical about the dichotomies of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ medicine, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ medicine, or even ‘science’ and ‘belief’. Moreover, contemporary medical anthropologists pay attention to the hierarchies that exist among nonbiomedical systems and within biomedicine itself.

Nevertheless, the residue of such dichotomies can still be found in the academic literature and in public discourse, where the new terms of ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ may unwittingly reinforce the subjugated place of nonbiomedical knowledge and practice. Often the subjugated place results from the lack of legitimation of nonbiomedical therapies by the state. How and why the state regulates medical pluralism is, therefore, another prominent area of scholarly inquiry. Studies that focus on global political economic inequalities often do so to disentangle the multiplicities and hierarchies of medical practice, especially as influenced by state ideologies and transnational markets.

The state

Today, most governments take an active role in regulating medical pluralism: they can either ban alternative medicine as ‘quackery’ and ‘pseudoscience’, provide ways to integrate it partially into biomedical infrastructure, or provide it with full support as a standalone institution (Adams & Li 2008; Berger 2013; Kloos 2013; Lock 1990; Scheid 2002). How do governments make such decisions? Why are some medical traditions denied legitimation while others are promoted? What is at stake when a nonbiomedical tradition is officially recognised? What kind of transformations occur in its ontology and epistemology after its legitimation and institutionalisation? What are the implications for practitioners, patients, and society in general? These are some central questions raised in the studies that investigate the relations between medical pluralism and the state.

A government’s support for nonbiomedical treatments can be a strategic move to conform to international directives, especially after the 1970–1980s, when the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted the integration of traditional therapies as ‘a means of accessing gaps in service provision’ (Hampshire & Owusu 2013: 247-8). ‘Filling the gap’ is a common trope in official rhetoric in countries with large rural populations where biomedical services and institutions are limited. Here a standardised, regulated alternative medicine is presented as a necessary means to achieve a common good. However, more critically, the recognition of alternative medicine can also be seen as the government’s failure to provide accessible and affordable biomedical care, pushing people to rely on services of ‘a large, unregulated, unqualified medical cadre of practitioners’, as argued by some scholars in the case of India (Sheehan 2009: 138). Similarly, in post-Soviet Cuba, the government partially incorporated traditional herbal medicine into the healthcare system as a strategy to disguise massive shortages in biomedical pharmaceuticals after the decline in supply from countries of the socialist block (Brotherton 2012: 46).

In multicultural contexts, the legitimation of alternative medicine can be also taken as the government’s responsibility to satisfy popular demand. Often associated with migrant populations, plural and ‘culturally sensitive medicine’ is at times demanded as citizens’ rights. Some scholars have pointed out the importance of providing non-discriminatory medical services to migrants, especially to those who may not share a biomedical model of health and disease (Chavez 2003). Others go as far as to argue that integrating nonbiomedical healing should be a goal for modern democratic governments as that would recognize the rights and identities of minority groups. For example, the official healthcare system in Israel includes many alternative medical modalities, but not Arab herbal medicine, indicating that the cultural preferences of the Arab minority may remain undermined (Keshet & Popper-Giveon 2013).

An important insight from the literature on the state shows that governments are selective about the degree of legitimacy and support they provide to medical traditions. Thus, medical pluralism can become a mechanism for and the end product of carefully planned and instituted government efforts for managing population and economy. For example, by analysing the New Order government of Indonesia under President Suharto, Steve Ferzacca (2002) proposes to understand medical pluralism as a form of state rule. Ferzacca demonstrates how the Indonesian government manipulated the plurality of medical practices by recognising and promoting only those that fit into the overarching ideology of ‘development’.

Another example of selective legitimation of nonbiomedical knowledge and practice is demonstrated by Helen Lambert (2012). She highlights how medical pluralism is characterised by the ‘hierarchies of legitimacy’ when the government grants support to Ayurveda, Yoga and other text-based medical systems, while the practitioners of local traditions, like bonesetters in India, remain at the ‘margins of government legitimation’, even though they are seen as experts in their local communities.

This is important, because to nonbiomedical doctors, official recognition brings visibility, further societal acceptance, and legal employment (Blaikie 2016). Once a medical tradition is granted official status, its practitioners can demand higher salaries, better facilities, funding, and more opportunities. In contrast, healers who are left outside government legitimation face the danger of losing community respect, losing clientele, and gradually disappearing (Hampshire & Owusu 2013; Kleinman 1980). At the same time, Linda Connor (2004) argues that state legitimation does not necessarily affect people’s medical preferences: in an ethnographic study of residents of Australian suburbs, she demonstrates that people often choose nonbiomedical treatments outside the official healthcare settings for their perceived effectiveness and imagined ‘natural’ qualities in contrast to pharmaceutical drugs.

A related outcome of the professionalisation of traditional medicine is the marginalisation of women’s knowledge. In Ghana, Kate Hampshire and Samuel Owusu (2013) have observed that the government’s efforts to ‘professionalise’ traditional healing have led to the dominance of male practitioners who had means and connections to become ‘professional’ doctors. In contrast, women lacked those means, which created a context for a potential loss of their traditional knowledge, particularly concerning children’s illness.

However, even officially sanctioned and integrated medical traditions face many challenges, including the problem of ‘translation’, when the state, biomedical healthcare, or the market appropriate local medical knowledge by ignoring, undermining, or transforming its value system (Bode 2008; Cho 2000; Craig 2012; Janes 1995; Saks 2008). For example, due to ideological pressures from the Chinese government, certain procedures of Tibetan medicine have been pushed to the periphery of practice as being ‘religious’ and ‘unscientific’ (Adams, Schrempf & Craig 2010). In a similar way, in India, bhūtavidyā — one of the eight branches of Ayurveda, which deals with non-human entities — has been discounted by many contemporary Ayurvedic patients and doctors (Naraindas 2014: 112-3; Hardiman 2009).

Even if institutionalisation does not result in a distortion of meaning and repertoire of traditional medicine, it nevertheless transforms flexible healing practices into coherent units of standardised therapies, imposing therapeutic normativity and orthopraxy. This means that only select medical texts, ideas, and procedures along with their ‘correct’ interpretations get to be included in medical education and training; doctors must follow these normative ways of doing medicine if they wish to remain in institutional settings. For example, the institutionalisation of traditional Chinese medicine in the 1950s was accompanied by measures to ‘define, delimit, name, and “purify”’ select practices to comply with the communist ideology (Farquhar 1994: 14-5). Also, the professionalisation of traditional medicine affects how medical knowledge is transmitted and learned. While traditional medical knowledge is often passed through apprenticeship from a teacher to one or several students, state involvement often brings the introduction of a college system, which may break a vertical structure of teacher-student and elder-younger relations (Farquhar 1994: 15; Smith & Wujastyk 2008: 7).

As various political and social actors have high stakes in promoting a particular medical ideology, medical anthropologists have been careful to show the existence of heterogeneous powers within governments as well as rival groups of citizens, their competing claims about medical traditions, and various ideological positions embedded in those claims (Khan 2006). For example, because of the co-constituted relations between Western imperialism and biomedicine, the ‘revival’ of ‘indigenous’ medical systems is often embedded in anti-colonialist and nationalist discourses (Langford 2002). In other words, postcolonial states articulate their aim to recuperate local medicine as a sign of liberation from structures of colonial rule. This goal becomes particularly complex in the countries with more than one nonbiomedical system, through which nationalist ideologies can be activated (Alter 2015; Khalikova 2018).

Modernity, science, and efficacy

Discourses on nationalism and national medicine are often interlaced with debates about modernity (Croizier 1968; Khan 2006). An important insight from this literature is the problematisation of the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. While twentieth century anthropologists tended not to look at nonbiomedical practice as already modern, by the end of the century, scholars began exploring ways in which the modern and the traditional were co-constructed and fluid.

Based on her research on three medical traditions in Bolivia—cosmopolitan medicine, indigenous Aymara medicine, and home remedies—Libbet Crandon-Malamud (1991) introduced the notion of 'medical ideologies' to show that when people say something about their illness, they are also saying something about themselves and making statements about political and economic realities (1986: 463; 1991: ix, 31). Consequently, people’s beliefs and debates about therapeutic authenticity, efficacy, and legitimacy of a medical tradition can explain a lot about a society in a local and global context.

In many parts of the world—but especially in postcolonial countries struggling with the cultural and political legacies of colonialism—doctors and patients attempt to reconfigure traditional medicine through the notions of modernity, science, and technological progress. Medical practitioners often employ ideologies of both modernity and tradition, in response to demands and expectations from patients, government policies, and other actors. The same holds true for the notion of science. For example, Vincanne Adams has documented how practitioners of Tibetan medicine in China have to use the language of science in order to conform to the science-oriented ideologies of the communist state, while maintaining that Tibetan medicine is efficacious and scientific in its ‘own’ way (i.e., not measurable by biomedical standards). Thereby, they satisfy the aspirations of the local population for culturally appropriate therapy and demands of the international market for a ‘unique’ Tibetan medicine (2002b: 213).

But why do patients seek alternative medicine? Does it work? The problem of efficacy has been important in the study of medical pluralism since its conception (Leslie 1980), but anthropologists still lack a consensus about what ‘efficacy’ means and how it should be analysed (Waldram 2000). If we take efficacy to be a statistically measurable capacity of a drug to produce a desired relief, then in general scholars of medical pluralism tend to avoid making claims about whether or not alternative treatments are efficacious (Ecks 2013: 12; Langford 2002: 200). Instead, scholars have been more interested in understanding the ‘perceived’ efficacy by bringing attention to the feelings, subjective experiences, and views of patients and doctors as they rationalise their use of alternative medicine (Poltorak 2013).

Patients often ‘shop around’, alternating between therapeutic options, until they find what works for them. Here, the concern may be not about whether alternative medicine brings measurable therapeutic relief or not, but what kind of effects it produces. For example, in India many people insist that nonbiomedical treatments such as Ayurveda and homeopathy work but do so gradually and therefore are mild on the body, while biomedicine provides immediate relief but has numerous side-effects (Langford 2002). In other words, both alternative medicine and biomedicine can be seen as efficacious, but in different ways. In North America, patients who are dissatisfied with biomedicine turn to alternative medicine because it is seen as instilling a sense of ‘safety, comfort and well-being’ by appealing to nature, wholeness, and harmony, providing treatments in pleasant surroundings, whereas biomedicine is criticised ‘for its failure to engage the personal and cultural dimensions of suffering’, and for involving ‘painful, disorienting, and disturbing treatments aimed not at comfort but biological efficacy’ (Kirmayer 2014, 38-9). Such juxtaposition of alternative medicine as warm and personal, while biomedicine may be cold and institutional, frames many cultural discourses about how and why different treatments work.

Probing the questions of efficacy of alternative medicine even further, Sienna Craig argues that the very question ‘Does a medicine work?’ is a fabrication of a hegemonic, clinical perspective; instead, one needs to ask, ‘What makes a medicine “work”? How are such assertions made, by whom, and to what ends?’ (2012: 4). Craig argues that the question of efficacy serves as a mechanism for ‘translating’ nonbiomedical knowledge into the language of biomedicine and science, which is itself an outcome of global governance of medicine (such as by the WHO) and neoliberalism. In other words, scholars highlight that the efficacy of biomedicine is embedded in its social and economic power. This means that efficacy is not a neutral objective category, but something that needs to be interrogated with regard to what counts as evidence and who gets to define it.

As reminded by Margaret Lock and Mark Nichter, social claims of efficacy can have actual impact on patient’s health, since the ‘attributions of efficacy, however determined, and be they positive or negative, influence treatment expectations and thus effectiveness in their own right’ (2002: 21). Therefore, anthropological studies often explore various truth claims, the semantics and language of efficacy: how efficacy is spoken about in local terms, how it is invoked by patients and doctors themselves, and how various ideas about efficacy can influence the health outcomes. This includes negative health outcomes too, when claims of the efficacy of alternative treatments can create an atmosphere of distrust towards established biomedical treatments (such as vaccines). Hence, it is important to recognise that the existence of plural medical options can cause confusion and be detrimental to people’s health: while shopping around for a therapy that appears right to them, patients may delay using medicines with proven effects.

Gender

For most of the twentieth century, the studies of medical pluralism contained only scattered references to women—for example, as primary users of alternative medicine or as traditional healers. Today, there is a growing body of literature that critically addresses gender and gender ideologies in the context of medical pluralism (Cameron 2010; Fjeld & Hofer 2011; Flesch 2010; Menjívar 2002; Schrempf 2011; Selby 2005; Zhang 2007). A related area of scholarship is focused on reproduction, traditional birth attendants, and the issues of gender equity in pluralistic medical settings, particularly within the institutions of intercultural medicine in Latin America.

Many medical traditions such as Tibetan medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Unani, and biomedicine used to be the spheres where female doctors, teachers, and authors of medical texts were absent or rare (but see Fjeld & Hofer 2011). In the twenty-first century the situation has started to change, and more women have become practitioners of these previously male-dominated medical traditions. Yet this can also create new inequalities. For example, by examining an increase in female practitioners of Ayurveda in Nepal, Mary Cameron (2010) argues that the ‘feminization of Ayurveda’ has been entangled with the official marginalisation of Ayurveda in the context of biomedicine-dominated healthcare system. In other words, a positive change, such as the increased acceptance of women as alternative practitioners, is negated by the loss of prestige of Ayurveda in Nepal (although this is not the case in India). Another problem is that the increase of female practitioners in alternative medicine can reinforce the stereotypes of women’s ‘innate’ ability to heal and their proximity to nature, as documented in Hannah Flesch’s work (2010) on female students studying Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in the US. Thus, these studies illuminate that the discourses on alternative/traditional medicine are often gendered.

Other scholars have shown how nonbiomedical health-related practices can be linked to ideas of masculinity and socio-political ideologies. By examining traditional male wrestlers in India, Joseph Alter (1992) has discovered that their practices of celibacy, self-control, and dietary regimens are linked to their unique interpretations of modernity, masculinity, and nationhood. While many Indian citizens conceive of biomedicine as a link to modernity and good health, traditional wrestlers engage with nonbiomedical practices to strengthen a national physique and achieve culturally appropriate masculinity by countering the harmful impact of Western consumerism and sexual liberation.

Globalisation

The studies of medical pluralism and globalisation emerged in the early 2000s in an attempt to make sense of medical practices in the face of transnational migration, medical tourism, the global flow of alternative pharmaceuticals, the spread of the Internet, and other processes that have problematised national and cultural boundaries, creating avenues for the global exchange of local and ‘new age’ medical knowledge (Lock & Nichter 2002; Krause 2008; Wujastyk & Smith 2008; Hampshire & Owusu 2012). Certainly, transcultural connections were forged intensively during the colonial era and even earlier; however, the close interconnectedness of the world is a relatively recent phenomenon, which both allows and compels people to render their therapeutic itineraries ever more diverse and geographically dispersed. This complexity has compelled scholars to rethink the concept of medical pluralism as no longer confined to a single society but as spanning national borders (Raffaetà et al. 2017). Rather than being limited by medical options within a certain locality, contemporary health-seekers can avail of pluralistic medical approaches, experts, and institutions by crossing borders physically and virtually.

On the one hand, nonbiomedical practices are taken outside their place of origin, as exemplified by the popularity of German anthroposophic medicine in Brazil, the proliferation of Yoga centres outside India, or the spread of acupuncture outside East Asia (Alter 2005; Kim 2009; Wujastyk & Smith 2008). Unlike many twentieth century studies of the influences between the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ (as per World Systems Theory), contemporary scholars explore South-South and other global connections: for example, the incorporation of traditional Chinese medicine into pluralistic medicine in Tanzania (Hsu 2002; Langwick 2010). Additionally, there is an emerging literature on the impact of new communication technologies on plural medicine (Hampshire & Owusu 2012; Krause 2008). Such research addresses ‘telemedicine’, self-help Internet blogs, email consultations with overseas nonbiomedical doctors, and other technologies (for example, digital apps on meditation and Yoga) that have significantly shaped the ways in which medical pluralism is conceived and practiced.

At the same time, patients themselves travel around the world in the search of nonbiomedical treatments. Here, some scholars distinguish medical tourism, associated with biomedical treatment, from health tourism or wellness tourism associated with traditional and alternative medicine (Reddy & Qadeer 2010: 69; also Smith & Wujastyk 2008: 2-3). For example, health-seeking tourists may travel to India in pursuit of ‘authentic’ Ayurvedic therapy, Yoga, or spiritual healing (Langford 2002; Spitzer 2009).

Therapeutic trajectories of migrants in host countries is also a particularly fast-growing area of research, especially because migrants carry different medical ideologies and attitudes that might raise concerns in the sphere of public health, health policy, and public discourses (Andrews et al. 2013; Cant & Sharma 1999; Chavez 2003; Green et al. 2006; Krause 2008). Some of these studies examine how minority groups seek satisfactory treatment in biomedicine-dominated contexts. For example, Tracy Andrews and others (2013) examine how adult Hispanic migrants in the US make therapeutic decisions for their children in a pluralistic healthcare setting that includes both biomedical providers and famous Mexican healers in the vicinity. Many studies emphasise that migrants resort to alternative practitioners, particularly from their community, because of language difficulties, cultural preferences, a search for a specific herbal or spiritual treatment, or fear of being looked down on by biomedical practitioners (Green et al. 2006, Andrew et al. 2013; Lock 1980: 260; Chavez 2003: 201, 219). These challenges can motivate migrants to postpone immediate care and instead make trips to their countries of origin to receive medical treatment. Therefore, medical anthropologists often point out the importance of providing non-discriminatory medical services to migrants, especially to those who may not share a biomedical model of health and disease, and advocate for health policies of ‘integrative’ and ‘culturally-sensitive’ healthcare (Green et al. 2006; Chavez 2003).

In addition to the focus on patients, scholars of globalised healthcare also investigate the transnational mobilities of medical practitioners and material objects. ‘Traditional’ medicines, healing crystals, talismans, and other paraphernalia, which are not exchanged through formal channels of commerce, often follow along the lines of an informal economy of transnational connections (Hampshire & Owusu 2012; Krause 2008; Menjívar 2002). Kristine Krause (2008) provides an example of ‘transnational therapy networks’ that connect Ghanaian migrants in London, their relatives and friends in other European counties, and traditional healers in Ghana who may ‘directly deliver their products’ to owners of Afro-shops in the UK. In these transnational channels, money, drugs, and prayers are sent between members of the African diaspora in Europe and their friends and suppliers in the countries of origin.

Inspired by the work of Arjun Appadurai (1988) and other scholars of materiality, medical anthropologists have expanded their inquiries of medicine as knowledge and practice to the examination of physicality and the ‘agentive properties’ of medical objects: pills, intake forms, ultrasound prints, medical charts, stethoscopes, syringes, and other equipment are not passive objects but active agents in clinical interactions, as they can influence people’s behaviour, compel action, communicate, instil fear or trust, and even heal. For example, contemporary alternative doctors frequently adopt material objects from other medical traditions, especially from biomedicine: in India, some patients who visit an Ayurvedic doctor demand to be examined by a stethoscope, believing that a touch of a stethoscope has a curative outcome (Nichter 1980). Thus, a stethoscope is not a silent object in a doctor’s room but an agent that speaks, calls for action, and brings confidence.

Such studies of materiality provide the crucial insight that medical pluralism is often unmarked: sometimes neither doctors nor patients see their encounters as pluralistic. As shown in Stacey Langwick’s work in Tanzania, a ‘traditional’ healer may routinely use a syringe and ask to bring an X-ray from biomedical hospitals. The presence of ‘modern’ medical technologies can ‘challenge the self-evidence of boundaries between traditional and modern medicine’ (2008: 429).

Unlike the above research on unauthorised, informal transnational flows of medicines, there is a new scholarship on the commercial flow of ‘alternative’ pharmaceuticals and the operations of alternative industries beyond national borders. Building on previous studies of marketisation of alternative medicine in domestic contexts (Adams 2002a; Banerjee 2009; Bode 2008; Craig 2011, 2012; Kim 2009), this scholarship highlights the transformations under the pressures of a global neoliberal economy, when many nonbiomedical practices can no longer be dismissed as local, marginal, or alternative traditions. It makes the case for recognising them as transnational, mainstream, innovative, and profit-driven industries (Kloos 2017; Kloos et al. 2020; Pordié & Gaudillière 2014; Pordié & Hardon 2015).

Conclusion

Developed in the 1970s–1980s, the concept of medical pluralism offered novel ways of understanding diverse medical practices and their relations with biomedicine. It went beyond the early twentieth century descriptions of indigenous healing beliefs and was a crucial concept for establishing the field of medical anthropology. By attempting to overcome the dualistic representation of Western/modern and non-Western/traditional medicine, scholars of medical pluralism demonstrated that the diversity of medical ideas, approaches, experts, and institutions exists in every complex society, even in the West. Rather than merely focusing on health and healing, medical pluralism highlights the heterogeneity, multiplicity, and competition that permeate medical thought and practice. Although many scholars have challenged the notion of ‘pluralism’ and suggested replacing it with other terms such as eclecticism or diversity, medical pluralism remains a valuable framework.

Many anthropologists have come to criticise the ideas of medical ‘systems’ and medical ‘traditions’ as being overly rigid, even essentialising. Instead, they moved towards the exploration of doctor-patient negotiations, paying attention to whether different actors see therapies as pluralistic, what therapeutic plurality means, who benefits from their promotion, and what kind of inequalities exist between various categories of medicine. Most prominent examples of such inequalities include the hegemonic position of biomedicine supported by science discourses due to which nonbiomedical knowledge and practices are dubbed ‘alternative’ and ‘complementary’, if not entirely fake.

However, the studies of medical pluralism also show that, paradoxically, traditional and alternative medical practices did not disappear under the dominance of biomedicine. Although sometimes lacking official support, they are widely sought out around the world not only by rural populations but also by consumers with wealth and power. The analyses of pluralism as resulting from medical tourism, the spread of the Internet, and the pharmaceuticalisation of indigenous therapies have become important areas of study. This scholarship acknowledges that multiple actors such as medical providers, tourists and migrants, corporations, national leaders, and other categories of citizens—all have their own stake in various medical traditions. Therefore, instead of a narrow focus on colonial and postcolonial situations, researchers explore ‘new’ (Cant & Sharma 1999) and ‘transnational’ (Raffaetà et al. 2017) forms of medical pluralism. The pressing need to account for local and global media, migration, and the rapid growth of medical and other technologies have also forced scholars to change their methods. They moved from studying health practices in a single community to ‘following’ people, objects, and ideas across borders (as per Marcus 1995), showing that people’s therapeutic options have become truly transnational and even more pluralistic. The intensified pluralism is also visible if we account for the ‘virtual’ field in which both biomedicine and nonbiomedical healing is increasingly offered. As a result, scholars have also moved from the descriptions of nonbiomedical practices as small, local, low-cost, marginal alternative traditions to recognising them as large, profit-driven, and mainstream ‘industries’ that occupy substantial market segments domestically, while also rapidly expanding globally. All of this demonstrates that medical pluralism does not just remain an important feature of modern life, but that it is constantly changing in form and content.

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Waldram, J.B. 2000. The efficacy of traditional medicine: current theoretical and methodological issues. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(4), 603-25.

Waxler-Morrison, N. 1988. Plural medicine in Sri Lanka: do Ayurvedic and Western medical practices differ? Social Science and Medicine 27, 531-44.

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Note on contributor

Venera R. Khalikova is a cultural anthropologist and Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her previous work on medical pluralism and the politics of Ayurveda in North India have appeared in Medical Anthropology, Asian Medicine, and Food, Culture, and Society. Her current interests include the study of migration, race, and gender among Indians in Hong Kong.

Dr Venera R. Khalikova, Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, NAH 322, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong. venera.khalikova@cuhk.edu.hk

[1] For additional reviews of this concept in anthropology as well as sociology and history, readers can consult texts by Hans Baer (2011); Sarah Cant & Ursula Sharma (1999), Waltraud Ernst (2002), and Roberta Raffaetà et al. (2017).

Latin America

Felix Stein — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 10:40:45 +0000

John Gledhill

The University of Manchester

Initially published 4 Jan 2021

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

Abstract:

‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’ America. Bringing together people without previous historical contact, the diversity of its societies and cultures was increased by the transatlantic slave trade and later global immigration. Building on the constructive relationship that characterises the ties between socio-cultural anthropology and history in the region today, this entry discusses differences in colonial relations and cultural interaction between European, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American people in different countries and the role of anthropologists in nation-building projects that aimed to construct national identities around ‘mixing’. It shows how anthropologists came to emphasise the active role of subordinated social groups in making Latin America’s ‘new peoples’. Widespread agrarian conflicts and land reforms produced debates about the future of peasant farmers, but new forms of capitalist development, growing urbanisation, and counter-insurgency wars led to an era in which indigenous identities were reasserted and states shifted towards a multicultural politics that also fostered Afro-Latin American movements. Anthropology has enhanced understanding of the diversity, complexity, and contradictions of these processes. Latin American cities are characterised by stark social inequalities, but anthropologists critiqued the stigmatisation of the urban poor as ‘marginals’ and used their ethnographies to produce novel insights into the nature and determinants of urban violence and the role of criminal organisations. Other areas in which Latin American anthropology has been innovative are analyses of transnational relations and new social movements, including women’s movements and feminism, although issues of gender, religious transformations, and cultural mixing run through this entry’s entire discussion, which concludes with Latin American debates about the decolonisation of anthropology itself.

Introduction: Building nations in the shadow of empire

Latin America is a vast and socially and ecologically heterogeneous region. Brazil, colonised by the Portuguese, is more extensive than the whole of Europe (excluding Russia). Most other countries in the region were colonised by Spain, but the French colonies of South America and the Caribbean are generally also included when identifying the region. Emerging in the wake of the nineteenth century division of the Americas into independent nation states, ‘Latin’ America was defined in opposition to an ‘Anglo’ America established through British colonisation. The division was not simply a matter of whether English or a Romance language became the principal language of government, but rather was a consequence of competing imperial ambitions. In the 1860s, the United States of America supported the Mexican republican forces that ended the reign of Maximilian Habsburg, installed as ‘Emperor of Mexico’ by a French military invasion backed by Britain and Spain. Yet Mexico had already lost almost half of the national territory that it inherited from the colonial Viceroyalty of New Spain to its northern neighbour, whose opposition to European imperialism reflected ambitions to make the Americas an exclusively US sphere of influence.

For some elites in the Latin American republics, the United States represented a model to emulate, yet those who looked there or to Europe for models of ‘progress’ often saw the nature of the peoples that they governed as a barrier to achieving it. Most ‘Latin’ Americans were the product of biological and cultural mixing of Europeans with the original indigenous population and African slaves. Whether their concern was with the continuing existence of culturally distinct indigenous communities considered ‘backward’ or rebellious, or prompted by ‘scientific racist’ theories that the mixing of ‘races’ deemed unequal in their capacities produced ‘degeneration’, many who saw themselves as descendants of Europeans born in the Americas (criollos) aspired to ‘whiten’ their nations through new immigration from Europe.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, new nationalist visions were taking a more positive view of the ‘mixed’ character of Latin American peoples. Cuban revolutionary nationalist José Martí met the issue of growing US domination head on. Insisting that, in contrast to the segregated United States, there could be no racism in Latin America’s future ‘because there are no races’, Martí argued that Latin Americans should develop institutions adapted to the ‘nature’ of their own peoples rather than imitate a threatening northern neighbour ‘who does not know us’ (Martí 1891). Yet more positive views of the capabilities of the ‘mixed’ peoples did not necessarily entail rejecting the United States and Europe as models for ‘progress’. Peruvian socialist José Carlos Mariategui argued that revolutionary politics in his country could not be based on Western models because the role of indigenous Peruvians would be crucial. Yet he also wrote in 1928 that ‘the only salvation for Indo-America lies in European and Western science and thought’ (Mariategui 1971). Positive evaluation of the capabilities of people of mixed European and indigenous ancestry did not eliminate the idea that Latin American countries needed to address an ‘Indian problem’. Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (1948) turned scientific racism on its head by portraying the country’s mestizos as a ‘cosmic race’, a ‘fifth’ race that brought all previously existing races together in a fusion that provided the region with the ability to develop a ‘universal’ civilisation free of racial oppression. Yet when Manuel Gamio, who was both an archaeologist and socio-cultural anthropologist, asked Vasconcelos, as a government minister, for resources for his research on living indigenous people as well as the archaeological heritage of pre-Hispanic Mexico, Vasconcelos refused, saying that it would be better to imitate the gringo solution to the ‘Indian problem’: ‘the rifle’ (Vértiz de la Fuente 2019: 62).

‘Whitening’ policies were sometimes pursued with genocidal force, exemplified by the Argentinian military conquest of the territories still controlled by indigenous people in the Patagonian Desert to make way for white settlers at the end of the 1870s. The promotion of new immigration from Europe brought migrants from Germany and Eastern Europe as well as ‘Latin’ Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Yet new immigration was not restricted to ‘white’ Europeans. The region’s population includes significant numbers of people with Middle Eastern and East Asian ancestry. Connections across the Pacific as well as Atlantic oceans remain relevant to Latin America’s geopolitical and economic options for the future. Yet Sidney Mintz (1974) distinguished the plantation societies of the Caribbean islands from mainland Latin America because their indigenous populations were replaced by culturally, ethnically, and racially heterogeneous workers drawn from Africa, Asia, and Europe, producing ‘new peoples’ made up of ‘strangers’ bound together only by European domination. White elites used other ethnics or mixed-race people as middle-ranking ‘buffer classes’ to strengthen their control over black labouring classes (Allen 2014).

The study of Anglo and Latin America cannot be entirely separated (Shukla & Tinsman 2007; Fine-Dare & Rubenstein 2009). The transatlantic relations created by European expansion and reproduced through slavery and commerce shaped both. New migration from the south has contributed to making people who self-identify as ‘Hispanics’ or ‘Latinos’ the largest ethnic minority identified by the US census, at over eighteen percent of the population. Exploring similarities and differences in systems of ethno-racial stratification in the US and Latin America is long established. Points of similarity today include the militarised policing of poor people of colour (Graham 2011), ethno-racial social inequalities increased by deindustrialisation and neoliberal models of urban development (Smith 2002), and what Paul Farmer (2004) termed the ‘structural violence’ underlying the health inequalities so starkly underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic. Narco-violence in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia is clearly related to the demand for drugs within the United States. Endemic political corruption, authoritarianism, and violence sometimes foster a view of Latin America as a region of ‘deficits’ relative to the liberal capitalist societies of the North Atlantic. Yet although this does not absolve Latin American elites of their own share of responsibility, authoritarianism, civil conflict, paramilitary violence, and gang violence in Central America, are directly related to US meddling in the region, which replaced democracy with military dictatorship and counter-insurgency war during the Cold War and continues to undermine left-leaning governments today.

From its beginnings as an academic discipline in the twentieth century, Latin American anthropology has addressed social and political problems. Many anthropologists who were Latin American citizens played important institutional, public intellectual, and political roles in nation-building projects. Later generations have engaged with the demands of social movements as well as state policies. Studying issues that directly affect one’s own life and those of one’s fellow citizens does produce differences of perspective between ‘native’ and foreign anthropologists. Nevertheless, differences of class, gender, and ethnicity complicate anthropological work irrespective of nationality. George Stocking’s (1982) distinction between ‘Euro-American’ and ‘native’ anthropologies as a distinction between anthropologies dedicated to the construction of empires versus anthropologies dedicated to the construction of nations may have been too simple (Archetti 2006). Yet, the tensions between anthropology with a global comparative orientation and nation-centric institutional missions prompted anthropologists such as Myriam Jimeno (2007) in Colombia and Otávio Velho (2003) in Brazil to argue that rethinking of theory and practice by ‘native’ scholars was in fact necessary.

Although Latin American anthropology has addressed social injustice, oppression, violence, and conflict, it is also about intense cultural creativity, in religion and ritual, popular culture, art, music and dance, highlighting social and cultural practices that enable people to maintain resilience in difficult circumstances.

Indigenousness, mestizaje and state-building: historical perspectives

Although the mixing of diverse cultures and the creation of new cultural forms makes studying Latin America attractive, the region was born of genocide. Wherever they came from, the bodies of the European invaders carried germs to which indigenous people had no acquired resistance. Although violence and exploitation also played a role, the indigenous population was decimated by infectious diseases, causing a global fall in temperatures as abandoned agricultural fields reverted to secondary vegetation that absorbed more carbon (Koch et al. 2019). Although Africans shared the immunities of Europeans, contributing to the infection of native Americans, inhuman conditions on the slave ships meant that at least fifteen percent of the more than ten million slaves transported from Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries died before even reaching the Americas, and the trade had devastating effects on the societies from which they were taken (Manning 1990). Yet by the final decades of the twentieth century, social movements founded on the assertion of indigenous and Afro identities were increasingly active in Latin American politics, despite assumptions that these differences would cease to be significant in societies in which states fostered national identities based on ‘mixing’.

Anthropologists often distinguish Latin America’s ‘highland’ zones, dominated by urbanised pre-colonial imperial states such as the Andean Incas and Mesoamerican Aztecs, from ‘lowland’ zones in which indigenous societies were ‘egalitarian’. However, archaeology shows that European colonisation destroyed lowland societies that were different from those that anthropologists studied ethnographically. The lost lowland societies were integrated into stable and extensive regional networks of exchange and ceremonies, in some cases presenting evidence for social and political hierarchy that challenge the notion that social ‘complexity’ was impossible in lowland environmental conditions (Roosevelt 1999). The comparatively small number of Portuguese invaders of Brazil’s coastal regions were able to exploit the indigenous Tupi-Guarani custom of incorporating male strangers into their communities by making them ‘brothers-in-law’ by giving them an indigenous girl to marry. This was the starting point for anthropologist, novelist, educator, and politician Darcy Ribeiro’s (1995) account of the ‘formation and meaning of Brazil’ as a mestiço nation. Ribeiro documented the role of the mixed-race children of Portuguese fathers, and indigenous groups that allied with the Portuguese against others allied to French or Dutch invaders, in the expansion of slave-raiding into the interior. This, along with Jesuit missions, progressively transformed those indigenous people that conserved distinctive ways of life into what is today a small minority (0.4%) of the national population (compared with 21.5% in Mexico, the country with the largest absolute number of indigenous citizens). Ribeiro adopted an evolutionist perspective on the development of ‘civilisation’ which meant that he did not see indigenous people as significant in the future of mestiço Brazil, a country of ‘new peoples’ produced by cultural mixing. According to Ribeiro, Brazil stood in contrast to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico and Guatemala, formed from the remnants of pre-Hispanic civilisations, and Argentina and Uruguay, where new European immigrants had greatest demographic weight (Ribeiro et al. 1970).

Yet his classification can be misleading. Indigenous people living beyond the southern frontiers of the Spanish Empire interacted culturally and economically, through trade and raiding for cattle, with the areas settled by the Spanish, who created diplomatic institutions to negotiate with the representatives of what became more politically hierarchic societies that also built new relations with each other across the Andean mountain chain (Boccara 2002). Argentina’s genocidal ‘War of the Desert’ in the 1870s was not simply about making new territories safe for white settlers, but also about ensuring that the people of the Patagonian Desert became Argentinian and not Chilean (He 2018). This reinforced racist discrimination that discouraged people from identifying themselves as indigenous. The founders of Argentina’s professional anthropology included immigrants associated with ‘racial science’ in fascist Europe, for whom indigenous people were of archaeological interest as a superseded ‘race’ but not worthy subjects of ethnographic enquiry, a perspective that regained traction whenever the country suffered a military coup (Ratier 2010). Yet the local Mapuches as a ‘new people’ created through a colonial process of ethnogenesis did not go away but regained social visibility. Along with relatives of the Quechua-speaking indigenous peoples of Peru and Bolivia in the north, they participated in ethnic social movements, struggled for indigenous rights, sought to regain lost lands, protected themselves from environmental devastation caused by fracking, or simply accommodated themselves to state-sponsored development programmes (De la Maza Cabrera & Bolomey Córdova 2019). In Argentina, as in Brazil and Mexico despite their different classifications in Ribeiro’s typology, ‘invisibilised’ indigenous people who had lost their lands but maintained many of their cultural practices after they became farm labourers or herdsmen on lands owned by others joined struggles for rights and recognition in new movements that became urban as well as rural (Gordillo & Hirsch 2003).

In the Andes and Mesoamerica, the number of indigenous people who survived the ‘Great Dying’ enabled the rulers of the Spanish empire to reject indigenous slavery in favour of a system in which the supply of tribute by indigenous communities, in commodities or forced labour, became the foundation of the colonial economy. The Spanish repurposed the Inca labour draft system, the mit’a, to supply labour to the silver mines in Potosí, Bolivia. Indigenous patterns of settlement and socio-political organisation were transformed radically, but provided that they met their obligations to the state and the Catholic Church, colonial indigenous communities were granted a degree of self-government in a ‘Republic of Indians’, with communal control over their own lands, forests, and water. Although usurpation of these resources by non-indigenous outsiders became an increasingly serious problem, their defence formed part of the ‘Closed Corporate Community’ model developed by Eric Wolf (1957), which argued that restriction of membership and property rights to those born within the community was a strategy to protect its collective patrimony, accompanied by obligations to expend resources in community rituals to limit consolidation of wealth differences between its members. Wolf insisted that the indigenous communities that ethnographers studied in Mesoamerica were the product of four hundred years of colonial history. Although he accepted criticisms that his original model paid insufficient attention to cases in which enduring inequalities did emerge between families (Wolf 1986), his insistence that indigenous people were active actors in history and did not live in unchanging ‘traditional’ social worlds was paradigm changing.

Tributary exactions and exploitation based on forcing indigenous communities to buy goods often prompted protests and rebellions. These intensified from 1760 onwards because Spain’s Bourbon rulers, who sought to increase the wealth extracted from the colonies, ignored complaints about extortion by colonial officials and priests, and undermined the power of indigenous authorities. An uprising that had lasting consequences despite its ultimate defeat was the ‘Neo-Incan’ rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in Peru. Born José Gabriel Condorcanqui, he was both an indigenous authority (kuraka) descended from the last Inca ruler, and a merchant and muleteer who crossed the borders between Spanish and Indian society. Adopting the name of his ancestor, he declared a multiclass, multiethnic rebellion against abusive authorities rather than the Spanish Crown (Walker 2014). Yet after Túpac Amaru II, his wife, Micaela Bastidas, and part of their family were executed, the brutal Spanish repression of the rebellion turned the violence of indigenous people towards anyone who spoke Spanish or wore European clothes, as had already been the norm in a separate rebellion of Aymara-speakers in the south between Lake Titicaca and La Paz, led by a peasant coca trader, Túpac Katari. Both Micaela Bastidas and Túpac Katari’s wife, Bartolina Sisa, played leadership roles in these rebellions, indicating continuities in Andean principles of (hierarchised) gender complementarity (Silverblatt 1987). In Peru, as elsewhere in colonial Latin America, the rebellions provoked conflicts even amongst indigenous people of the same ethnicity, but a weakening military situation led the colonial authorities to offer a peace agreement to Túpac Amaru’s surviving sons. When the colonial elite subsequently reneged on this agreement, exterminating the rest of the family, they not only brought the original colonial ‘pact’ with Peru’s Quechua-speaking peoples to a definitive end, but enhanced the mythical appeal of the neo-Incan rebellion for later movements, not simply in Peru but elsewhere in the region, including in Haiti. There, a slave revolution expelled the French to make Latin America’s first independent nation one that was ruled by people of colour, in 1804 (Walker 2014: 249).

The nineteenth century produced conflicts for control of Latin America’s new nations between conservatives who sought to maintain the social and political structures of colonial Spanish America, and liberal reformers who saw the indigenous communities as a barrier to the creation of a modern society based on equal rights for all citizens rather than ethno-racial ‘castes’. The liberals included Mexican president Benito Juárez, whose own indigenous Zapotec descent did not inhibit him from moving to abolish the corporate properties of indigenous communities as well as the Catholic Church. Some indigenous people accepted that they would be better off as ‘citizens’ than remaining in a caste hierarchy in which they were subject to discrimination. Yet it proved difficult to deliver ‘citizenship’ as equality before the law to people who remained structurally unequal in terms of access to justice and economic opportunities. Mexico’s liberal ‘reforms’ redistributed property in a way that converted many indigenous people into rural proletarians whose adoption of mestizo identities Guillermo Bonfil (2010) characterised as forced ‘deindianisation’.

Indigenous people lost control of communal resources throughout Latin America, although some retained enough land to subsist as migrant labourers working on agro-export plantations after being ‘hooked’ into debt-bondage. This laid the basis for heightened twentieth century agrarian conflict throughout the region. Mexico was a special case, since the national revolution that began in 1910 eventually produced Latin America’s first redistributive agrarian reform. That reform was less focused on restoring land that had been lost by indigenous communities than it was on making grants of land to build a solid rural base of political clients for the post-revolutionary regime. This logic was extended by allowing landless workers on large estates to petition the government for land redistribution in the 1930s, eventually dividing the countryside into a ‘social sector’ of state-sponsored land reform communities (ejidos) and a capitalist farming sector. The state wanted land reform beneficiaries to think of themselves as members of a mestizo ‘peasant’ (campesino) social class. Land reform was therefore intended to support a national state-building project based on ending indigenous identities for good. Anthropologists were enlisted into the process of ‘Mexicanizing the Indian’ by employing them in field stations set up in different parts of the country. The aim was to understand the details of different indigenous cultures in order to change local ways of life through education, and to encourage ‘Indians’ to think of themselves as mestizo citizens of the whole Mexican nation rather than the ‘little nation’ of their village.

This ‘official indigenism’ was replicated in other countries (De la Peña 2005). An interesting case to compare with Mexico is Bolivia. The National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) that overthrew a military dictatorship in 1952 with the support of the country’s mine workers’ union (Nash 2001) also sought to promote a mestizo national identity through land reform. However, they encountered resistance from a novel indigenous movement in the 1970s. The founders of this katarista movement, named after eighteenth-century rebel Túpac Katari, were Aymara university students whose families had benefitted from the MNR agrarian reform. Their politics were based on the premise that indigenous people suffered from a combination of class oppression in the Marxist sense and ethnic oppression that should not be ignored in government policy. They soon formed the largest peasant union in Bolivia, independent of the ‘official’ union which had been created by the Bolivian government as an instrument of control using the same model as Mexico’s National Peasant Confederation. Mexico’s ‘national revolutionary’ regime proved more enduring than Bolivia’s, which was repeatedly interrupted by military coups. Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) enjoyed unbroken national power until the year 2000. Yet by the 1970s, socially mobile indigenous intellectuals in Mexico were also arguing that ethnic inequalities could not be reduced simply to class issues. Thereby they contributed to the collapse of the ‘official’ indigenist project.

The foundational work of Mexican indigenism had been Manuel Gamio’s book Forjando Patria, published in 1916 while the revolutionary wars were still raging (Gamio 2010 [1916]). Gamio did not advocate immediate suppression of indigenous cultures and languages, even in the case of what he called ‘savage’ groups such as the Yaquis, whose communities straddled the US-Mexico border. He argued that priority should be given to addressing socio-economic inequalities, and that the longer-term objective of anthropological studies of indigenous people was to make their integration into nation states less painful, ensuring that it benefited them and not simply the ‘white race’ of their colonial conquerors. The regional projects of what became the National Indigenous Institute did bring indigenous people some material benefits (Nash 2002). Yet modernising revolutionary nationalism was often implemented in an authoritarian manner, exemplified by the punishment of indigenous children for not speaking Spanish in schools that the government provided for them. Official indigenism created a new group of Spanish-speaking community leaders tied to government who often used the leverage this gave them to turn themselves into local political bosses, called caciques (chieftains).

Because caciquismo was so pervasive and frequently violent, its study became one of Mexican anthropology’s contributions to understanding how national state power was implanted at regional and local levels in the twentieth century. It unveiled the limitations and contradictions of that process in a socially and culturally diverse country in which that state was far from being an all-powerful ‘Leviathan’ in terms of its ability to manage heterogeneous regional cultures (Bartra 1976; Friedrich 1986; Lomnitz-Adler 1992; Rubin 1997). While the direct institutional presence of central governments remained precarious, local and regional boss rule was significant in rural regions throughout Latin America. In the Andes, these figures were called gamonales (Cotler 2005). In Brazil’s First Republic (1889-1930), local affairs and patron-client relations were managed by agrarian oligarchs called ‘colonels’ (Roniger 2005). All acted as political ‘brokers’ intermediating relations with the national state, but Mexico is distinctive because rural caciquismo has persisted up until the present, enabling drug cartel bosses to take on this role. It also developed in urban shantytowns, trade unions, and universities (Maldonado 2005; Pansters 2005).

Agrarian conflict, neoliberalism and multiculturalism

Mestizo peasants became disillusioned with the ejido system as the Mexican state’s promise to deliver ‘material improvements’ as well as an end to discrimination to indigenous people lost credibility. Many peasants who had received irrigated lands rented them to agricultural entrepreneurs with the capital to grow more profitable crops and invested in migration to the United States to improve their own living standards. Even outside the areas where farming was transformed by incorporation into a global food system dominated by transnational agro-industrial corporations (Friedmann & McMichael 1989), agrarian conflicts developed over illegal logging and the extension of cattle-raising to supply meat to urban and export markets. The corruption of the public officials administering the land reform added to feelings of injustice and efforts to develop peasant organisations not controlled by the state. It was in this context that, in 1969, a group of Mexican anthropologists led by Arturo Warman published a series of polemical essays repudiating indigenism (Warman et al. 1970). By this stage, the political context had become explosive. Mexico’s eternal ruling party had created a civilian regime free of coups, but in 1968 the government massacred student protestors in Mexico City and unleashed an anti-communist counterinsurgency ‘dirty war’ in the state of Guerrero similar in its barbarity to those pursued by Central and South American military dictatorships (Bartra 1996). Although left-wing militants who left the cities to solidarise with peasant rebels in Guerrero were to find that their ‘communism’ owed more to Christian than Marxist principles, Marxism played a prominent role in academic anthropology as the 1970s advanced, much of it reworking earlier European debates around ‘the agrarian question’.

A key issue for Marxists was whether peasants would survive or face mass proletarianisation as the capitalist transformation of rural Mexico deepened (Hewitt de Alcantará 1984). Some protagonists in these debates, including Warman (1980), favoured the theory of peasant economy that Alexander Chayanov was killed for defending in Soviet Russia. Chayanov had argued that, although some peasant families were richer than others and might employ other peasants as wage labourers, the logic of the peasant economy was about securing an acceptable standard of living, not the accumulation of capital. According to Chayanov, this made it possible to develop a socialist society on the basis of peasant family farms and cooperatives. A deepening crisis in basic food production coupled with growing agrarian conflict promoted a new round of state intervention in the ejidos in the later 1970s, but after Mexico was hit by the debt crisis that made the 1980s a ‘lost decade’ economically for the whole of Latin America, the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari embraced neoliberal economic policies. These had been pioneered in Chile after the 1973 military coup and were generalised throughout the region in the 1990s, under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. In the case of Peru, the government of Alberto Fujimori carried out a ‘self-coup’ that closed the congress to allow neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ to be implemented. By ending land redistribution and opening the door to privatisation of ejido land, Mexico’s ‘reform of the land reform’ was widely considered to pose an existential threat to peasant agriculture. Yet ‘bottom-up’ social movement resistance remained an impediment to the neoliberal project (Pechlaner & Otero 2010).

1994 saw an armed uprising in the southern state of Chiapas that called for a global war against neoliberalism. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was the product of the coming together of segments of the indigenous peasantry with non-indigenous urban leftist revolutionaries whose outlooks were radically changed by the encounter (Leyva Solano & Ascencio Franco 1996). Although it contributed to broader reassertion of ‘indigenousness’ (Rus, Hernández Castillo & Mattiace 2003), its anti-capitalism and eagerness to build a national coalition of ethnically diverse dissident forces led Leandro Vergara-Camus (2014) to argue that the neo-Zapatista movement was closer to the non-indigenous Brazilian Movement of Landless Workers (MST) than a conventional indigenous rights movement. Nevertheless, as the EZLN turned to sustaining long-term civil resistance in Chiapas in the indigenous communities where it retained support, after failing to construct its broader coalition, indigenous practices did provide inspiration for the movement’s approach to establishing ‘autonomous’ forms of local and regional organisation. These rejected all relationships with the ‘bad government’ of the state, and based themselves on the principle of ‘governing by obeying’ through sovereign communal assemblies and rotation of representative offices.

Another aspect of the shift to neoliberalism was, however, the adoption of multicultural state policies. The Mexican government under President Salinas changed the Constitution to define Mexico as a nation with a ‘pluri-cultural’ composition ‘originally based on its indigenous peoples’, adding indigenous rights to universal social rights. Neoliberal multiculturalism offers indigenous people the right to keep their own language and culture, coupled with a modicum of sensitivity to cultural difference in the judicial system. Charles Hale (2006) argued that its aim is to contain more radical demands, such as new agrarian reform or control over the exploitation of natural resources within indigenous territories. He also showed that in Guatemala, state resistance to more radical demands for indigenous self-determination was fortified by an anti-indigenous ‘backlash’. When indigenous people start occupying local political and bureaucratic offices that non-indigenous people previously monopolised, lower-class mestizos can become resentful of what they see as unfair privileges resulting from social and educational programmes targeted at indigenous people. Work by the EZLN had not managed to avoid this tension. The EZLN challenged the post-revolutionary state builders’ undifferentiated mestizo national identity, seeking to persuade citizens to re-identify with their ‘indigenous side’. However, it failed to create a ‘rainbow coalition’ of popular forces. This suggested that mestizo peasant farmers, working class people, and even some indigenous people in the north and centre of Mexico, still saw indigenous Chiapas as a culturally alien world.

Multicultural politics were adopted throughout Latin America (Assies, Van der Haar & Hoekema 2000; Sieder 2002), reflecting both changing national situations and global processes. In Brazil, the 1988 democratic constitution that followed twenty years of military dictatorship also assigned territorial rights to indigenous groups and Afro-Brazilians occupying lands settled by communities of escaped slaves (quilombos). Mexico was the second country, after Norway, to ratify International Labour Organization Resolution 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples, but by the end of the 1990s, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia went further in making constitutional changes that opened the way for indigenous people to obtain jurisdiction over autonomous territories that would allow for self-government. The next decade brought further reforms in Bolivia after the Aymara leader of the coca growers union, Evo Morales, was elected president in 2006 in the wake of popular revolts against neoliberal economic policies. Although Colombia’s indigenous ‘reserves’ (resguardos) were a legacy of the colonial era, the 1990s brought new laws on indigenous territorial rights that were extended to include Afro-Colombian people, and new territories were created (Rappaport & Dover 1996). Progress towards strengthening autonomous local self-government over those territories was, however, limited by interconnected transnational capitalist interest in exploiting their resources and paramilitary violence. Activists therefore worked on linking individual communities into wider social movement networks that could strengthen negotiations with government and increase support from domestic and international NGOs (Escobar 2015).

Although return to civilian rule after military dictatorships created a political climate in which international agencies and NGOs promoting indigenous and Afro-descendent rights could advance their global strategies, neoliberal multicultural policies clearly did not resolve longstanding problems arising from the importance of natural resource extraction and agricultural exports in Latin American economies. Yet it is important to understand in detail how and why differences in national circumstances and histories produce differences in the local social and political consequences of these general problems.

Central America suffered socially devastating US-backed Cold War violence. In Guatemala, a democratic regime was removed from power in 1954 after it expropriated land controlled by the United Fruit Company for redistribution to peasant farmers (Adams 1970). As a result, leftist mestizo guerrilla movements that had difficulty mobilising indigenous communities intensified their campaigns from the late 1960s onwards in the absence of democratic alternatives (Le Bot 1992). Even when mestizo and indigenous groups united at the start of the 1980s, and genocidal repression made indigenous communities more receptive to rebellion, the guerrillas proved incapable of defending them against counterinsurgency operations that involved forced displacement and massacres of civilians on a massive scale. Anthropological research made important contributions to understanding such contradictions. It showed that ‘modernising’ indigenous leadership sympathetic to the guerrillas existed, that it had emerged as an unintended consequence of interventions by the Catholic Church, and that it was motivated by the frustration of some younger indigenous people with established age-based and patriarchal systems of communal authority (Wilson 1995; Warren 1998). The revalorisation of indigenous identity and culture, and the—largely urban—creation of a Pan-Maya movement by intellectuals who sought to build an ethnic politics transcending community-based identities, was the work of a new generation of leaders emerging from the violence that exterminated their modernising predecessors. Some anthropologists who analysed Central American counterinsurgency wars documented US responsibility. Leigh Binford (1996) not only reconstructed the circumstances behind the mass slaughter of civilians at El Mozote in El Salvador, but also humanised the victims by investigating the social biographies of the people behind the numbers. Guatemalan specialists observed that conflicts also occurred between indigenous peasants, but most related this to a context in which they were forced to colonise agriculturally marginal areas because most of the country’s land remained in the hands of large landowners, receiving very low wages as migrant workers on their estates (Smith 1999).

Andean specialists, however, found themselves asking why the Shining Path movement that convulsed Peru between 1980 and 1999 had come as surprise (Starn 1991; Rivera Cusicanqui 1993). Most Andean anthropology had focused on historical continuities in the economic and politico-ritual systems that governed the way Andean indigenous communities related to their environment and to each other, inspired by classics such as John Murra’s model of how those communities were organised into ‘vertical archipelagos’ based on the exchange of complementary products between highland and lowland ecological niches (Murra 1980). Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1993) argued that the problem was not that this vision of the ‘Andean community’ was irrelevant, since indigenous alternatives to European models for exploiting the environment provided useful ideas about how to promote more ecologically sustainable and socially equitable ‘alternative development’ in the future. The problem was what it was leaving out in the later twentieth century, in particular the impacts of growing cities and rural-urban migration on peasant activism and agrarian conflict.

Military dictatorships reflected elite anxieties that the growing activism of peasant farmers and rural workers threatened a repeat of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. During the following two decades, accelerating urbanisation made it impossible to understand even indigenous agrarian movements without considering links between town and countryside (Schryer 1990). In Peru, peasant invasions of landed estates to recover lost lands were accompanied by militant action by peasant unions whose political networks transcended the urban-rural divide (Smith 1991). In response, a Peruvian military regime embarked on a programme of expropriating big estates and turning them into peasant cooperatives at the end of the 1960s. Yet many who benefitted from this land redistribution were not happy about the imposition of collective forms of production. These meant that they continued to be rural workers subject to top-down management in a state-capitalist rather than privately-owned enterprise, whilst most of the indigenous communities that continued peasant family farming but wanted more land were not included in the reform (Kay 1982).

The Shining Path guerrilla movement was an unanticipated consequence of this intervention by a military government. It was led by university intellectuals from Ayacucho whose regional elite families lost their local power as gamonales as the military regime promoted rural development through state capitalism, strengthening central control. Shining Path was a movement based on cadres, university students in the first instance, who diffused its ideology in both urban and rural areas. That ideology was partly inspired by Maoism in advocating agrarian communalism based on peasant cooperatives, but Shining Path rejected both ‘backward’ indigenous culture and the technological modernisation of agriculture advocated by established left-wing movements and peasant unions. Arguing that the state needed to be completely destroyed by violence, the movement not only killed the leaders of these rival organisations but also carried out symbolic ‘executions’ of tractors. The first peasant communities that came to support Shining Path were relatively prosperous and socially differentiated, which is why their young people got into university (Degregori 1991). Rural grievances in the movement’s heartland were more closely linked to the low prices paid to local farmers by mestizo merchants than to agrarian conflicts with landed estates. Ayacucho had the highest rate of migration to Lima in the country, although Shining Path had less support in its urban shantytowns than other left-wing organisations (Poole & Rénique 1992). Like the indigenous leaderships that supported the guerrillas in Guatemala, young indigenous people joined it because it offered a route to transcending community authority systems. However, Shining Path provided a different ideological solution to the problem of securing what Peru’s class and racial hierarchy denied them: ‘knowledge’ of how to build an alternative future in which they could feel empowered (Degregori 1991).

Shining Path was therefore not an attempt by impoverished ‘traditional’ peasants to restore an Andean indigenous utopia, but an effect of contradictory ‘modernising’ processes. Rivera Cusicanqui (1993) insists that change and interactions with the wider society had been a feature of Andean communities throughout their colonial and national histories. Yet she also observes that Peruvian social science had differed from Bolivian social science in terms of the dominance of left-wing class-focused perspectives in Peru, whose coastal capital city, Lima, is characterised by an ‘integrationist’ suppression of indigenous ethnicity in a ‘melting pot’ that also includes many citizens of African and East Asian descent. This stands in contrast to La Paz, where the division between the Spanish city and the indigenous city of El Alto produced ‘a permanent contradiction between an imported citizenship model and the Andean communitarian model that organizes both the practices and collective perceptions of its inhabitants’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 1999: 157, my translation). Nevertheless, Marisol de la Cadena (2005) argues that when market women in the Peruvian highland city of Cuzco define themselves as mestizas, this is to mark their difference from rural indigenous people, rather than to abandon indigenous identity completely, as the assimilationist model of mestizaje normally implies.

‘Indigeneity’ itself is not a simple category. Not only can people think of themselves as being ‘indigenous’ (or not) in different ways that change as social situations change, but there are also differences between what indigeneity means to people and indigeneity as defined by states (Canessa 2014). The proportion of Bolivians self-identifying as indigenous declined from the sixty-two percent majority registered in 2001, to forty-two percent in 2012. The governments of Evo Morales (2006-2019) had promised to transform the country’s ethnic hierarchies in favour of its indigenous population, the principal components of which are Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani. Morales’s attempt to renew his mandate for a fourth term in 2019 was blocked by a coup that temporarily re-empowered non-indigenous elites, although his Movement for Socialism Party easily won new elections held in 2020 with former economics minister Luis Arce as its candidate. The Morales governments’ macro-economically successful strategy of increasing state revenues from gas exports and other extractive industries to improve the economic situations of poorer Bolivians had, however, provoked conflicts between the indigenous president and some indigenous groups that felt threatened by it. Nancy Postero (2017) argues that the root of that contradiction was that the state constructed by Morales remained a ‘liberal’ state, despite its deployment of Andean indigenous symbols in new state rituals designed to emphasise its indigenousness and talk about pursuing an indigenous concept of ‘living well’ as an alternative to capitalist accumulation.

Rethinking race, cultural mestizaje and ontological differences

The concentration of Afro-Latin American populations in cities is the principal factor determining the nature of their politics and social movements today. Afro-descendants have a history of working in urban occupations that goes back to the colonial period. Africans had originally been used as labour on plantations and landed estates, in particular sectors of the export economy and in places where indigenous labour was scarce or extreme heat was considered to make African labour more suitable. Recognisably ‘black’ rural communities emerged in Mexico, as in Colombia and Ecuador, on the Pacific Coast, principally in Guerrero, as well as Atlantic-facing Veracruz (Aguirre Beltran 1946). Yet as bearers of a particularly stigmatised racial identity, most preferred to blend into the ranks of the mestizo population. Although African intangible cultural heritage is detectable in regional cultures generally seen as mestizo, embedded in styles of music and dancing and religious rituals and carnivals, it was when multicultural policies opened up possibilities of claiming land rights that rural communities began to make them as Afro-descendants, generally following the lead set by indigenous movements (Wade 2010).

In Latin America, in contrast to the US in the past, having some African ancestry was never sufficient to define a person as ‘black’. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888, and the emancipated slaves were socially and economically marginalised as the First Republic, established by a military coup in the following year, focused on ‘whitening’ the nation. It exterminated millenarian movements that brought indigenous, black, and poor mestiço people together in the backlands beyond the coastal cities. But the dictatorial regime that Getúlio Vargas constructed after the First Republic in 1930 was more inclusive. Vargas incorporated the cultural contributions of Brazil’s Afro-descendants into his project of national integration, promoting samba music and carnival, albeit in a tightly controlled way under what was a police state. This conformed to Gilberto Freyre’s positive interpretation of racial and cultural mixing in a patriarchal plantation society (Freyre 1986 [1933]). For Freyre, the Brazilian slavocracy combined absolute domination and intimacy, such as the recognition by slave-owners of offspring that they sired with enslaved women. He argued that the roots of this system lay in the close cultural relationship between Portugal and the Islamic Arab world, whose slave systems served as a model for Brazil, as well as in the need for a small Portuguese elite to populate and dominate a vast country (Souza 2000: 78-9). Freyre’s ideas were used to present Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ from which the racially segregated US might learn. This notion was undermined by a series of anthropological studies published in the 1950s under the aegis of UNESCO, which found abundant evidence of prejudice and discrimination in Brazil even if their expressions differed from US forms of racism (Wade 2010: 54-9).

A long-established Afro-Brazilian movement often looks to the state for support for artistic and cultural heritage projects or educational programmes to help Afro-Brazilians achieve social mobility. However, the fact that victims of police killings in the urban periphery are predominantly young black men has provoked campaigns similar to ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the US. Workers’ Party governments (2003-2016) adopted affirmative action policies to widen the access of poor, indigenous, and black Brazilians to university. These, however, promoted debate amongst Brazilian anthropologists about whether ‘quotas’ for ‘black’ students constituted an undesirable ‘racialisation’ of social issues in a mestiço society (Guimarães 2003). It also provoked some ‘backlash’ from light-skinned residents of poor urban communities who claimed they were being discriminated against. Although members of higher social classes tend to classify all residents of the urban periphery as ‘black or brown’ whatever they look like, many poor Brazilians do not identify with ethno-racial politics. Syncretic religions venerating African gods remain important for some Afro-Brazilians, but more now attend evangelical churches that attack these religious practices as demonic and preach the individualistic self-improvement doctrines of ‘prosperity theology’ (Lima 2007).

Modern politics present challenges to defining Latin American nations in terms of the mixing of ‘peoples’. Yet, the significance of cultural mixing remains central to understanding all ethnic groups. The idea that everyone would become assimilated to the same dominant culture through ‘acculturation’ developed in the United States, in the context of thinking about the ‘melting pot’ of immigrants from different parts of Europe. It was extended to Mexico by Chicago social anthropologist Robert Redfield (1950; 1956) in his work on Yucatán. Redfield also argued that the people of Latin America would develop according to an evolutionary model in which rural ‘folk’ would over time become ‘civilised’ into urban societies. US scholars’ confidence in the universality of their own country’s path to ‘modernisation’ was not shared by their Latin American counterparts, despite its affinities with indigenist anthropology. In 1940, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz published a book that introduced multidirectional and multilinear ‘transculturation’, the blending of elements of distinct cultures to produce new, distinctive, and diverse cultural forms, as an alternative concept. Ortiz contrasted the social consequences of the peasant production of tobacco and Cuba’s artisan cigar industry with the slavery, proletarianisation, and foreign domination of sugar production (Ortiz 1995).

Since the indigenist phase, both anthropologists and historians have shown how cultural mestizaje in the Americas involved multidirectional exchanges and hybridisations, based on continuous interaction and adaptation to new circumstances (see for example, Florescano & García Acosta 2004; Gruzinski 2013). What looks like the ‘acculturation’ of indigenous Brazilians to Western eyes might, from an indigenous perspective, be seen as ‘a labor of domesticating, of pacifying us together with our germs and our commodities’, not to mention religion and saints (Monteiro 2012: 29). By the nineteenth century, cults based on the West African gods (orishas) that the slaves brought with them had adapted to the colonial setting in Brazil by associating those deities with Catholic saints, and also included indigenous spirits called caboclos, to produce the religious tradition called Candomblé. Umbanda evolved from that tradition by adding Spiritism to the mix, a European element imported from nineteenth century France. Whereas Candomblé had its roots in a society based on slavery, Umbanda emerged in Brazil’s southern cities in the 1930s, appealing to working and lower middle class people across ethno-racial boundaries. Candomblé also continued to evolve, to be reborn in the 1960s in the Brazilian Northeast as cultural heritage and a religion for everyone, including tourists (Prandi 2000).

Mexican anthropology also celebrated hybridity and plurality when studying indigenous legacies in mestizo cultural practices and urban ‘popular’ culture (Bonfil 1991; García Canclini 1995). The deeper meanings of ritual processes between indigenous and non-indigenous participants might differ in terms of ideas about the significance of death, and the role of the souls of the departed in the world of the living, for example. However, popular Latin American interpretations of illness as provoked by spirit attack (susto) are not restricted to people who conserve indigenous identities or ways of life (Glazer et al. 2004). Popular religious practices continue to evolve. The principal meaning that the contemporary cult of Saint Death carries for urban working class Mexicans, for example, is the promise of a more prosperous life for its adherents, despite an exaggerated media emphasis on its links with drug trafficking. Saint Death is therefore competing in a lively religious market with neo-Pentecostalist churches, and the challenge is to understand why some people choose one option rather than another (Argryadis 2014).

It remains important to recognise the reproduction of distinctive indigenous ontologies. In Peru, peasant leaders, for example, were activists in peasant unions and perfectly capable of talking the same language as the urban left, operating effectively in that legal and political world. Yet, at the same time, they remained part of another world, in which open cast mining is wrong because it kills the mountain as a living entity, destroying fundamental relations between human and non-human beings (De la Cadena 2010). Human beings appear to be able to manage different ways of ‘being in the world’ simultaneously. Differences between Western and indigenous understandings of the relationships between human beings and nature also ground a case for defending indigenous territorial rights in Amazonia (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Nevertheless, as Alcida Ramos (2012) points out, there are downsides to non-indigenous anthropologists continuing to speak in the name of indigenous people who are increasingly able to speak for themselves, and even obtain PhDs in anthropology. Ramos herself has explored the contradictions of NGO activism as well as Brazil’s official indigenist institutions. NGOs often need indigenous people to behave in an idealised way to conform to their own agendas, which causes difficulties when indigenous leaders decide that mining might be good for their communities (Ramos 1994). Indigenous people who have been forced to change their lifestyle as a result of past capitalist transformations of Amazonia have difficulties being recognised as such because they do not conform to the stereotypical image of a ‘rainforest Indian’. The majority of Amazonians now live in cities, and the region as a whole is ethnically heterogeneous (Nugent 1993). If we wish to defend the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination of their future development, it is important not to talk about them as if they had never changed. That false claim is still used to argue that they would be better off being ‘modernised’ through new capitalist transformations.

Urban anthropology, transnationalism and new social movements

Latin American cities are spaces of extreme social inequality and the region now has the highest homicide rates in the world. Urban anthropology initially focused on how rural people obliged to live in informal shantytowns built social relations that helped them adapt to a precarious life of working poverty (Adler de Lomnitz 1977; Roberts 1978). The debt and social crisis of the 1980s, and impoverishment produced by neoliberal policies, produced a change of emphasis. People’s mutual support relations that Mercedes González de la Rocha (2004) called ‘the resources of poverty’ became more difficult to sustain because families faced an absolute ‘poverty of resources’. Crisis also provided enhanced opportunities for political parties to deploy patronage relations in ways that impeded ‘bottom-up’ efforts to build community organisations (Auyero 2000). Brazilian research strongly challenged the idea that people who live in irregular settlements (favelas in Rio de Janeiro), are ‘marginal’ to society and politics. At the same time, it recognises that they face marginalisation in the form of discrimination in the wider society, including from working class people who live in less stigmatised neighbourhoods. Janice Perlman (1976) followed up a critique of the ‘marginality’ concept written against the policy of forced removal of favelas. Based on a forty-year longitudinal study of favela development, she shows that some favela residents succeeded in attaining social and spatial mobility (Perlman 2006). This kind of research challenged Oscar Lewis’s concept of ‘the culture of poverty’, derived from his studies of Mexican and Puerto Rican families, which suggested that living in poverty leads parents to adopt values and behaviours that they transmit to their children, perpetuating a ‘failure to make it’ that persists across generations (Lewis 1959; 1966).

Yet ‘progress’ for some families within favelas was accompanied by greater inequality. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, in a poor community in which some women transcended the limitations of informal local labour markets by migrating to work in Europe, there were differences in the extent to which improvements in income levels and housing continued in the next generation, related to the amount of ‘social capital’ families accumulated through links with other non-resident family members and participation in community politics (Moser 2010). Although racialised class prejudice led citizens who did not live in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to see them as a ‘threat’ to the rest of the city, that prejudice ironically made it easier to argue politically that supposed ‘dangerous classes’ would become less dangerous if they were fully integrated into the urban mainstream through state-financed improvements to the infrastructure of ‘consolidated’ favelas in which residents had transformed their original shacks into multi-storied self-built homes (Cavalcanti 2009). Yet here as in Guayaquil, ‘consolidation’ increased inequality. Rio’s hosting of the World Cup in 2014 and Olympics in 2016 created a real estate boom. The need to improve infrastructure for sporting mega-events led to the forced removal of some favela residents to more peripheral locations in the city, but ‘material improvements’ in some of Rio’s more scenic favelas also stimulated a process of ‘gentrification’ and rising property values and rents within them that also displaced poorer residents (Freeman & Burgos 2017; Cummings 2015).

The problems facing women in favelas include domestic violence and the loss of young male children attracted by enhanced access to commodities symbolising status and to women in what Alba Zaluar (2010) termed the ‘hypermasculine’ subculture of drug gangs. Since police tend to assume that all young men are ‘involved’ in that world (Cechetto, Muniz & Monteiro 2018), people who live in favelas remain ‘caught in the crossfire’ between drug traffickers and police, whose violence and corruption often makes them seem the worse of two evils (Machado & Leite 2007). Zaluar also developed research on the paramilitary groups called milícias (Barcellos & Zaluar 2014). Run by former or serving members of the police, they expelled drug traffickers from favelas only to become criminal organisations in their own right, enjoying the protection of political patrons. Donna Goldstein (2003) showed how evangelical churches might offer an escape route from the world of crime, but her ethnography also revealed the black humour that working women employed in coping with extremely testing lives. An example that female neighbours found hilarious was when twenty-three-year-old Marília recounted how, returning in the early hours of the morning from her night job, she had exclaimed to her husband Celso: ‘Gosh, you’re hard to kill, ehh’. When Celso asked why, she responded: ‘Because I put rat poison in your drink this morning, and you didn’t die’ (Goldstein 2003: 259).

Lynching offers a ‘self-help’ solution to dealing with insecurity in poor communities in which the problem is not the complete absence of the state but the nature of its sporadic presence, as Daniel Goldstein (2012) argued for Bolivia. Teresa Caldeira’s work on São Paulo (Caldeira 2000) offered an anthropology ‘of’ rather than simply ‘in’ the city (Low 1996) by exploring the relations between the social worlds of the fortified condominiums of the rich, lower middle and working classes not living in irregular settlements, and the urban periphery. She showed that many who lived in the latter also subscribed to the view that ‘a good bandit is a dead bandit’, opposed ‘human rights for criminals’, and supported extra-judicial police killings despite being the most exposed to police violence themselves. Yet lynching, homicides, and sexual violence diminished in São Paulo to much lower levels than in Rio de Janeiro after a criminal organisation born in the state’s prisons, The First Command of the Capital (PCC), established a system of ‘criminal governance’ based on their own tribunals with formal procedures in these communities. The police and political authorities were willing to reach tacit accommodations with this parallel authority that made their lives easier and diminished homicide rates (Feltran 2008; Willis 2015). Although this covert ‘pact’ with state authorities periodically broke down, the PCC expanded nationally through the prison system by ‘baptizing’ new ‘brothers’ (Biondi 2016) into a world of crime that became very lucrative and transnationally connected.

As a ‘dark side’ of capitalist globalisation, criminal networks responsible for the trafficking of drugs, arms, and people, including women obliged to work in the sex trade, transcend national borders. Yet Latin American countries are also connected to each other, and to Africa and Asia, by a ‘globalization from below’ that provides livelihoods to informal traders who carry legal commodities across borders (Mathews et al. 2012). The study of these transnational networks has equally transformed our understanding of international migration, since even when migrant families decide to make another country their permanent home, they often maintain ties with their communities of origin. What happens as a result is variable. Nina Glick Schiller & Georges Fouron (1999) show how Haitian migrants in the United States were incorporated into a ‘deterritorialised’ nation-state building process. Thus, even those who had taken US citizenship continued to look to Haiti’s nation-state as the political community to which they owed ultimate loyalty. Whatever they thought about Haiti’s current government or the prospects of the country ever securing ‘good government’, they held on to it as they were victims of strong discrimination in US society. The ‘deterritorialised’ Haitian nation state was mainly built on ‘transnational social fields’ between Haitians abroad and their kin in Haiti. These relationships transcended the particularism of familial networks because migrant remittances were redistributed within Haiti to other families without direct kinship links to the migrants. The downside, Glick Schiller and Fouron argued, was that a ‘bottom-up’ politics based on ‘blood ties’ and racialised personal identity made Haitians in the US less inclined to join larger coalitions to ameliorate their disadvantages. At the same time, poor Haitians at home remained attached to hopes in the informal redistributive networks of the remittance economy. This made them less inclined to challenge domestic elites and their foreign allies and more inclined to try to resolve problems at an individual level through patron-client relations.

Transnational migration of indigenous Mixtec people from Oaxaca provides a contrasting case. The Mixtecs studied by Michael Kearney (1991) and Federico Besserer (2004) remained marginally incorporated into the Mexican national state and many did not speak Spanish. They started migrating working on agribusiness farms in northern Mexico, where they were subject to brutal forms of exploitation and discrimination. This promoted ethnogenesis as they started thinking of themselves as ‘Mixtecs’ rather than people from particular villages. From northern Mexico, they moved across the border as undocumented migrants, working picking tomatoes and in the construction industry, and later finding other kinds of urban jobs. Their ethnic identity thereby sharpened because of discrimination from mestizo Mexican migrants. Today, Mixtecs from Oaxaca and other regions live in colonies in cities and rural areas that stretch from New York through California to southern Mexico. This transnational diaspora still reproduces some indigenous ways of organising things, including communal labour systems, at the same time as it employs new technologies to maintain communication with migrant homelands. For many, English rather than Spanish became their second language. In this case, discrimination north of the border was less likely to produce closer identification with the Mexican nation.

Capital also moves across borders, rather more easily than people, in ways that have implications for gender roles and relations. Latin American and Caribbean countries became sites of offshore production by transnational corporations, in the form of assembly plants, garment factories and agricultural processing and packing plants. Jane Collins (2003) adopted a transnational approach to studying garment production in the US and Mexico. Since these new forms of production offered new employment opportunities for women (Arizpe & Aranda 1981), economic changes impacted on family and household structures. Gender and kinship equally matter in studies of the informal economy, which provides more than half of total national employment in Latin America (Fernández-Kelly 2006). In the case of mestizo migrants to the US, men tended to adapt fully to life in the north, but some resisted full incorporation into the disciplines of northern working class life by continuing to value Mexico as a space of freedom where patriarchal values still ruled and the police did not stop them from beating their wives (Rouse 1991). Although female migration was increasing by the late twentieth century, as their lifestyles changed, women suffered from a major contradiction. They were often being morally stigmatised in their communities of origin but remaining signifiers of the transcendent moral value of ‘the Mexican family’ as mothers and wives wherever they were living. Sometimes they found themselves subject to censure by other women as they tried to renegotiate gender relations within their families (Malkin 2004).

Nevertheless, collective female activism became an important theme in the literature on the ‘new social movements’ of the late twentieth century. New collective movements of opposition emerged within ‘civil society’ under military dictatorships in part because traditional party politics (and the demobilising patron-client relations that went with it) was suspended. The independent trade union movement of São Paulo’s industrialised ABC region laid the basis for the creation of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, led by future president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva. It promised to do politics in a more democratic way that would give poorer citizens participation in government decisions. Critical anthropological studies have shown that a considerable gap emerged between promises and practice after the party started winning power, first at the local level and, in 2002, at national level (Assies 1999; Albert 2016). Many theorists had seen Latin America’s ‘new social movements’ as politically transformative, assuming that they were democratic in their own internal organisation. Ethnographic research showed that this assumption needed to be questioned.

Women were the principal protagonists in some new movements. Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, for example, demanded that the military produce their children, ‘disappeared’ by a regime of torture, extermination, and theft of its victims’ babies. Feminists were often sceptical about ‘motherist’ movements, despite their contributions to struggles for human rights. The mobilisation of women of different social classes also raised questions of how appropriate Northern middle-class feminist models were for ‘grassroots’ feminisms in Latin America (Stephen 2010), and how Latin America’s structures of class and racial oppression should be factored into the politics of defining the ‘strategic interests’ of poor women of colour in both rural and urban contexts (Alvarez 1990). Women made their voices heard in EZLN-controlled indigenous communities in Chiapas, contesting both patriarchal family structures and their past exclusion from decision-making in communal assemblies (Speed, Hernández Castillo & Stephen 2006). Yet female protagonism was a longstanding historical feature of Andean indigenous movements, and poorer mestizas as well as indigenous women were assuming public roles in marches and protests organised by new rural movements in other regions of Mexico before the EZLN rebellion, sometimes in defiance of husbands committed to the ideology that a woman’s place is in the home (Zárate Vidal 1998).

Throughout urban Latin America, it fell to women to defend the home when the authorities came to irregular settlements to evict families while their men were working outside the community. They faced new problems when men were unable to obtain enough regular work to fulfil their ascribed role as family provider. During the 1980s crisis, women’s informal work often became the main basis for family reproduction, and domestic violence reflected the ‘wounded masculinity’ of men who could not be machos in this positive, provider sense (Gutmann 2006). Yet femi(ni)cide, the torture and killing of women because they are women, represents an intensification of intersections between patriarchy, class, and race. The violence against women practised by Latin American military dictatorships has escalated in the neoliberal era because the armed male actors with the power to abuse women and girls – police, paramilitaries, and criminals – have diversified and are often complicit with each other. Capitalist development has multiplied the number of vulnerable women in public spaces and commoditised them as disposable sexual objects (Monárrez Fragoso 2010). ‘Grassroots feminism’ is, however, continuing to develop within the working classes, as exemplified by the occupations of schools by secondary school students in Brazil in protest against the policies of the new government installed by the ‘constitutional’ coup of 2016 against the country’s first female president. Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Scalco (2018) show that female school students were actively raising political issues in class and some explicitly declared themselves to be feminists, despite negative reactions from young men faced with mounting economic precarity and physical insecurity. Yet after ultraright president Jair Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections, Brazil also demonstrated the challenges posed for women’s and LGBT rights movements when a transnational evangelical Christian countermovement reaches the heart of government.

Conclusion: contesting the hegemony of ‘Northern’ anthropology

Anthropological research on Latin America has made distinctive contributions to broader comparative analysis of issues of race and ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial settings, agrarian change, insurgency and revolution, religious syncretism and conflict, political anthropology and the anthropology of the state, gender relations, informal economies, urban anthropology, and new social movements and transnationalism. Its strengths include attention to history and its challenges to received wisdoms within Latin American societies themselves and within the North Atlantic world.

Postcolonial theorists such as Enrique Dussel (Dussel et al. 2000) and Walter Mignolo (2000) argue that the notion of ‘Western modernity’ as the fount of historical ‘progress’ depended, ideologically as well as economically and militarily, on a transatlantic colonial world in which ‘Latin’ America became the ‘other’ of Euro-North American ‘civilisation’. Postcolonial critiques were taken up in the context of later twentieth century imperialism and capitalist globalisation by Latin American anthropologists such as Fernando Coronil (2003). Anthropologists living in Latin America became increasingly pre-occupied with the relationship between their anthropologies and the ‘hegemonic’ anthropologies of the North Atlantic countries. The existence of global disciplinary hierarchies is undeniable, given the dominance of English as a language of scholarly communication and differences in the opportunities available for international mobility to scholars from the South who have not studied outside their countries of nationality. Some ‘native’ anthropologists also began to argue that their distinctive perspectives were actually being ‘silenced’ by North Atlantic dominance (Krotz 1997). Latin American critics called for global reappraisal of how all anthropological thinking might be enriched by reflection on differences of vision between North Atlantic anthropology and the anthropologies of the former colonial worlds (Restrepo & Escobar 2005; Escobar & Ribeiro 2006). They argue that the ‘hegemonic’ anthropologies remained limited by Eurocentric or even ‘orientalising’ thinking (Velho 2003) and that disciplinary decolonisation entailed ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2008).

Latin American state-building projects had their own internal colonial dimensions, and Latin American countries have their own academic hierarchies that are influenced, in terms of ideas as well as career possibilities, by class and ethno-racial inequalities. The decolonising critique is not about closing off regional anthropologies from the wider conceptual and comparative thinking that has always influenced their development, but about enhancing their contribution to developing more universal understandings of the human past, present and possible futures. White supremacist ideas are regaining traction in Europe and North America. Anthropology cannot challenge those ideas effectively unless it is purged of all remaining Eurocentrism. Critics of ‘hegemonic anthropologies’ call for more South-South dialogues but also for anthropologists based in the North to reflect on what different scholarly communities consider strategic objectives for anthropological research and the different perspectives on issues that they may offer. The aim of decolonising anthropology is not to promote ‘ressentiment or nativism’ (Restrepo & Escobar 2005: 485) but to build a more inclusive international and intercultural ‘conversation’ about knowledge, power, and the future of anthropology everywhere (Narotzky 2014).

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Note on contributor

John Gledhill is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Social Sciences. He has published in English, Spanish and Portuguese on his ethnographic and historical research in Brazil and Mexico and also writes on broader comparative issues.

Email: john.gledhill@manchester.ac.uk, website: https://johngledhill.wordpress.com.

Tax

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

Miranda Sheild Johansson

University College London

Initially published 14 Dec 2020

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

The social contract and governmentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are taxes? Meanings, imaginaries, and values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debt and credit

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

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

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

Global flows

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

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

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

Conclusion: an anthropology of tax

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

Political ecology

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 15:28:18 +0000

Jason Roberts

Columbia University

Initially published 6 Sep 2020

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

Abstract:

Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology and related disciplines that examines how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world. Initially it was most well-known for investigating the practices and impacts of large-scale resource development projects in subsistence-oriented communities in the Global South. Over time, political ecology has expanded its research trajectory to include analyses of environmental politics and socio-ecological degradation in urban, industrialised settings as well. This entry outlines the historical development of political ecology in order to understand the bases for its common theoretical assumptions, research themes, methodological approaches, and sources of critique. In doing so, it provides particular insight into the important ways that anthropologists have influenced, and been influenced by, political ecology. Though individual research interests and emphases have expanded since the early days of political ecology, the field continues to provide a valuable means for tracing the broader structural forces of socio-ecological change to a thorough understanding of the impacts and responses to that change at the local level. Yet, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, the challenge for political ecology continues to revolve around properly integrating its various disciplinary interests and influences into a consistent framework capable of analysing political, cultural, and ecological matters with sufficient rigor. Political ecologists’ on-going efforts to meet this challenge have never been more important than they are today, as the world increasingly struggles with interrelated issues such as global climate change, industrial pollution, resource degradation, economic dispossession, and changing patterns of environmental health.

Introduction

Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology, geography, and related disciplines that has become well known for its analyses of how and why structural forces, such as capitalist economic processes and power relations, drive environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world (see Biersack & Greenberg 2006; Blaikie & Brookfield 1987; Paulson & Gezon 2005; Peet et al. 2011; Perrault et al. 2015; Robbins 2019). Emerging in the context of global neoliberalisation in the 1970s and 1980s, political ecology emphasised the key role of outside forces like international development and economic modernisation schemes in the restructuring of local lives and environments in the Global South. As such, the field has often been associated with interdisciplinary studies of environmental change and livelihood loss in the context of transnational mining, logging, agricultural conversion, and nature conservation projects in developing countries. Political Ecology tends to foreground the role of capitalist markets and state forces in such processes of local dispossession and environmental disruption. Hence, it provides an important counter to earlier Malthusian arguments that centred the blame for environmental degradation and food insecurity on growing human populations outstripping the sustainable use of resources (e.g. Ehrlich 1968; Hardin 1968). Since the 1970s, the research trajectory of political ecology has evolved from its initial focus on rural lives and landscapes, to include concerns with issues of environmental politics and socio-ecological relationships in urban, industrialised settings as well. In all these contexts, political ecologists have commonly asked: whose use of, claims to, and/or perceptions of the environment prevail, and why? (Karlsson 2015: 350). Thereby, they attempt to understand the central relationships between environmental degradation and social marginalization, the causes of environmental conflicts over changing patterns of access to and control of resources, and the fundamental connections between place, identity, and social movements (Robbins 2019).

This entry traces the historical development of political ecology in order to understand the bases for its common theoretical assumptions, research themes, methodological approaches, and sources of critique. In doing so, it provides particular insight into the important ways that anthropologists have influenced, and been influenced by, political ecology. Though research interests and emphases have expanded since the early days of political ecology, the field continues to provide a valuable means for tracing the broader structural forces of socio-ecological change to a thorough understanding of the impacts and responses to that change at the local level. Yet, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, the challenge for political ecology continues to revolve around properly integrating its various disciplinary interests and influences into a consistent framework capable of analysing matters of both the political and the ecological with sufficient rigor (Paulson et al. 2003; Walker 2005; Bridge et al. 2015). On-going scholarly efforts to meet this challenge have never been more important than they are today, as the world increasingly struggles with interrelated issues such as global climate change, industrial pollution, resource degradation, economic dispossession, and changing patterns of environmental health.

Historical antecedents to political ecology

Many scholars locate the foundation of both environmental anthropology and political ecology in the research of Julian Steward (Gezon & Paulson 2005; Jacka 2015; Robbins 2004). From the 1920s through the 1950s, Steward worked within the subfields of cultural anthropology and archaeology, developing a research framework that he called ‘cultural ecology’. Cultural ecology sought to explain human social organisation as a functional adaptation to local environments and requisite subsistence practices (e.g. Steward 1937, 1955). For example, Steward argued that in the context of the harsh environment of the American Southwest, regular bouts of food and water shortage had forced smaller bands of Desert Cahuilla hunter-gatherers to separate from larger groups in order to find necessary resources (1937). Over time, some of these divisions became stable and ceremonially important. Such data formed the basis for Steward’s assertion that the human relationship to the environment was more important and more logical in structuring cultural patterns of kinship descent and residence than diffusion of these patterns from other, independent societies (1937).

Accordingly, Steward argued ‘those features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements’ constitute the ‘culture core’ of any particular society (1955: 37). It was this culture core that combined with the contingencies of historical circumstance to structure the largely symbolic ‘secondary features’ of a culture like ideology and religion. In this way, cultural ecologists argued that human interaction with nature through different forms of subsistence labour provided a directing influence on the social order (Robbins 2004: 30). Overall, like the work of geographer Carl Sauer (1965), Steward’s assertion that cultural groups should be studied as forces that both shape, and are shaped by, their environment represented a significant theoretical contribution for the environmental social sciences. Likewise, the effort to understand adaptation toward functional stability within bounded groups would remain a key theoretical conviction for years to come (see Walker 2005; Watts 2015).

Cultural ecology was also significant because it reflected the growing influence of Marxist thought within anthropology, which would subsequently become more elaborated in the work of political ecologists. Steward’s ‘culture core’ was roughly analogous to the Marxist idea of the ‘material base’, and his ‘secondary features’ approximated the Marxist concept of an ‘ideological superstructure’. Like Steward (1955), Karl Marx (see also Foster 2000) had previously argued that human labour processes were key to understanding the relationship between nature and culture:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man [sic] and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her [sic] own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature (1889: 156-7).

Marxist theory influenced cultural ecology’s materialist emphasis in the examination of human-ecological systems. However, cultural ecologists tended not to expand these insights to analyse the ways in which broader social and economic relationships between human groups might influence environmental and economic change. Cultural ecology’s emphasis remained on subsistence as a creative process of local cultural adaptation and evolution (see Orlove 1980; Walker 2005; Watts 2015). Within anthropology, individual cultures continued to be viewed as largely homogenous and relatively bounded entities, in a way that precluded sustained investigation of intergroup relationships and patterns of change. Therefore, cultural ecology and related predecessors of political ecology eventually faltered on their inability to account for and understand human-ecological change in a complex, global economy (Robbins 2004). Future research would also emphasise the need to provide more holistic accounts of the symbolic and material dimensions of human-ecological relationships. Even so, much of this work continued to pay insufficient attention to the broader, structural relationships of political economic influence that were becoming increasingly important at the time – particularly within developing economies (Bridge et al. 2015). Anthropology, overall, had not yet developed a sophisticated means for accounting for the types of social interactions that were often on display in processes of political transformation and transnational development.

From cultures to ecosystems

One important anthropological research effort that aimed to better integrate the symbolic and material aspects of the human relationship to the environment was a body of work developed by Roy Rappaport, which came to be known as ‘new ecology’ (1967, 1968, 1971, 1984). Rappaport’s early work among the Tsembaga Maring, a group of horticulturists living in Highlands Papua New Guinea, was more interdisciplinary than previous efforts within environmental anthropology. It was strongly influenced by ideas from ecology, biology, nutritional science, and systems theory^[1] (Biersack 1999; Dove 2006; Kottak 1999). Over time, this penchant for borrowing from other disciplines would provide a key basis for the development of political ecology as a whole (Walker 2005). Rappaport was inspired by emerging work in ecology (e.g. Odum 1969) to use new units of analysis in his anthropological research. Against Stewardian cultural ecology that took cultures as the proper unit of analysis, Rappaport’s ‘new ecology’ would focus on populations in the ecological sense, as one of the many components within a bounded, interdependent system of energy transfer and nutrient cycling (Biersack 1999: 5). Rappaport argued that this approach allowed him to analyse numerous human, plant, and non-human animal populations as commensurable units within the same research framework (Rappaport 1990). Human populations, like populations of plants and animals, were just material sub-components of a larger regional ecosystem. Culture was the symbolic tool that allowed these human populations to adapt to that ecosystem (Rappaport 1990). The key to understanding the overall functioning of such an ecosystem was to properly examine the structures and relationships between its various material and symbolic sub-components (Rappaport 1968; also Biersack 2006).

Accordingly, one of the most influential and lasting contributions of Rappaport’s work was his argument that ritual could serve a principal role in the regulation of human-ecological systems (Biersack 2006; Jacka 2015). Specifically, Rappaport acknowledged (1967, 1968, 1984) that the Tsembaga Maring viewed their ‘kaiko’ pig killing ritual as a way to maintain social relationships of reciprocity with ancestral spirits and allies who had previously assisted them in times of war. However, he argued that the ultimate function of the ritual was to maintain the sustainability of the regional ecosystem by regulating population sizes of humans and pigs, conserving wild game, mitigating warfare, and regularly redistributing agricultural lands and other goods between human groups.

In many ways, the interdisciplinary influences that inspired Rappaport to make this argument about the functional role of ritual simultaneously constituted the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of his work (Biersack 2006; Jacka 2015; Watts 2015). These influences allowed him to introduce a more explicitly ecological framework, methodology, and focus within environmental anthropology. However, they also opened Rappaport to critiques of overcorrection. In the years following the publication of Rappaport’s (1968; republished in 1984) book Pigs for the ancestors, he was charged with accusations of ‘vulgar materialism’ (Friedman 1974) and ‘ecology fetishism’ (Sahlins 1976). Critics suggested that his analysis of cultures as functional tools of human populations within bounded, self-regulated ecosystems may have blinded him to alternative explanations (Rappaport 1984; also Biersack 1999; Kottak 1999). Rappaport, like Steward, was also critiqued for paying insufficient attention to the broader historical and political economic relationships that were also influencing human-ecological processes among the Tsembaga Maring at the time (Rappaport 1984; also Biersack 2006). His critics held that environmental anthropology was focused ‘too narrowly on the local to the exclusion of the dynamics of colonialism and the encroachment of a global capitalist economy’ (Paulson et al. 2003: 207). Indeed, such increased attention to structural inequalities and the possibilities and processes of maladaptation that such inequalities necessitated was one of the defining features of the rise of political ecology (see Walker 2005; Watts 2015). Heavily influenced by Marxist theory and critical development studies, political ecology would come to emphasise the role of political economy as a force of socio-ecological change in an increasingly neoliberal world (Greenberg & Park 1994). The historical significance of colonialism, continuing reduction of global trade barriers, and the impact of broad, free-market economic restructurings of social and environmental policies within developing countries, could no longer be downplayed.

Political ecology comes of age: expanding the scales of analysis

The anthropologist Eric Wolf (1972) is generally recognised as the first scholar to coin the term ‘political ecology’, having done so in an article about the dynamics of land and resource ownership in the Swiss Alps. As Lisa Gezon and Susan Paulson note, it makes sense that a former student of Julian Steward’s would go on to ‘develop a powerful analytic framework linking ecological with political-economic phenomena across diverse scales of action and analysis’ (2005: 8). Significantly, Wolf argues:

Capitalism progresses through the employment of jural rules of ownership to strip the laborer of his means of production and to deny him access to the product of his labor. The local rules of ownership and inheritance are thus not simply norms for the allocation of rights and obligations among a given population, but mechanisms which mediate between the pressures emanating from larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem (1972: 202).

Yet, it may be more appropriate to argue that Wolf suggested this powerful analytic framework without fully developing it or specifically defining what it might become. The term ‘political ecology’ only appears in the title of Wolf’s 1972 article, and not within the body of the text. Wolf’s subsequent work in books, such as Europe and the people without history (1982), however, proved to be a seminal force in highlighting the significance of global capitalist processes to local human cultures and environments. In it, he illustrated how historical processes of European colonisation and expansion into the Global South in pursuit of valuable raw materials had resulted in the creation of a world economic system that impacted even the most remote people and places (Karlsson 2015). Along with the efforts of other anthropologists like Sidney Mintz (1985), William Roseberry (1983), and June Nash (1993), such work emphasised the importance of intergroup connections within the overall structure of a world economy tied together by the pursuit of valuable, limited resources. These insights would become central theoretical tenets within the mature ‘structural political ecology’ of the 1980s, which solidified around studies of socioeconomic ‘modernization’ efforts in supposedly underdeveloped countries (Walker 2005). Within structural political ecology:

[q]uestions about the social relations of [economic] production and about access and control over resources – the basic toolkit of political economy – were applied in efforts to understand forms of environmental disturbance and degradation and to develop models for environmental rehabilitation, conservation, and environmentally sustainable alternatives (Paulson et al. 2003: 206).

This first generation of political ecology was heavily influenced by the Marxist principles of dependency theory/world system theory (Frank 1989; Wallerstein 1974). Here, critical development scholars like Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein argued that underdevelopment did not actually represent an earlier stage in a country’s evolution towards high consumer capitalism and representative democracy, but rather a continuing process that was in fact required by the contradictions inherent in the modern capitalist world system. Underdeveloped regions were essential to the maintenance of global capitalism because they served as ‘sources of cheap or strategic raw materials, markets for manufactured goods, outlets for excess capital, and/or places where super-profits could be derived from super-exploitation of poorly paid workers’ (Edelman & Haugerud 2005: 11). Developing countries, therefore, were integrated into this world economy as ‘satellites’, performing limited and/or unsustainable economic activities for the developed, ‘metropole’ countries (Frank 1989). It was this role within the world economy that kept these satellites underdeveloped, as they were structurally dependent upon foreign capital and external markets for economic viability (Frank 1989).

The implication for political ecology was that ‘the local was subordinated to a global system of power relations and must be understood entirely with respect to that subjection, in terms of what is commonly referred to as capitalist penetration and its effects’ (Biersack 2006: 9). Such studies often focused on the effects of colonialism and development policies in the Global South. They centred on the ways in which unequal power relations created conflicts in access to, and control of, land and resources in times of intense economic change (e.g. Blaikie 1985; Little et al. 1987; Peluso 1992). Works such as Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield’s (1987) edited volume Land degradation and society, linked the marginalisation of farmers, shifting cultivators, and hunter-gatherers to state enclosures of commons resources for the purposes of market production. Such research highlighted how Indigenous and other politically marginal groups tended to be disproportionately disadvantaged by the large-scale environmental changes often associated with capitalist development processes. In these contexts, it no longer made sense to conceive of local cultures and environments as bounded, or humans’ relationship with nature as intrinsically adaptive. Environmental degradation was a problem grounded in social inequalities among and between groups (Harvey 1974). As the anthropologist Michael Dove would learn from his long-term studies among Indonesian shifting cultivators:

[t]he nature of the relationship between forest degradation and underdevelopment of forest peoples is the reverse of that which is commonly claimed: forests are not degraded because forest peoples are impoverished; rather, forest peoples are impoverished by the degradation of their forests and other resources by external forces (1993: 21).

Political ecology, therefore, would strive to productively combine insights and methods from the social and environmental sciences to show how environmental degradation was ‘both a result of and a cause of social marginalization’ (Blaikie & Brookfield 1987: 23).

To better explain the specific processes and outcomes of such environmental change, Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), recommended a regionally focused methodology that would connect multiple scales of analysis. They argued that political ecologists should start their research by studying local-level land users and their relation with the land, before branching out to examine their relationships with each other and groups within the wider society. Eventually, the last links in this chain of analysis required integrating an understanding of how state policies and global economic processes were affecting local environmental conditions and resource use practices (Blaikie & Brookfield 1987: 1-37). Along with historical contextualisation, this commitment to connecting the local, regional, and global scales of analysis has become one of the key methodological principles of political ecology that ties it together as a field (Neumann 1992). Significantly, this methodological improvement also separates political ecology from earlier traditions within environmental anthropology (Biersack & Greenberg 2006; Gezon & Paulson 2005).

In the 1990s, however, this initial form of structural political ecology would be critiqued for the ways in which it conceptualised global capitalism, the state, and related multinational development processes as relatively unchecked forces that seemed to have intentionality (e.g. Moore 1993). Thinking of capitalism as a monolithic structure bore a striking resemblance to earlier anthropological models of culture as fundamentally homogenous, coherent, and purposeful. As such, it was suggested that many early political ecologists had not truly been following all the methodological principles outlined by Blaikie and Brookfield (1987). They had not given sufficient weight to the local level of analysis, potentially ignoring the fact that local groups were made up of individuals with often-divergent beliefs and interests regarding processes of economic development and accompanying socio-ecological change. Such change was not only initiated from the outside. Local people could also change their environments and economies through their own actions and political struggles (Bryant 1998; Moore 1993, 2005; Li 2007, 2014). For example, as Michael Dove illustrates, generations of Bornean shifting cultivators have willingly engaged in commercial rubber production as an effective means to strengthen their customary land claims while simultaneously supplementing and maintaining their subsistence livelihoods (2011). Such practices demonstrate the ways in which capitalism and the state are not all-powerful structures. Global market forces are often subject to both resistance and facilitation from local actors who try to engage with them according to their own values and agendas (Tsing 2005).

Critiques and changing directions within political ecology

In 1993, the anthropologist Donald Moore echoed the critiques of other scholars when he argued for the need to move beyond the ‘structural legacy’ of early political ecology. As Moore noted, early political ecology too often relied upon a rather uncomplicated opposition between seemingly virtuous local land users and vicious states and corporations (also Bernstein 1990). Yet, real life is much more complicated. In Moore’s (1993) article about a state-administered peasant resettlement scheme along the border of a Zimbabwean national park, we see the importance of paying closer attention to the possibilities of local agency in daily struggles over resource control. These struggles took place within and between groups of farmers, pastoralists, tourists, agricultural extension agents, national park staff, and rural development administrators all vying for control over their own particular vision of the border zone. Accordingly, Moore (1993, 2005) argues that local resource users and state governments are always made up of a complexity of different divisions and individuals that often do not share the same goals and values. Such complexities contradict earlier theoretical models within political ecology.

Work such as Moore’s inspired a second phase of ‘poststructuralist political ecology’, which emerged in the 1990s. Poststructuralist political ecology tried to move political analysis beyond the determinisms of Marxist-inspired dependency and world system theory, while also recognising that multiple voices and interpretations exist in situations of environmental and economic change. This second phase of political ecology integrated a broader range of theoretical influence, such as: household studies (Berry 1989; Netting 1993); feminist and gender studies (see Agarwal 1992; Harcourt & Nelson 2015; Merchant 1980; Rocheleau et al. 1996); studies of race, environmental justice, and social movements (Escobar 2008; Harvey 1996; Martinez-Alier 2002; Moore et al. 2003; Peet & Watts 2004; Sawyer 2004; West 2016); and postructuralism and discourse theory (Escobar 1999; Li 2007; Moore 2005; Tsing 2005; West 2006). Together, they brought greater attention and analytical precision to the different ways in which environmental change and conflicts over that change were experienced according to variables such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, ability, sexuality, and/or socioeconomic status. For example, in a key article about gender and resource tenure, Dianne Rocheleau and David Edmunds (1997) argued that development schemes designed to promote formal titling and privatisation of land could have the unfortunate effect of increasing power differentials between men and women in many parts of Africa. These practices often removed women’s previous customary claims to use-rights on communally owned lands, as formal land titling invested greater powers of exclusion and decision-making in men, who were much more likely to gain such titles. Accordingly, Rocheleau and Edmunds suggested that policymakers should not simply make a better effort to ‘bring women in’ to these titling schemes. Instead, they should start such development processes by understanding and working within previously existing cultural models of overlapping land and resource tenure rights.

Yet, in the late 1990s, this continuing movement toward a more sophisticated conceptualisation and analysis of all things political prompted a different critique of the field. In an article entitled ‘Against political ecology’, anthropologist Andrew Vayda and geographer Bradley Walters (1999) criticised political ecology for what they saw as its unexamined, apriori focus upon issues of politics and power. This focus, they argued, prevented political ecologists from engaging in sustained ecological analysis that might explain how environmental phenomena and processes of socio-ecological change actually worked. Unlike the earlier environmental anthropology traditions of Steward and Rappaport, political ecology was now suffering from a dearth of ecology. Here, the environment had essentially become a stage where political struggles over resource control took place, but in-depth ecological analysis of the environmental impacts of such struggles was often not provided (Zimmerer & Bassett 2003). While the extent of Vayda and Walter’s (1999) criticism may result from a somewhat selective reading of an increasingly expansive field (Robbins 2004; Walker 2005), the effort to achieve an appropriate balance between the concerns of political economy, cultural analysis, and ecological science remains an important issue that political ecologists are still contending with today. The challenge for political ecologists is to continue improving their methods of analysing the processes and effects of socio-ecological change across a variety of scales and actors. Determining ways to productively apply such methods and findings to alleviate our current socio-ecological problems like global climate change and resource depletion has never been more important.

The future for political ecology in a rapidly changing world

In 2020, the world finds itself confronted with cumulative social and ecological challenges of a degree that many of us have not seen before in our lifetimes. The 'Anthropocene' has become an academic buzzword for emphasising the fact we are now living in a geological time period in which humans are the absolute dominant force shaping the Earth’s ecological processes (Chua & Fair 2019; Ogden et al. 2013; Moore 2016). Generations of increasing fossil fuel use, industrial development, population growth, and related processes of pollution and resource degradation have led to broad scale ecological and climatic changes that are no longer easy to deny. As Will Steffen and colleagues (2007: 614) note, ‘[t]he Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state’. The implication is that we are approaching a global ecological tipping point from which we may never recover. Accordingly, recent years have seen anthropologists cover an expansive list of topics related to this issue, such as: the rising frequency and toll of environmental disasters like hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and industrial pollution (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 1999; Jones & Murphy 2009); the impact of polar ice cap melt and climate change among Artic societies (Crate 2009; Cruikshank 2007); and rising sea levels and the mounting likelihood of environmental refugees being forced to leave small islands and coastal regions (Lazrus 2012; Rudiak-Gould 2013). Entire ecosystems and cultural ways of life are increasingly threatened with rapid and full-scale transformation. And yet, such challenges of the Anthropocene are far from the only challenges the world is facing right now.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has also thrown into stark relief the many key relationships between environment, economy, and a broadly defined public health. An entire global economy based upon the extraction of the surplus value embodied in natural resources and the exploitation of individual wage labour has quickly been thrown into recession by the necessity of social distancing. Similarly, the socioeconomic distinctions between mostly low-paid ‘essential’ workers and often well-paid ‘non-essential’ workers have highlighted the magnitude of economic inequality, social marginalisation, and despondency that the world has been experiencing for decades. Such issues are taking place within a global political context of rising nationalism, authoritarianism, and general social conflict about the responsibilities of states and the rights of social minorities within them. The many potential complications associated with these issues highlight the importance of the holistic and interdisciplinary perspective that anthropologists and political ecologists have long tried to bring to their analyses of the complex relationships between culture, nature, and economy.

The question for political ecology as a field is what is the best way to help moving forward? How might political ecologists work to ensure that often-abstract theory and impersonal scientific data becomes more relevant to state policymakers and the people with whom we work? Some anthropologists have suggested that we need to do more work in and with the state and corporate institutions that are so directly responsible for the direction of our futures (Fiske 2009; Rajak 2014; Welker 2014). Others argue that we need to pay much closer attention to the work of Indigenous scholars, and local frameworks of environmental explanation (e.g. Kirsch 2006; Smith 1999; Tallbear 2014; Whyte 2018). Still others have suggested that political ecology and medical anthropology would both benefit from a greater correspondence between the two fields (Baer 1996; King 2010), particularly during a global pandemic that has highlighted the social nature of illness in political and economic circumstances that restrict many peoples’ access to medical care. Such a collaboration might also gain key insights from the work of disaster anthropologists on social patterns of vulnerability and resilience (Hoffman & Oliver-Smith 2002). The second phase of political ecology has already done the important work of opening the field to such multi-faceted collaborations. There is a place and a need for all of these efforts right now. The key for political ecology seems to be to continue working, collaborating, and improving its mechanisms of socioecological analysis and intervention accordingly – so that we might come to recognize more sustainable and equitable pathways for living together in the future (Rappaport 1993).

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Note on contributor

Jason Roberts is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at San Antonio, where his research was supported by the United States’ National Science Foundation. This research examined the historical motivations and socio-ecological changes occurring in the context of industrial agroforestry development and climate change on New Hanover Island (Lavongai), Papua New Guinea. He is currently working on projects that examine the relationships between resource development, climate change, and public health in the Pacific.

Jason Roberts, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, New York, 10027, United States of America. jsr2197@columbia.edu

[1] Systems theory is an approach to studying social life and environmental interaction that assumes that integrated systems exist, which consist of human and non-human elements. It tends to explain human actions, beliefs, and their interactions with the non-human environment by showing how all elements of the system function interdependently to preserve a stable whole.